When long-time Scarborough resident Garen Markarian released his three-song EP last year, he managed to get some airtime on 102.1 the Edge, Toronto’s popular cutting edge rock station, not to mention plenty of play on university radio stations.

One of them certainly was the UofT Scarborough Campus radio station where he was a deejay with a weekly one-hour show when he was a student there in neuro-sciences.

Prior to that, the 29-year-old musician went to Agincourt Collegiate Institute, in the french immersion program, and before that JB Tyrrell senior public school and North Bridlewood junior public school, all in Scarborough.

In his younger days, he delivered the Scarborough Mirror and actually got in it a few times.

His musical talent, however, soon had him exchanging his Mirror paper route for rock ‘n roll, forming his first band, Lud, while still at Agincourt C.I.

His old band had an interesting bit of trivia in that it was asked to play for a school dance at Agincourt C.I. instead of a not yet famous band called Moist.

He went on to some local bar bands, Handwave in university and, most recently, Overview.

“We (Overview) put out an album. We played pretty much every bar in Toronto – Lee’s Palace, Horseshoe to the Rivoli, The 360 when it was open.”

Markarian’s just released, first full-length solo CD, entitled Health Crisis, includes the three songs that originally attracted the interest of 102.1 the Edge, and he hopes the full-length version will make an even bigger splash.

His own background is Armenian. The songs “are mainly rock, folk, a lot of acoustic with a lot of world music element to it. Probably not too out there where it wouldn’t get radio play which I had with the EP.”

Markarian, who played in the concert bands at all three Scarborough schools he attended as well as numerous annual Kiwanis music festivals, took formal violin lesson for about 10 years, starting at the age of five.

“I was classically trained on violin. I did private lessons with a Russian teacher, so it was kind of neat but very strict.”

As he grew older, he decided that becoming a classically trained violinist was not the route he wanted to go.

He picked up the guitar – and just about every other instrument he could get his hands on.

And you’ll find just about all of them “economically” used on his new CD, including violin, although he stresses “it still maintains a very indie-rock kind of (vibe), pretty relevant to today’s music. It’s not crazy out there.”

Garen, who went on to post graduate studies at the Michener Institute for Applied Health Sciences in Toronto, holds down a full-time day-job downtown as a medical underwriter for an insurance company.

He’ll use an upcoming summer “vacation”, however, to focus on his other job as a musician with a planned August tour of northern Ontario and western Canada, including gigs at Chapters and various bars.

Further ahead, he anticipates having an official CD release party in early fall.

In the meantime, you can easily sample or order it on his website at www.myspace.com/garenmusic.