Some mornings the inbox surprises you. This morning I opened a message from Winnipeg and there it was: the artwork for our 10th anniversary, ready to meet the world. I sat with it for a long time before doing anything. You don't rush a moment like that. Today, we get to share it with you.
Look at it. Really look at it. The whole thing pulses like a sunrise coming through stained glass. Sunbursts in burgundy and orange spin out from the centre. Twin moons sit like sentinels in the corners. And in the heart of it all, the kestrel - our kestrel, the bird that's watched over Static Roots since 2024 - takes flight again, this time with a key clutched in its talons. A key, because for ten years now we've been opening doors. Doors to artists you'd never heard of. Doors to friendships that started in the Altenberg yard and lasted years. Doors to those moments roots music slips you when you're not looking - the ones we've come to call the shiver.
That's why the scroll across the bird reads what it reads: chasing the shiver since 2016. It is not a slogan. It is a confession.
The Artist Behind The Bird
The hands behind all of this belong to Roberta Landreth, a JUNO Award-winning graphic designer based in Winnipeg, Manitoba. If you've ever been moved by the cover of a great Canadian roots record - The Bros. Landreth (her husband's band), William Prince, Dan Mangan, Steve Bell - there's a fair chance Roberta had something to do with it. She has designed more than 200 album covers, won the 2015 JUNO for Album Artwork of the Year for Steve Bell's Pilgrimage, four Western Canadian Music Awards, two Covenant Awards,and earned a second JUNO nomination in 2022. Her festival work reads like a love letter to roots and folk culture: the Winnipeg Folk Festival posters from 2021 through 2025, Break Out West, Festival of Small Halls, Canmore Folk Festival, and, since 2019, ours.
She has an idea about her craft that has always stayed with me. She's described what a designer does as being "a mirror" for the artist and her clients - listening before deciding, responding rather than imposing. That listening is what makes Roberta extraordinary. Every kestrel she has drawn for us has sounded like a different season of the same song.
Working with her year after year is one of the quiet privileges of running this festival. There's a generosity in how she works that you feel in every email. When I apologised this winter for being slow with feedback, she came back with the kind of grace you cannot manufacture: don't be embarrassed, life is just chaotic sometimes, thank you for the festival itself. That generosity ends up on the poster too.
A Decade In One Drawing
This year's bird sounds like a celebration. The palette is unmistakably retro - terracotta, cream, gold, dusty teal, brick red - the kind of psychedelic rock-poster vocabulary that conjures Fillmore West in 1968 and a basement record bin in 1974 all at once. But look closer and it's all hand-drawn, all considered, all Roberta. Even the way the lineup is set down below, every name in a different colour, no act bigger than another, says something quietly important about who we are.
Silver Lining. The Dreaming Spires. Joana Serrat. Jerry Joseph & The Dimpker Brothers. Vandoliers. Emily Nenni. Julianna Riolino. Irish Mythen. Jesper Lindell. Leeroy Stagger. Kirsten Adamson & The Tanagers. Ben de la Cour. Plus The Southern Fold for our Welcome Night and Small Change for the Campfire Session. Twelve artists on the main bill, two more for the bookend moments. All in the same hand. All on the same poster. All chasing the shiver with us over a long weekend in July.
The kestrel will live beyond paper too. Roberta's design will be on the merchandise we'll have at Zentrum Altenberg in July - shirts, totes, the things you take home with you. As ever, every Euro from the sale of those merchandise items goes straight to Médecins Sans Frontières / Ärzte ohne Grenzen. Ten years of music, ten years of giving back. The bird carries that too.
So here it is. Print it out. Put it on the fridge. Send it to the friend you keep meaning to bring along this time. The 10th edition of Static Roots Festival is 10 & 11 July 2026 at Zentrum Altenberg in Oberhausen, with our Welcome Night the evening before in Essen-Werden.
If you haven't grabbed your ticket yet, this is the nudge. Come and chase the shiver with us.