BeatRoute Magazine AB Edition - February 2020

Artist to Watch
LOUIS CZA
THE BLACK GREEK GOD
BOUNDLESS EXPERIMENTATION DEFINES NEW
CLASS OF CALGARY ARTISTS
L
ouis CZA the Black Greek
God’s beating heart is deeply
experimental.
The young multidisciplinary artist has
carved out a space in Calgary’s music
and arts community through his intense
desire to reimagine his community
through his own means, to blossom the
means of DIY artistic production into
something that knows no generic or
stylistic boundaries.
“I’m very experimental,” he begins,
tucked away in a corner of Calgary’s
charming, infinitely Instagrammable,
Japanese jazz bar-inspired I Love You
Coffee Shop, which Louis has adopted
as a kind of artistic home base.
“I did start off making music in hip hop,
but I feel like, at a certain point, everyone
expected me to keep making music in
hip hop. But, if you respect an artist or
creative, you know they’re not going to
By SEBASTIAN BUZZALINO
make the same stuff over and over again.”
To wit, a recent performance in
December at the Palomino started off
with some lo-fi chill-wave and synth-wave
vibes before inviting friends up from the
audience for a set-ending blast of punk
and black metal-inspired crashers. At
another recent avant garde show, at I
Love You Coffee Shop, he performed
his first piece live body art inspired by
Viennese Actionism.
“I think of myself more as an
intellectual or a scientist, so what I create
depends how I’m feeling,” he says.
Not content with merely looking
inwards to create, Louis CZA the Black
Greek God has also made it his mission
to give a helping hand to other rising
youth artists in Calgary, mentoring them
and developing spaces with like-minded
friends to encourage new expression
and development.
“It’s always been about trying to
push forward in the scene,” he says. “I
work with a lot of young people in the
community because a lot of the older
people are more stuck in their ways. I try
to create new avenues for young people
to get in there.
“When we started, we didn’t have
a lot of people showing us what to do
or how to do it. I feel like if we did, we
would have progressed a lot faster.
So, we’re very young at heart, young
people, we’re always energetic and
stoked on creativity. Eventually we want
to have a centre in the future, in 10 or
20 years, where young people can
go too. It’ll be like Professor Xavier’s
School for Creativity.”
STAR
Catch Louis CZA the Black Greek God at
Tubby Dog on February 27.
SEBASTIAN BUZZALINO
16 BEATROUTE FEBRUARY 2020