Supplied – Madison CurrahAs most post-grads tend to do at the age of eighteen, Teresa Dzavik, who goes by the stage name Terrian, came to the University of Alberta to study general arts. Not even a semester later, she realized she was traveling down the wrong path. “It was just a downward spiral from there,” says Dzavik, who realized that if she wasn’t studying music, there was no point.
However, there was a light at the end of the tunnel. While here, Dzavik attended her first EDM show at the Starlite Room in 2010: it was a Doctor P show and she witnessed the blossoming dub step scene and her thoughts began to shift.
“That night changed my life and that’s kind of when I realized that I wanted to find a way to mix that kind of music with the pop music that I was more skilled at writing,“ she recounts.
Her journey began and her music inspirations continued to expand across multiple genres. On the electronic side of things, Dzavik looked to influences such as Sigma and drum-bass producers like Metrik. Dzavik has greatly modeled her musical style after the U.K. artist Katy B, who manages to seamlessly blend a mix of house, dub step and U.K. garage together with a pop ambiance.
After parting ways with the University of Alberta, Teresa entered the music program at Grant MacEwan, a diploma that was primarily jazz-focused. But without it, Dzavik claims she would not be where she is now, vocally.
“That’s where it benefited me the most,” she explains, “I got to learn about the chords and theory that I would have needed to know.” She went on to praise the professionalism, saying that she never played with a band or started music groups without studying in the program.
After gigging during and at school, she felt the need to extend her musical arms and start to perform outside of school.“I had to do that before I graduated or else I might not ever do it … people graduate, and never end up performing again. You have to do it while you’re in that musical setting or you might not get that motivation back.” Her wise words lead to her wise decision to do just that.
Once she graduated, without wasting a second of time, she released her debut self-titled E.P. on the very last day of her school career. And she did it all independently.
“It’s hard when you’re doing it as a solo artist … it is solely my project and my responsibility,” Dzavik says. “It’s hard to find ways to branch out and get more people to listen.”
But Dzavik got people to listen. After playing several shows in Edmonton, she adopted her stage name Terrian and made her festival debut at Astral Harvest this past summer, while also playing a number of other of other shows, a big turning point came playing the Phantasm festival in Saskatchewan.
“I was there by myself, I drove there by myself and it was just a very liberating moment. I got to do everything on my own and I had to set up everything on my own,” she says.
As for next summer? Dzavik plans on playing at least five festivals as well as releasing another single. It’s evident that there are big things ahead for this passionate young woman, as she isn’t wasting a second of potential stardom.
