RED MOON MUSIC

 Red Moon Collective April 2026

As an artist in Toronto in 2010, I joined the Red Moon Collective, which was a get-together. They had parties, one another, mostly musically based. I was a photographer and poet, so it wasn’t the main focus of the group, but I still hung out with them. People sang, collaborated, built friendships out of repetition and proximity and late nights that didn’t really end so much as dissolve into the next day. Fast forward fifteen or sixteen years and something has changed shape. I’ve been around artists in Toronto recently and they seem more isolated, more self-contained, like they are orbiting their own work rather than each other. The instinct to build things together is still there in theory, but in practice it feels thinner, harder to activate. Apps like Vampr show up as the new meeting point, like Tinder did for people, but something about that kind of matching system doesn’t seem to produce a shared world. It produces contact without continuity. And contact without continuity doesn’t become culture.

What I’m really noticing is not just a loss of collaboration, but a loss of how collaboration actually works when it works at all. There used to be an unspoken literacy inside scenes like the Red Moon Collective. Nobody sat you down and explained it. You learned it by being there. You learned how to drift into a room and stay in it long enough for something accidental to turn into something intentional. You learned how to return to people without needing a formal reason. You learned how to let ideas stay unfinished without abandoning them. It was not organized, but it was coherent. It had rhythm. It had memory.

Now I meet younger artists and collaboration often seems to arrive as a kind of abstraction. It is either a planned transaction or a vague aspiration. When it comes up, there is a kind of hesitation, like they are trying to figure out what box it belongs in. It feels like one-task thinking: one collaboration, one output, one moment, cleanly defined. Not because people don’t want more, but because the environment they’ve grown inside doesn’t give them repeated examples of how anything else actually holds together. The culture of how to do it has thinned out.

There are reasons for this that sit underneath everything. The city itself has tightened. Time has fragmented. People are pulled across jobs, gigs, obligations, survival logistics that make shared unstructured time harder to sustain. You don’t just “hang out until something happens” the way you used to, because there are fewer spaces where that kind of time is economically or socially stable. Even when people meet, the conditions for staying in the same orbit are weaker. So collaboration gets pushed into scheduling, and scheduling is where spontaneity goes to die.

Then there is the platform layer, which accelerates contact but flattens duration. You can find anyone now. That part is easy. But what used to matter was not finding people, it was remaining near them long enough for trust and rhythm to build. When discovery is instant, repetition becomes optional, and without repetition, scenes don’t fully form. They flicker.

Over all of this sits a shift in how artists are taught to think about themselves. The individual unit has become the default. The personal brand, the solo output, the constant stream of discrete work. Even collaboration gets filtered through that lens, like it has to justify itself inside an individual trajectory. That changes behaviour in subtle ways. It narrows what people assume collaboration even is.

And underneath even that, there is a quieter break in transmission. The old scene knowledge—the informal craft of how to actually be in collective process—doesn’t pass through as reliably anymore. It used to be absorbed by being around it long enough. By watching it fail and work and restart. By repetition without instruction. That kind of learning doesn’t survive easily in fragmented environments. So what disappears is not just the scene, but the shared instinct for how scenes operate.

I still feel like I can push through that gap. I can still head toward collaboration and make it happen even when the conditions are not helping it. But I notice that for a lot of younger artists, there is a kind of uncertainty at the starting point. Not resistance, exactly. More like not knowing what the process is supposed to feel like once it leaves the level of a single interaction.

So what looks like isolation is not only personal choice or temperament. It is a shift in cultural memory. A loss of shared operating knowledge. And once that goes, collaboration stops being a default condition of being an artist in a city and becomes something you have to consciously reconstruct every time from scratch.

My name is Ed Scholz, and what I remember is not just a collective I joined. It is a way of being around other people’s work that assumed continuity, assumed return, assumed that things didn’t have to be completed to matter. That assumption used to be everywhere. Now it has to be rebuilt, one encounter at a time.