Down the
Rabbit Hole

It began the way most great ideas do. Stoned with friends, watching hockey. The Janitor and Two Close Friends were sitting around talking about the state of nightlife in Calgary. Mostly, they were griping about the events happening in the city – or rather, those that weren’t.

At the time, the choice in party venues that weren’t top 40, big-crazy-rave, super clubby, or just plain basic were pretty nil. Nothing checked all the boxes, and they knew that they weren’t the only ones who felt that way. It wasn’t for a lack of talent in the city. There were great local artists and DJs in Calgary, but no one really had a chance to hear them. Venues just weren’t taking those chances. Nobody was banking on local DJs to bring in the numbers on a regular basis, and apart from a select few, not many were given the chance to prove if they could.

Performing arts were out there, and the city’s arts scene was developing, but it seemed the arts were operating in their own silos of existence. The conversation turned to which opportunities could merge spectacle with the music scene. Where could these energies meet and manifest in the realm of nightlife? Where could innovative thinkers, musicians and artists interact with the audience? Where could you go to a party, listen to drum n’ bass in one room and hip hop in the other, while scantily clad fire-breathers did backflips on stilts?

“Where was the party we wanted to be at?”

Their initial foray into promotions and event production came from that single conversation, when the DJ of the group mentioned a Halloween party he was booked for got cancelled – the people throwing it couldn’t secure the funds to get it off the ground.

“The next day I took my chequebook and went to the venue. I met the owner. He told me the price they needed for a deposit. I called the guys and said, ‘Hey guys, remember that thing we were talking about yesterday? Well, I booked it and we’ve got it for Halloween this year – we’re throwing a party.’”

Their first art direction was little 4 x 6 postcards of a girl lying in a bloodbath. They titled the night “Creep it Real”  and

distributed the postcards to friends. The capacity of the venue was 150 people. Within 48 hours every single ticket sold. The event was a blank slate, where their imaginations could run wild. They upped the ante on traditional decorations, and built a true haunted house, running projectors playing horror flicks throughout the rooms. Hip hop, breaks, drum ‘n bass, downtempo; each room banged different music. People poured from the house in all directions like a too-large Alice in Wonderland spilling out of the White Rabbit’s house.

“Everybody came out of there saying it was the best Halloween party they had ever been to. It was bonkers.”

After the success of the event, they were asked by the same venue owner to throw a New Year’s Party that year.

“He contracted us to do the event – were we actually getting kind of paid to throw these madhouse parties?”

And so Rabbit Hole Productions was born.

The idea behind Rabbit Hole Productions was to create exciting, surreal, monumental – and local – events. The company became a vision factory where original and unconventional ideas could percolate into existence. They realized that what they were really after was a bigger experience, and on a much larger scale. Calgary was a city full of potential, and there was much opportunity to blaze the trail. Multiple rooms, multiple DJs, multiple genres – nights where anything could happen, and there was something for everyone. The chance to imagine something and find it right in front of your eyes. That wasn’t impossible, was it?

The windows, covered in vellum, projected billowy fog against them, and party goers floated through the clouds. Venues began contacting Rabbit Hole Productions to fill their rooms.

Theatrical elements that hadn’t really been present before then turned parties into performances and experiences. PK Sound, another landmark in the city’s music scene, was launching and the calibre of venue sound exploded. Electronic music was not only part of the underground but had filtered into the mainstream.

“We didn’t know it at the time, but elements of those parties were shaping the scene to come in Calgary.”

The brand evolved, as did their walking emblem, the Rabbit. Hidden in a suit, no one knew his identity, but he served as the master of ceremonies at each event, popping bottles, introducing artists.

“The idea was that a few nights a year, the Rabbit would come out – you could be a part of his world for a crazy, sweaty evening, and then he just disappeared. No one knew who he was. When we were talking to our guests, we wouldn’t say it was us throwing a party – it was the Rabbit. And everyone would say “Who the %@&* is the Rabbit?”

But when you’d see him, you knew what you were in for. You knew you were going down the rabbit hole. While throwing these events, another hole in the scene became apparent. Avi noticed he was literally running around the city, delivering tickets to each event. Going through Ticketmaster amassed atrocious fees. Another problem was how long it took to return money from the sales. The artists, the DJs, the theatre people – everyone had to be paid.

“We were trying to support the community, but they’d have to wait for their money? Something wasn’t working. That’s when we created Zoobis.”

Zoobis was a low-cost ticketing platform initially put on the market to use for Rabbit Hole. Shortly after, it became available to other events, venues and clubs in town, from the Hifi to Commonwealth. Promotions companies extending out to Edmonton, Vancouver and interior B.C. began to use it. And from there, Zoobis was utilized by larger scale events and festivals, and continued to grow.

Zoobis worked for Rabbit Hole and vice versa. The businesses were symbiotic in that they each benefited directly from the existence of the other. Each was born from the realization something was missing in the city.

Around this time, Avi was talking with the owners of Beatroute, a much-loved rock ‘n roll magazine in Calgary, noticing that many advertisers they were interested in were into electronic music. Which is how Freq Magazine came to exist – finding yet another underrepresented part of the city’s culture and working to acknowledge it, speak to it, and cultivate it.

“It was something that the city needed – a quality street magazine for free, about what people in the city were doing. About fashion, about music, and about what people were actually into.”

Initially an insert in Beatroute, Freq was meant to cover the local artists, events, and venues Zoobis was dealing with. The new restaurants and bars that Avi and his slowly-building team were designing for could use the space to advertise. The magazine could publish an events calendar for free and advertise their shows. Everything made sense. There was a feeling in the city that you could open spaces up to more, and those windows would fall open like dominos. People were responding to how to build those cultural industries, institutions, and needs, because they were also the ones looking for them.

Eventually, Avi wanted more than just an insert in someone else’s magazine. Freq became a high-quality, arts, culture and design publication.