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Canada's strong music culture will be centre stage at next weekend’s Richmond World Festival in Minoru Park.

Photo by Matt Barnes

Lights and Magic! headline Richmond World Festival

By Don Fennell

Published 12:08 PDT, Tue August 28, 2018

Last Updated: 2:12 PDT, Wed May 12, 2021

Two of Canada’s premier music acts will headline the 2018 Richmond World Festival this weekend in Minoru Park.

Singer/songwriter Lights (born Valerie Anne Poxleitner) and the group Magic!, will each take to the YVR Main Stage for what will most certainly be memorable performances.

Having just released her fourth album SkinEarth, alt-pop phenomenon Lights will be performing Friday, Aug. 31 at 8:45 p.m.

Lights enjoys an incredibly passionate fanbase, selling out tours around the world and earning 100 million streams and 200,000 album sales in the United States. She also has two Juno (Canadian Music) Awards.

A multi-talented artist, Lights also wrote and drew her own comic book, En, based on an alter ego of sorts. An album coincided with the project.

The setting for SkinEarth revolves around the last city left in a post-apocalyptic world lost to famine and plague and devoid of hope. A super corporation called Tempest runs everything from the media to the water rations to the schools.

“There’s a lot of commentary in the story about how we’ve taken and taken and taken until there’s nothing left, and that’s how this apocalypse has happened and that’s why they’re in the last bastion of humanity,” she says.

Two days after the release of their latest album Expectations, look for the group Magic! to perform the title track as part of their show Saturday, Sept. 1 starting at 8:45 p.m.

The Toronto-bred, Los Angeles- based quartet has already reached the top of the charts. Rude, a buoyant reggae-pop tune, held the No. 1 spot on Billboard magazine’s Hot 100 for six weeks. It charted in 41 countries, sold more than 10 million singles, and has been viewed over one billion times on the online video hosting platform Vevo.

Magic! also enjoyed great chart success in 2016 with the Caribbean-tinged Lay You Down Easy featuring Jamaican dancehall singer and record producer Sean Paul. Debuting at the top of Billboard’s Reggae Digital Songs Chart, it enjoyed two million Spotify streams and one million Vevo views in its first two weeks.

The list of elite artists doesn’t end there.

Described as immigrant-based music, Desi Sub Culture’s unique sound is influenced by the members growing up listening to both Run DMC and Apna Sangeet. Growing up as kids of Asian immigrants, the group’s music is the musical version of themselves, their upbringing, and their identity.

Desi Sub Culture will be on the main stage at 7:30 p.m. Friday.

Up-and-coming Canadian duo Elijah Woods x Jamie Fine—the ‘x’ is pronounced ‘and’—will take to the stage Saturday at 7:15 p.m.

Featuring instrumentalist/composer Woods and lyricist/vocalist Fine, the duo burst onto the mainstream music scene earlier this year as winners of CTV’s The Launch. Their sound reflects multiple influences from dancehall to hip hop to jazz.

All told, some 90 artists are set to perform at Richmond World Festival. Admission is free.