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Destiny Productions’ Jesse Brown, left, and Ryan Kruger are throwing their final camping (and music) excursion this weekend. Next year they will look to expand their Cutting Edge rock festival.

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Ben Rayner
Pop Music Critic

Friedrich Nietzsche was probably no great shakes at a party but, if suitably inclined, he no doubt could have bent post-rave vernacular into a memorable statement: "That which doesn't kill an electronic-music festival only makes it stronger."

A lot of North America's are indeed dead, legislated and red-taped into capitulation or – if you live in certain reactionary pockets of the United States – trampled outright beneath homeland paramilitary sorties.

Within a few hours' drive from Toronto, we still have the annual Om Reunion Project subsisting as a non-profit, co-op-ish venture and Quebec's psy-trance-themed Eclipse festival each summer, but they're "niche" events, not massive, catch-all throwdowns.

The festivals that survive are scattered, furtive and generally must content themselves with hanging onto the same faithful, if dwindling, crowds they've always had.

After 14 years at the helm of the World Electronic Music Festival, co-founder Ryan Kruger – the sole behind-the-scenes mainstay since the three-day campout's inception as the World Trance Festival in 1995 – has hung on long enough to lay claim to the longest-running event of its kind in North America, but even he's giving up the ghost after one last bash on a stretch of farmland in Madawaska, south of Algonquin Park, this weekend.

"That just makes you feel old," he says of WEMF's elder-statesman status on the dance-music scene. "I don't know if it's necessarily a claim to fame."

WEMF's retirement isn't total, to be fair, as Kruger, 36, and his Destiny Productions partner Jesse Brown started a parallel camping excursion of a more rock 'n' roll bent called the Cutting Edge Music Festival last year that they're bringing back to the Grand Bend Motorplex on Aug. 1-4 with oddball co-headliners Alexisonfire and Mix Master Mike.

Only a pair of committed masochists would attempt to mount two back-to-back festivals on an annual basis, though. So as much as they love the institution that is WEMF, they've been forced to concede that it's not worth the headaches and the sleepless nights any longer.

"We still look forward to it, but the energy and the time commitment you have to put into something like this is massive," says Kruger. "It's not like throwing a show in a club, which we do throughout the year, that can be planned in your spare time on evenings and weekends. This really involves a massive time commitment from Jesse and myself and everyone else involved, including my wife.

"Before, there was at least a little bit of light at the end of the tunnel and, at the end of the day, you went home with a little bit of money after you had a good time, you got to hang out with your friends and you got to bring in all these DJs from overseas. .... But over the last three years, even that little bit of money has disappeared. So we're really throwing a party for 5,000 people for nothing."

WEMF has persevered through all manner of adversity over the past 14 years, so it can't have been an easy decision to close things down for good.

A freak tornado ripped its inaugural outing near Bowmanville to pieces on the Friday night. In 1998, the Destiny crew overcame the daunting logistics of transporting 10,000 partygoers back and forth to a dream site on Christian Island on a single, 150-capacity ferry.

The next year, the unfortunate death of an attendee who wandered off site, 21-year-old Kieran Kelly, thrust Kruger and his compatriots in the Toronto party scene into the midst of an anti-rave witch hunt that essentially brought an end to an era when dance-music events hosting 10-15,000 people were common each weekend. An OPP roadblock then threatened to shut down a subsequent festival in Bobcaygeon, although ironically, the town would have WEMF back the following year once it realized how much money it made off all the traffic passing through.

There's simply not enough of an audience to sustain the high-end talent – this year's lineup includes the A-list likes of Christopher Lawrence, Max Graham, Chris Liberator, Freq Nasty, Andy C, Mickey Finn and fest fave Mark EG – and production to which WEMF devotees are accustomed, without resorting to corporate sponsorship, past experiments with which have left Kruger and Brown wary.

Instead, the pair hope to boost the electronic component of future Cutting Edge festivals. That event grew out of the indie-rock-centric "Cutting Edge" stage they introduced to WEMF in 2006 in a half-successful attempt to bring acts such as Broken Social Scene, Tokyo Police Club and illScarlett to the festival's electronic-music audience, so turnabout is fair play.

"As much as we thought that would be a great idea, to bring rock into the electronic scene, it didn't really work because the rock people didn't necessarily want to go to an electronic event. So our thought was the other way around works okay – what we'll do is throw a rock event and bring the electronic people into that. And that's worked much better," says Kruger.

"WEMF will be gone next year, but Cutting Edge will be much bigger.