It's the second weekend of September, so you know what that means, kids?! RIFFLANDIA!

For seemingly as long as I can remember, (Quick caveat here: My memory is kinda fucked.), Rifflandia has been one of the most important weekends in Victoria. It is a marker of time; the summer is over. We get together to commune and blow off the last of that warm summer energy as we get ready for the new – and quite frankly, much better – seasons and return to Life™. It is a beginning and an end. A time to connect with all the homies who went off for separate adventures and a time to maybe make a new homie or two. For all the changes it's gone through over its nearly 20 years of existence, Rifflandia still sits there, at the beginning of September, fulfilling its ultimate destiny as a Great Connector. Beyond that lofty position, Rifflandia remains a place to go and just listen to some really fucking good music.

The musical net Rifflandia casts is wide, genre-wise; you're never going to like everything Rifflandia has to offer. But I don't think that's really the point. Rifflandia is a crossroads where fans of music - be they casual, general fans or hyper-niche fans - can get together and find some common ground to commune on. Like children being given new foods to help expand their palettes, it's good for all of us to be exposed to stuff outside of our bubbles. The pathways in our brains that allow us to genuinely enjoy new, different music will atrophy if not kept active. So even if there’s stuff I’m not personally interested in, I can guarantee there’s going to be something positive in my brain that is a direct result of standing in front of acts I’ve never heard before. But luckily for me (and for you, dear reader) there’s a lot of tremendous music on this years lineup that I already know and that is going to pull me out of the house. And here are some of the things, presented in no particular order, that will make me drag my lazy ass out of my house and down to the Matullia Lands in Rock Bay, Victoria to experience yet another Rifflandia.

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5 Questions with Rags #89 - Rashad Tyson or "I'm tryin' to be what I'm destined to be"

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When I first started interviewing wrestlers, I had the assumption that you could detect and guess someone's original wrestling inspiration(s) by simply watching them in the ring. Little movements, bits of movesets, etc., I genuinely (and incorrectly) believed this formula meant something. As this hypothesis is being disproven more and more all the time, no one has surprised me with their long-running favourite like Rashad Tyson. “My favourite wrestler I first knew I liked, and specifically thought, 'I'm gonna follow this guy's journey,' was Randy Orton. Specifically bald Legacy Randy Orton.,” Tyson says, shocking me on an idle Friday morning. (If I was drinking coffee I would have spat it out hilariously.) “The whole angle was so entertaining to me growing up. Just his stare alone was the wildest thing. I love a good bad guy. The best bad guys to me are built out of trauma and like, Randy Orton's whole story about his anger issues, 'Don't push me to the edge' and that. I don't wanna resonate with this, but I think it's kinda cool.” Randy Orton. This man, Rashad Tyson – this man I declared my new favourite wrestler on Instagram after seeing him live for literally 3 minutes because of the love I could feel pouring from every corner of the room – came up loving one of the most evil mufuckas to grace a wrestling ring?? How could this be? But if you stop to think even for a moment, it makes perfect sense. Wrestling is about reactions and connections. It's one of the few places where Horseshoe Theory actually applies. Orton connects to the lizard brains of the audience, Rashad connects to their hearts. In the end, it's really the same thing. And there aren't a lot of wrestlers in the Pacific Northwest that are making those connections with the audience like Real Talk Rashad Tyson.

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5 Questions with Rags #88 - Casey Ferreira or “I'd call it showboating but this is the Millennium Falcon”

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A few months ago, at the first show from No Fate Pro Wrestling in Vancouver (An incredibly successful and tremendously fun show, by the way) the first wrestler through the curtain was Casey Ferreira. This wasn't a one-off show put on by people who were coming and going. This is a new promotion with a direction and ton of power, run by people who clearly LOVE professional wrestling. Having Ferreira be the first wrestling through the curtain in the history of the new promotion was the choice of people who know what they're doing. You see, each day I wake up as an indie wrestling fan on the west coast and I feel blessed to live in a place so lousy with talent. Walk into any wrestling show in Victoria or Vancouver and you're going to see an endless stream of talent, charisma and passion. With such a high bar being the standard, encountering someone who stands out means something special. You know it as soon as you see them walk to the ring for the first time and engage their opponent for the first time. Casey Ferreira is one of those special people. On that Sunday night in downtown Vancouver, he wrestled other very special wrestler – and past 5 Questions with Rags guest – Eli Surge. It was a bout of hard-hitting strikes and high-flying risks that really encapsulated everything that makes me love professional wrestling. Great crowd connection, chemistry between the wrestlers, technical and devastating moves, and, perhaps most importantly, a story to tie it all together.

“I feel like I'm thinking less and less about moves as I progress. It's really not on mind, not getting me too excited at this point – It's more, at this point, how can I tell a whole match? There are so many fans who realize they love guys because they don't do that many moves. I'll go-go-go, but it's not move-move-move, it's build-build-build-one move. That's what I prefer. The fun part for me is the movement between moves,” Casey reflects, sitting on a bench in the sun in the Victoria neighbourhood of North Park, as preparation for that nights 365 Wrestling show continues a couple of blocks away. His match that night was another thumper, against other fast-rising stud Cole Rivera. It was just the latest entry in a year that is quite apparently ever-more-filled with such occurrences.

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5 Questions with Rags #87 - Elliot Tyler or "Beloved in Victoria and reviled in Portland - the anatomy of a rising PNW wrestling star."

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As I sit to put the finishing touches on this piece, we are less than one week away from the first 365 show of 2025 in Victoria and there is ONE MATCH announced for the card. But it doesn't really matter because it's a title match, a dog collar match (A famously violent match type) between the living legend Devon Shooter and the champion, our beloved champion – and funnily enough, the most hated guy in Portland wrestling – Elliot Tyler. And when Elliot Tyler is in the main event, people are going to come out.

But it's not just 365 where he overcame the longtime heel champion, Devon Shooter, where he has become a staple. Tyler has been a force in PNW wrestling scene,. I've talked to multiple people who have been to one wrestling show here on the west coast who said that the wrestler that stood out – sometimes the only one they really remembered – was Elliot Tyler. There are few wrestlers I've encountered that just click with everyone in the audience, no matter who they are – be they younger, older or my mom. It could be the entrance music that makes you want to slide down a rainbow. It could be the barking – who doesn't love barking in a pack? It could be evident hydration on he is always displaying. It could be the opportunity to chant “BEEF!” - who doesn't love a good, strong one-syllable chant? It could be his Big E-like combination of an adorable face and silly-yet-hard-nosed demeanour. (I'm putting the following here because this is still a music blog, for now, and I'm not going to assume you know about non-Stone Cold/Rock-level WWE champions: If you need context for this, please do yourself a favour and do a search for former WWE hampion Big E. He rules so hard.)

Beyond all of that, the thing that stands out when Elliot Tyler gets between the ropes is a legimately radiating love coming from the man himself. He looks like he's having the best time, all the time, and it's a completely infectious energy. The kind of energy that drew all of us to our favourite wrestlers when we first started watching. Thankfully for all us watching independent wrestling on the west coast, in the pacific northwest and beyond, a young man stumbled across something that drew him in more than a decade ago. “Honestly, it was just an accident. I was having a sleepover with a buddy and he fell asleep, and I was flipping through channels and I found a rerun of Friday Night Smackdown! and watched it and I got hooked,” Elliot recalls, telling me about his entry-way into wrestling. “It definitely wasn’t the first match that got me hooked – I think the first match was someone who is cancelled now, and they were notorious for never being that entertaining, from 2010/2011, so I’ll let you pick out from the roster who that could be – the main event had Kane and Edge and Rey Mysterio. I was like 'This is crazy. This is everything I want in life. The absurdity of it all.' A lot of people go 'I saw this match and that’s when I knew.' I never had that. There was never a specific moment where I said, “I have to do this.” It just kind of started as me watching, and it turned into me hitting moves on my pillows, which turned into me hitting moves on my friends in the backyard and then it progressed to me getting into a school. It started with beating up pillows, and it went way too far.”

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5 Questions with Rags #86 - Eli Surge

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I take a lot of new people to wrestling – Friends, siblings, parents, acquaintances, work associates, people I yell at on the street. I can say for near-certain that there is no one who connects with the crowd more instantaneously on a consistent basis than Eli Surge. BIRDS AREN'T REAL. The tinfoil hat (always with extras to indoctrinate the crowd). You know what this guy is about and from the moment he steps out from behind the curtain, it's entertaining as fuck. And this is before he gets into the ring with his very excellent wrestling – a hard-hitting and technical style, replete with flourishes like out-of-the-ring moonsaults. (It would be weird if a guy into aliens didn't have a moonsault in his arsenal right? Good call, Eli.)

I've only ever known Eli Surge as the Conspiracy Man – aliens, birds-as-surveillance, Bigfoot and whatnot – but, it wasn't always so, and the story of how it kinda came to be is now one of my favourite stories. “ The conspiracy gimmick started out of frustration, honestly. There was a company that formally ran in Vancouver that had a big show. Three of my friends were in a match with a fly-in talent and I was frustrated as to why I didn’t even get an opportunity on that show,” says Eli, talking to me while taking care of his laundry. “'Fuck you' to gender roles,” he says emphatically. Fuckin' eh, Eli.

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