As the owner of Scarab Metal Productions, a Calgary-based concert production company, Terese Fleming has to stay up-to-date with the goings on of the music industry and the trends that drive it on a global scale, then take that and apply it to the music community closer to home. It doesn’t hurt that she holds close a passion for music and the metal artists across Alberta.

As a result, Fleming has seen her business grow, and the annual metal festival Noctis Valkyries approach its third year, growing bigger and better – and challenging – each time it’s unleashed in the southern prairies.

“I’ve been to a number of music events across Canada – Canadian Music Week, NXNE, the Western Canada Music Awards – and they all had conferences attached to them. But the problem was, there was never any representation from metal: no metal business people, no metal bands, and none of the topics being discussed were done with a metal angle, even though it’s quite different when you’re marketing a pop album versus marketing a metal album,” Fleming says, thinking back to a few months ago when this year’s Noctis Valkries aspired to something even greater.

The first Noctis Valkyries invaded Calgary, Alta. in the fall of 2007, and was a one-day festival with a single stage at MacEwan Hall, at the University of Calgary campus.

“We had already done a couple of all-ages shows at MacEwan Hall that featured local bands, and the first one we did had 550 kids. The second one, which was the video game show (where local metal bands covered video game theme songs), had 750 kids. And Mac Hall only holds 900 or 1,000,” Fleming recalls. “I thought, ‘If we can get this many kids for just local bands, what if we threw in a couple of national or international headliners and mixed them up with local bands?’”

Sumerian black thrashers Melechesh headlined, sharing the stage with Columbian black metallers Inquisition and a number of other metal acts, including Calgary’s Verbal Deception and Edmonton’s Insidious Omen.

The following year, Noctis II: The Age of Darkness engaged an audience 900 strong at MacEwan Hall Ballroom, and featured the Finnish folk metal six-piece Korpiklaani in their North American debut, German doom metallers Ahab, also making their first appearance in Canada, and blackened doom act Woods of Ypres from Ontario. Again, local ,etal bands from across the province of Alberta joined the line-up, but this time, the place packed.

“So this year we thought we’d do it for two days, add more international bands, and then we got the idea to add a music conference,” she explains.

Inspired by all those events she had attended with no metal context, Fleming began to investigate, starting with the Inferno Metal Festival in Norway back in April.

“I was cruising their site to see who was playing, and I noticed they had a metal conference attached and I thought, ‘Well, now I’m going for sure,’” she laughs. “So I went, and that organizer said, as far as he knew, it was only the second one that had been done in Europe. The previous one was done in Tusca in Finland. That’s when I decided I was definitely going to do this, because I had been thinking about doing this and how to do it and it was just kind of a little push for me to go, ‘Yeah, I think this is a good idea.’”

Noctis III: Tritagonist features a club night at The Distillery on Oct. 2, with international headliners Novembers Doom, Slough Feg and Ares Kingdom sharing the stage with four Calgary metal bands: Kilyakai, Norrath, Truck and Tosca. The main show at MacEwan Hall the following night kicks off with acts from across Alberta, followed by feature acts Destroyer 666 and Suffocation, and headliners Cynic.

The conference attached is the first of it’s kind in Canada, perhaps even North America, and is designed with both bands and fans in mind.

“There’s topics specifically on what metal labels are looking for, topics like how to promote your band, how to get endorsements, what’s the latest in recording and how do you get the best bang for your buck when buying equipment,” Fleming says. “And then there are topics specifically for fans. We’re going to have live interviews of Cynic, and the members of Novembers Doom, Slough Feg and Ares Kingdom. We’re going to have something on how to improve your live metal photography. Metal makes for a really compelling photography subject, so that would be for anybody who is a fan who likes taking pictures at metal shows.

“And we’re going to talk about the future of metal journalism and to what extent the webzines can take that over, because there have been several metal journals that have bit the dust this year like Metal Edge, Metal Maniacs, and Brave Words and Bloody Knuckles,” Fleming adds.

The speakers are almost as interesting and diverse as the topics.

“We’re going to have Martin Popoff, who is apparently the world’s most famous metal-heavy journalist and author. He’s written something like 40 books. There are going to be metal label executives and, as far as we know, it’s going to be the first time in Canada that four metal label executives have been willing to sit down with bands and answer questions,” she adds enthusiastically.

And rightly so. The labels represented are Metal Blade, Relapse, Prosthetic and Season of Mist, and just a quick look at their rosters would make any struggling metal musician drool a little.

There will also be a number of Alberta-based speakers, including Tomislav Crnkovic, a manager at Axe Music and frontman for Calgary metal quartet Viathyn, Divinity’s Sacha Laskow, the creative mastermind behind Broke Bands, Josh Wood and Kevin Woron, who co-host CJSW’s Megawatt Mayhem, and even yours truly, moi, to name very few.

“We don’t have the label executives, but we certainly have a thriving cottage industry of metal in terms of webzines, metal shows, metal photography, recording people.”

And the fact that it’s being held in Calgary is no mere coincidence.

Just look at the number of shows over the last couple of years that have traversed western Canada and sold out.

“And Calgary was chosen by Ozzy Osbourne as the site for Monsters of Rock (at McMahon Stadium in 2008). And you know damn well that their ‘people’ are looking at ticket sales. They didn’t just take a dartboard, aim some darts and hit something called Calgary, those decisions are being made on how many tickets are sold here. I think there is a healthy metal market in Calgary, and it’s definitely the best metal market in western Canada. It was a no-brainer that this would be the best place for a conference.”

But what used to take three to four weeks of part time work to plan and execute for a staff of two three, “Suddenly jumped to four people doing it over four months. It has taken a lot of manpower. Way more than I expected.”

As the festival draws near, Scarab Metal Productions is looking for volunteers to help out with anything from hanging posters and passing out handbills to helping out at the conference and shows, and those interested can simply send an email to info@scarabproductions.ca.

Whether the festival in this format will be a success, or if it will return to its previous format for Noctis IV, remains to be seen.

“We’ll have evaluations from the people who attend; we’ll ask the speakers what they thought. And then, of course, we’ll look at the overall attendance. If it’s poorly attended, it may be a good idea and it may be good information, but if it’s not sellable to this market, it maybe hasn’t reached its time yet. It could be a little early,” Fleming nods, then smiles.

“But it’s definitely worth a try.”