The fourth and final night of Highly Likely Festival (Sunday, March 1) will feature Wax Mannequin (AKA Chris Adeney), a Hamilton-based musician who has been releasing music and touring for over 20 years. His eight full-length releases, with their fascinating, sometimes unsettling sound have garnered fans wherever heard—including me. Which might be why Arthur gave me the opportunity to interview Adeney in anticipation of his upcoming show.

The music of Wax Mannequin captured me from the first listen. It was unlike anything I had ever heard. So, when given the chance to speak with him, the first thing I did was ask him to describe his sound.

“My music is sort of art punk,” said Adeney. “There's like an absurdist stadium metal quality. There's a psych folk influence in some of my quieter stuff.”

“And it's kind of performance art as much as anything else. I just play a kind of rock music that has grown and changed over years of touring. And it's sort of my own voice, my own thing.”

I was first introduced to Wax Mannequin as an undergrad student at Trent. I was at a gathering hosted by Stephen Brown and the English department, where people were performing bits of Shakespeare or pieces of music. One such performance was by an English professor, Andrew Loeb. He introduced the song he was about to play as being written by an old classmate, that he had learned it the night before, and that it was a “little bit weird.” The song that followed was filled with mentions of bees, birds, and buttons, and featured a longer-than-expected segment consisting purely of “meow, meow, meow.”

The music stuck with me. Unfortunately, the song and artist name did not. After a few months of meowing to the tune and pacing my apartment in late-2020, I emailed Loeb to ask. He shared the song was “Thing Game” by Wax Mannequin, with whom he had taken a Renaissance Drama course with in the early 2000s.

This was not too long after Adeney started performing as Wax Mannequin. “Thing Game” was featured on The Price, released in 2004.

“I guess all through high school, in my teenage years and university years, I was just writing songs,” said Adeney.

“I was studying fine arts in university. And, at that point, started plugging my music out a lot more and got pulled in that direction. Music was just a vehicle for the same creative voice that I was exploring in fine art—visual arts. And I didn’t really look back. I just kept performing.”

Right from the beginning, Adeney “fell in love with the road.”

“Some musicians hate performing live and touring. I love it. And I find it’s really something I can’t kick,” Adeney told me. “Even as my life takes different turns with family and careers. I always come back to touring and releasing because there’s just something… Some work there that I haven’t finished yet.”

Adeney’s music career was born from writing songs and playing them at open mics in Hamilton, ON.

“My friend Joey had just spent a few months traveling, hitchhiking out west. This is in 1999 or 2000. He convinced me that he should book a tour for me after I released my first record. So, he did. And it was treacherous and half baked. Sleeping on sofas for two weeks at a time waiting for the next batch of shows to come through. I made it out and back again and spent a good ten years touring. East, west, basically nonstop.”

And it was from these early experiences (and, possibly, some assigned readings while studying fine arts) that the name and persona “Wax Mannequin” came from.

“I used to play in a band, Golden Lake Diner, in Hamilton,” Adeney said. “I just started opening those shows with my acoustic stuff.”

“We were talking about performance and being alienated on stage, and it came up in conversation I was having with my friend, Graham, at the time. I was also reading a book—a Descartes book. He had ideas about wax and how it melts […] I’ve grown into it. I feel, like, elemental. And I’ve always liked making things out of wax. So, I’ve embraced that and I do candles and stuff.”

Now “Wax Mannequin” is more than just a moniker in reference to René Descartes’ wax argument—the substance is physically incorporated into the performance. Entering “Wax Mannequin” into any search engine will reveal multiple images of Adeney mid-performance, with a burning, melting, dripping candle stuck to the crown of his head.

It’s something Adeney will do at “certain outdoor shows, or festivals, that have maybe a more extreme slant or freak-show-ish kind of quality.”

“I guess I call it my final form, or my true form. I feel at home while doing that. I used to do that sort of thing on stages but there were a couple of close calls where things lit on fire. And, so, I stopped doing that in venues. You know, I never burned any places down. But these days, when it happens, it's rare. And I use more candles. And I take more precautions.”

Adeney has a history performing here in Peterborough that goes back to the early 2000s. I’d wager that at least one of our local indoor venues has fit the criteria of having a “freak-show-ish quality” and has seen Wax Mannequin play with a live candle on his head.

“I think I started at… What was it? The Blue Room,” said Adeney. “It was this weird place above the Trasheteria.”

“Long gone, I think. A fellow, Christian Johnston, used to book shows there and he booked me at the Blue Room. And those went off, really well organized and had a lot of fun. He was this rough-around-the-edges kind of promoter who always made it happen. It was really reputable, reliable. So that was, probably, my first half-a-dozen or ten shows in Peterborough, at that little place.”

“And then, Christian, he emails me at some point and asks if he can open for me in Hamilton. I didn’t even know he played music. I said, ‘I guess so,’ because I’ve got to reciprocate. And so I organized this little show at a theatre, here in Hamilton, the Staircase Theatre. And it was off the hook,” Adeney said.

“He played this scrappy music about stealing from work and stuff like that. And he kept going, doing music. And we remained good friends. He’s actually Hamiltonian. You might know him, B.A. Johnston. He’s got a Peterborough connection […] So, that was my first connection to Peterborough, through B.A.”

Since those bookings at the Blue Room, Adeney has met friends and performed with artists from Peterborough, including The Burning Hell’s Mathias Kom and Michael Duguay.

“That whole scene embraced me, or we embraced each other,” Adeney told me. “And I fell in love with the town then.”

Some of Adeney’s local stories go back 25 years. Inevitably, in that time, an artist’s life changes. Adeney still tours, though less frequently than in the 2000s. While he isn’t on stage performing as Wax Mannequin, he teaches grade seven. His sound also evolves. He reflects on how his music has changed since his early tours and albums:

“I think it’s more punk, and more immediate, more brutalist, I guess. My early stuff was really nylon-string finger-style with circuit bent sounds. And really prog stuff. Now, there’s still that current running through my recent stuff, but it is more about… I don’t know. Playing live forces you to find new ways to connect to audiences," Adeney explains.

“And I really like the immediacy of stripping down production. Some of my songs are pretty complex. I try to simplify the production of it, so it’s as immediate as possible in its communication. I called it a sort of brutalism, where you see the bones of the machinery there in front of you as I’m playing. Leaving room in the audience’s mind to fill in the missing instruments or missing production elements. I think that’s really important to allow space for the listener to fill in blacks. I strive for that, lyrically. To imply things without saying them outright. I find that it’s a fun way to commune with people who listen to music.”

While we talked, I asked Adeney to share an example of a lyric, or song, or piece of music that he was exceptionally proud of:

“Well, it's like choosing a favourite child, or favorite ailment. Favorite scar… I like my new song, from my more recent album, there's a song called 'Not the Worst It Gets.' I think it holds together pretty nicely. It's sort of about depression, but it's also about the Yukon. And, so, I think lyrically it kind of does what I want it to do.”

Throughout the conversation, Adeney made multiple mentions to those spaces with a “more extreme slant.” Though I might not use the words “freak-show-ish quality” to describe Highly Likely Festival and Take Cover Books, I don’t believe Andrew or Sean Fitzpatrick or Michael Duguay (the organizers of the festival) would be overly hurt by the description. However, I’ll comfortably label Highly Likely Festival as “unconventional,” a genre of event space Adeney seems to connect with (though, I doubt he’ll light up a candle surrounded by shelves of books).

“I like when you show up to a show and you don’t have any baggage for the show. Maybe you’re familiar with the artist or the music, but it’s in a space where that doesn’t carry any baggage of what type of show it’s supposed to be. I think what I do is, particularly, conducive to spaces that either have a lot of different kinds of music, or are not conventional music spaces.”

“You walk into the room and it’s kind of a clean slate. We don’t have any preconceptions. I think that’s really important for any music. You want to listen to the music without thinking too much about what genre it is, or what label the person is on, or how famous, or what’s what. You just want to receive what is being said to you as clearly as possible. At least, that’s the kind of approach I take when I go to see shows. I want to play in spaces that allow for that.”

This interview made it abundantly clear that Adeney has a true love for live music; not just for himself, as the artist, but for everyone:

“It’s almost redundant, at this point, to say that getting out to live performances is incredibly healthy for society. And it reminds me to immerse myself in other people and what they do. That’s one of the reasons I keep doing this. And going to shows. It’s a kind of community building.”

This article is a part of Arthur's ongoing coverage of Highly Likely Festival, presented by Miracle Territory and Take Cover Books. The festival runs from February 26 to March 1, 2026 with four nights of music, literature, and art at Take Cover Books on 59 Hunter Street E. For more information about the festival lineup, visit the Highly Likely site or visit Take Cover Books digitally or in-person for tickets or weekend passes. Highly Likely is also offering discounted student tickets for individual nights of the festival via their brick-and-mortar storefront or online.