The People's Champ - Krofton - on a great year and the rise of 365 Pro Wrestling

in

For almost as long as I can remember, music was the thing – my love for it was the thing that drove me. But I say “almost” because before that, there was professional wrestling. Some of my earliest memories are watching wrestling with my grandfather and my uncle (Not together though, because, from what I can remember, they were very different wrestling fans). By the time I left high school, wrestling started to fade from my vision and that's when music took hold. But over the last five or six years, wrestling has taken its place back at the forefront of my mind. Wrestling is what gives me the feeling that music used to. Wrestling is what gets me out of my house. Wrestling is where I've found new community. Wrestling is what makes me feel like a kid again. And it's 365 Pro Wrestling has been the key to regaining that feeling. And there is no one that represents 365 like the Peoples Champ, the man known as KROFTON. I’ve interviewed hundreds of musicians but I’ve never interviewed a wrestler, or even written about wrestling. There is no one I could imagine starting this new wrestling-based phase of my writing with than the very tall man, Krofton. Luckily, he was more than game to dish about this insane thing he loves and when it finally happened, after weeks of planning, he answered the phone ready to go.

He may not the champ of 365 anymore, but he’s the champ of our hearts. Photo by Darren Ho Media.

It genuinely warms my heart to hear Krofton, a 20+ year veteran of the west coast indie wrestling scene, echo the feelings I have as an outsider, a fan. “We are a family, honestly. All the way from Garrett to Eddie and everyone in between, even outside of wrestling, if something's going on or someone needs something, we all know we can reach out and talk to each other. We all go out and support each other for different things. We all just want to see each other get better. Nobody's negative, we just want to do the best we can in the ring and we're always trying to help each other get better. There's really nothing better than 365.”

A clear fan-favourite, evident by the number of Krofton shirts often worn by children at 365 shows – perhaps the greatest marker of a professional wrestler's popularity – Krofton is there before and after the shows, interacting with fans. His in-ring cohorts speak of him with high praise. There's a reason he's been a mainstay on the scene for as long as he has. And, even after all the time he's spent between the ropes, the legend of Krofton continues to grow, with 2023 being a banner year for the man himself. “Last year I had a really good year. God...I wrestled Sebastian Wolfe not even 24 hours after he made his AEW (All Elite Wrestling) debut. I felt it. I felt that energy from him. I was in the ring with Max (Benson) and Travis (Williams) when Legacy came back. That match was – there was a point in that match where we were screaming at each other and we couldn't hear anything in the ring because you guys were so loud. That won match of the year for 365 and it's a high placement.”

Krofton & the mighty Eddie Osborne (pre-recent hair cut) - Guilty By Association. Photo by Darren Ho Media.

When I pressed him to narrow it down, it turns out his high point last year didn't even come in the familiar confines of his home 365 crowd. “I gotta say, it was going to Ontario and wrestling Joey Allen. Going in to a building where I've never been, not knowing if anyone there even knew who I was or the history of what was going on – we went out there and we beat the shit out of each other. And then not even 20 minutes later I was out there in a 3-way hardcore match getting skewers stabbed into my head and getting superplexed through a table. And the greatest thing, I never even expected, I got a “Please come back!” chant at the end of the match. That will always mean something to me and I'm going to go back for sure.”

And in case you are wondering what's worse – skewers to the dome or taking a superplex through a table – you can put those worries to rest. “Skewers are worse. It was a 'Oh my god, they're stuck in my head!' and then seeing the horror on everybody's faces as I'm staring at them in the crowd. Looking at the four little kids staring back at me with the same look I know I had on my face. Going through a table? Whatever. I used to jump off fences to impress people in high school and go through particle board stacked on those little blue rubber chairs. I busted my tailbone a few times as a teenager doing that stuff. It's not so bad.”

Yeah, okay, I buy that the skewers are worse. Photo by Steve Skullmaster.

Krofton may be the man, but he's just a cog in the beautiful machine that is 365 Pro Wrestling. It's a machine that's only been gaining momentum in Victoria over the past few years and is ready to hit the next level this Friday, February 2, with Capital Combat. Running at the First Met Church (Corner of Quadra and Balmoral) for the first time, the venue will be their biggest to date in the city and they've got a card to match. The excitement in Krofton's voice is palpable when I ask him about this momentous night. “Talk about a show. 11 matches. The best of the best. Judas Icarus and Travis Williams. You got Evan Rivers making his debut out here. Those three alone are crazy. I've never met Evan, I've watched all his stuff. I'm looking forward to him and Legacy – that match is...I don't think the ceiling is going to be high enough for them. Artemis Spencer and Devon Shooter – talk about a 10-Star match. Becky Beech & Josh Caldwell, the Yacht Club – I love them. They're going to die but I love them. I'm 6'5 and I'm about to wrestle a 20-year midget wrestling superstar. I don't know his exact height, but I've seen videos of him and it is going to be something. I don't know what the hell I'm going to do but I plan on bringing it all.”

“It's 365. $5 beers. It's great entertainment. If you got nothing to do February 2nd, that is the place to be. Some of the best wrestlers in Canada, including some that are not going to be around much longer, so you gotta come see them before they're gone.”

An absolutely insane of PROFESSIONAL GODDAMN WRESTLING. I can’t stress how great this night will be.

PS. I didn’t really have anywhere to put this, but the world really needs to know how good of a wrestler Devon Shooter is. Every time my friends and I go to a 365 show, we walk out talking about Devon Shooter. He is so good at seemingly every aspect of wrestling, I had to ask Krofton if it was true. “Devon Shooter is so underrated. People don't even know. He's the man. Anyone who's in the ring with him learns something. Even guys who have been in the business for 20 years. He is such a humble, good person, I don't think any of deserve the right to know him. I'm so happy he's in our lives in 365 but I'm so grateful to call him a friend. In that ring, he can go. He's probably forgot things most of us couldn't figure out how to do in the first place. “

Yeah, Devon Shooter is awesome - but I’ll still root for Krofton if/when they share a ring again.

5 Questions with Rags #81 - Stop The Presses (Ali & Danny)

in

I'm gonna start this thing off with a personal confession – for a guy who works for an internationally known ska festival, I don't really listen to that much ska when left to my own devices. But at some point in the fall of 2022 whilst scrolling Twitter, a lot of people I really like were talking about this album called Got It by Stop the Presses. I'd never heard the band before, but I was really drawn to the colourful pineapple on the cover and wanted to try to find something new and pleasing to bring back to my ska festival family, so I fired up the streaming and put it on. From the first notes of the opening track “Make the Best of It” I was in. Then “Fat Cats” came on and I knew this album was going to be part of my regular rotation. Got It is a ska album seemingly made for me, a SKAptic – immaculately balancing ska, reggae and rocksteady, full of great hooks and really fantastic, crisp production. Danny graciously explained part of the process behind the album before I ambushed he and Ali with the 5 Questions. “Got It was kind of a return to us writing in the room as a band a little bit more. The past album, it was our proverbial “bedroom album”. in our living room, just Ali and I writing, cavemanning our way to demoing things, trying things out over and over again, getting better through the writing. And then this album [Got It] we were able to bring much simpler demo ideas to Jack and Steve, our rhythm section, and were able to write a lot more on purpose in front of each other, which gives you that dynamic, that extra layer – you put the physical work into it and the music kind of shows that.

The album became a personal audio touchstone, propelling me through intense winter and spring work with its infectious energy and big doses of fun. I made it my mission to get Stop the Presses on the lineup for the Victoria Ska & Reggae Fest 2023, but it turned out to be a pretty easy mission because they were as excited to come up as we were all to have them. I was lucky enough to not only get the whole band up to the Canadian west coast for an unreal set on the Victoria Ska & Reggae Fest main stage, but to rope Danny and Ali into a rousing instalment of 5 Questions with Rags. Which also apparently features a whole extra bonus question because the conversation was so good and easy that I lost the question count.

(I actually did this interview right before last years Ska & Reggae Fest, but through the combination of work with the Ska & Reggae Society/Festival, mental health struggles and living through the grind of life in 2023, this stayed in the vaults until now.)

1. What’s the first album you remember buying with your own money?

Ali – It was two. I was in third grade. I bought Alanis Morrissette’s Jagged Little Pill and Tom Petty’s Wildflowers. Both of those records bring back to a time in my life.

Danny – Mine are only slightly more embarrassing. The first Spice Girls record and Metallica Re:Load. That was the record. I was like 11 or 12, I was at a Sam Goody – the music store that actually had contemporary CDs, tapes and records – Wow! We just listened to Jagged Little Pill less than a month ago together. I’ve listened to at least half of that Spice Girls record in the last six months. I still go for earlier Metallica on the regular, Kill ‘Em All through like, the Black Album, but my brother already had those records already so I’m gonna get Re:Load ‘cause that’s MY record. There’s good stuff on there.

Read More

5 Questions with Rags #80 - Kandle

in

Sometimes things happen around me and I miss them completely. Then I get blindsided by the existence of said thing. This happened last fall when I was writing for the Rifflandia festival guide and was assigned to write a bio for Kandle. I went in not knowing anything about her and was astonished at her immense musical talents when I put on her first independent release Set The Fire. (What. An. Album.) How I had completely missed nearly a decade of this incredible musician who was from my hometown?! How the fuck did I manage this? And she's the daughter of west coast music legend, 54·40 frontman Neil Osbourne? Truly this was a tremendous blunder by me. Luckily she was easy to track down so I could find out more.

Though she grew up in and around it, music wasn't always the end goal. “My whole life I think I was doomed and destined to be an artist,” Kandle says with a laugh. “I am kind of into everything. I went to school for photography in Victoria. I do a lot of drawing and painting. I started writing poems and then I started playing guitar. I kind of started doing music by accident.” It's a good thing for music lovers that accident occurred because Kandle has been consistently untouchable - delicately balancing modern sounds with big nods to crooners of the past – without ever sounding like a pale imitation of that past. “I've definitely always been a sucker for all of the classic crooners. I learned to sing by copying Billie Holiday when I was teenager. Growing up in the 90s with a rock dad I was really into alternative stuff, every “head” band – Radiohead, Portishead.” Even though you can hear the influences throughout her music, Kandle is most definitely not doing an homage – her music is entirely her own and all of our ears are better for it. I'm so glad I got the opportunity to not only write about this amazing artist for one of my city's biggest festivals, but also that she was so easy to track down and so effervescent when I did! Enjoy this wonderful instalment of 5 Questions with Rags featuring the powerful KANDLE.

1. What is the first album you remember buying with your own money?
It was Our Lady Peace, Clumsy. I was a diehard fan when I was like 6. I may have peed myself when I met them. <laughs> My dad never full got my obsession with them. I think they were opening for him around the time I got obsessed and he was just like, “ooookay.” I was just screaming “Superman's Dead” in my little overalls. It gets me every time.

2. What's the best memory you have of a teacher or mentor growing up?
This is going to be a shoutout to my Oak Bay art teacher. Mr McGulky. (Note: I cannot confirm the spelling on this. Please forgive me if it's wrong!) It was my, I dunno, sixth high school at that point? I'd kind of given up on making friends and fitting in after that many. For the first little while there, even now we're still friends, but he was my only friend there for awhile. I had pretty crippling anxiety about getting bullied, not fitting in, not doing well in school. Everyone knew I was a bad seed. He would lie for me. He would write notes for me to get out of science class. If I was freaking out about something, he would have my back. He would always roll his eyes and complain about it but he looked after me and I always really appreciated him. He's always proud of me.

Read More

The Osmanity Session - A Conversation with Balkan Bump

in

In late 2020 producer Will Magid, known to the music world as Balkan Bump, quietly released Osmanity, his full-length debut under the moniker. It's a wildly fun and ambitious record that really sounds like nothing else out in the musical ether. It's an album with deep grooves and big musical ideas, clearly crafted by someone with a deep well of skill to draw from and, perhaps more important, a more than palpable LOVE for music. “The title track 'Osmanity', me and my buddy Greg who co-wrote it, did the basic framework of it about 4 years ago. The CloZee track came out about a year and a half ago. Basically, I just started working on music and at some point realized, 'Hey wait, these songs fit together. I could put out an EP but I have more than four or five songs,'” says Balkan Bump describing the genesis of Osmanity to me over the phone from his home in Oakland. “Deciding to make an album at that point guided the rest of the writing and production process. It gave me a framework, 'Okay, I'm going to make this record. It's going to largely incorporate sounds from the Ottoman Empire, but of course with hip-hop and electronic and some jazz.' That decision gave me the context to get the album to another level as far as the cohesiveness of it. That's where the interludes come in and a few of the songs I wrote really late in the process to seal the package of the record together.”

While the album is a clear, cohesive statement with one person at the helm, Osmanity is at its core a deeply collaborative record, and for good reason. “I'm a pretty social person and I grew up playing in bands. So the idea of being a lone-wolf producer is not really my personality. For the most part I really thrive in environments of collaboration – out in the world at a festival, on tour or even just on the computer, on Soundcloud. In the case of Poldoore, we met on Soundcloud like 10 years ago and I think I've played trump on nearly half of his songs or something and he's done several remixes for me. CloZee, we toured together and vibed a lot together. We were talking about hip-hop [earlier], and I love the idea of group like the Wu-Tang Clan,” the excitement in Bump’s voice is more than palpable. “Okay, you have this group but you have all these individuals who have their own careers and collabroations. I look at the music world that way. All these artists are really connected, there are so many threads. The classic example of the scene I'm in is Big GriZmatik. Gramatik and GriZ and Big Gigantic are obviously separate artists, but can easily be one artist with different muscles being shown when different players step out front. I love that idea. It's not that I seek collaboration out or that it falls in my lap, it's more of just a natural continuum of the folklore nature of music.”

Read More

5 Questions with Rags #79 - Balkan Bump

in

Things haven't been great in my brain for awhile and, like a lot of people, I've just been doing what I can to get by for awhile now. Part of that meant that writing about music fell by the wayside. I still like listening to it, but gathering the strength to write about it was just something that I haven't been able to do. But things are slowly moving again and I can feel a bit of rhythm in the air. My friends are going to festivals and dancing and reporting back. And one of the names that keeps coming back in reports is BALKAN BUMP. All these glowing reviews reminded that about a year and a half ago, I tracked him down for one of the best interviews I'd had in a long while. Two music-lovers, talking about music. And as he returns to Vancouver Island this Saturday (August 20 at the fantastic Cumberland Wild in Cumberland) it seems like the perfect time to finally present this interview. This interview is from FEBUARY 2021. I cannot believe it has taken this long for me to share this.

At the beginning of last year, one of the last albums I was genuinely obsessed with was Osmanity by California-based musician and producer Will Magid, better known to me – and many other dancefloor astronauts up and down the west coast – as Balkan Bump. Osmanity, is an immaculately constructed album that works so well on headphones, but also keeps reminding you of sweaty, ass-shaking nights on a dancefloor. It is an album full of fresh ideas, sounds and, most importantly these days, energy. Osmanity is tremendously inventive and deeply fun – the creation of a musician whose love of the craft is evident from the opening notes right through to closing. Osmanity became a daily listen for me. I needed to know more. I needed to talk to the creator of this most excellent album. And lucky for me, the man himself was more than willing to jump on the phone and talk some shit with me. Not only did we cover Osmanity in more detail than I could have imagined, he was also game for a one of the finest rounds of 5 Questions with Rags so far. It's conversations like this that have me keeping music close, still staying at least a little bit in love with it. This shit right here is why I'm back.

Read More