Exhale Music Group

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Hamilton’s Exhale Music Group was born from a desire to bring people together through free expression and thoughtfully curated events.

Over the past four years, Exhale has grown into “a multi-faceted arts facilitator; booking tours, engaging in artist development, and putting on events to support local and touring artists.” Buzzwords associated with Exhale include, but are not limited to: creativity, collaboration, and inclusivity.

I had the chance to chat with the events and promotions manager, Emily Lise. We spent some time on the phone in a busy coffee shop, while she sat comfortably at home.

Emily is one of six who play a role in this collective. Alongside Matt Carson, Dan Dell, Luke Cummins, Blake Mancini, and Taylor Heres, Lise works to keep Exhale running as smoothly as possible. Once plans are settled, dates are decided on, and people are booked, everything else seems to proceed with relative ease.

Unique to Exhale, all of their events are exclusively in nameless places — they are all at residential venues. This was inspired by the fact that when Lise started with Exhale, she was 17, and none of her friends could get into bars where the bands were playing. Bars are often inaccessible for their younger audiences.

The other factor is that there isn’t the level of intimacy that Exhale is looking for. “Sitting in a bar and waiting for a band to play doesn’t build the same kind of community as being in someone’s house would.”

Exhale got together with people like Matt Thompson, who is a big community builder in the Beasley neighborhood. He hosts shows in his house, regularly opening his doors to the community. The intimate house shows started when Exhale started bringing bands to Thompson’s house. This opened doors for their Eternal Summer series, which

With shows every few weeks, last summer Exhale hosted a number of bands at a number of locations downtown Hamilton. They sent out requests for Hamiltonians to offer their houses as venues, and their calls were answered. The positive reception proved to Exhale that their want for community building is something that Hamiltonians share.

Venues are kept secret. In order to get the address for any of their shows, you have to e-mail them. When I asked Lise why, she gave me the expected answer: as a privacy issue, Exhale looks to protect the homeowners, but there’s also the mystery factor. “It gets people to reach out and say, ‘hey, I want to come to your show.’ ”

The audience in Hamilton has continued to grow in the past four years. There were only ten people in attendance at first, all mostly friends of the Exhale crew, but then those friends invited their friends, and so on. Word of mouth was important, because it reached Hamiltonians and visitors to the city.

Exhale’s last event, held this past Saturday, had a truly all-ages audience. There were senior women sitting behind 17-year-olds at the secret venue, which isn’t something the usual show-goer sees.

“The ability to create isn’t depression, it’s the inability to exhale.”

I asked Lise what the future of Exhale looked like, and she excitedly spoke quickly and backtracked over what she was saying, purely because of all of the exciting things planned. Exhale just finished calls for submissions for this year’s Eternal Summer, which she told me is “going to be bigger and more fun than last year’s.” In addition to this summertime-show-crawl, Exhale’s other big event is their fourth anniversary party in April.

Aside from the larger events, Lise said there are a number of shows coming up in the next few months. Names like Vulva Culture, Kurt, Jaunt, Esmerine, and Foxes in Fiction, to name a few, are popping up on posters around town. She told me that a lot of their plans are under wraps, and was hesitant to disclose more.

As a final piece, I asked her how Exhale got its name. Lise told me that it came from the collective’s founder, Carson, and his struggle with having an inability to create. She told me the story of Carson sitting by a fire with friends, kind of feeling down, talking to his friends about depression and how it affects your ability to create things. “His friend was saying the ability to create isn’t depression, it’s the inability to exhale.” The name just seemed to fit with Carson’s vision. Everyone in the Exhale group is breathing into the project everything they can’t do outside of it, putting what they can into their project creatively.

As a member of the community they are trying to foster and solidify, I can safely say that they are answering a call Hamilton didn’t know it was asking, and I trust that they are the group to do it.

Photo Credit: Vannessa Barnier

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