Road To Rouyn: Festival De Musique Émergente’s Party in Northern Quebec

All photos courtesy of author

"Half the people play music, and the other half listen to it,” 26-year-old Nick Tremblay tells me about the town of Rouyn-Noranda, as he stares down Avenue Murdoch toward beautiful Lac Osisko. “Whatever the show is, there's gonna be some people. Even if it's tiny, there's still gonna be some people, man. They're gonna be fuckin' party animals. You got 15 people at your show? Well, those 15 people are gonna be like the craziest motherfuckers ever."

It’s the last night of the Festival De Musique Émergente (Emerging Music Festival), an event that sprawls all over Rouyn-Noranda’s downtown, and after the past few days, I can say with some authority that Nick is half right. Before flying out here to the region of Abitibi-Témiscamingue on a tiny plane in which you could watch the pilot read about low fuel pressure, Quebec audiences were spoken about in hushed tones. “They’re fucking insane, man,” one photojournalist friend told me. “They make Toronto audiences look like they’re asleep.”

But after watching Deerhoof rain chaotic noise upon the very politely seated audience at the Agora des Arts, I was speculating about what it might take, exactly, for these people to get up and move. Actually, I was trying to figure out what it might take for them to do anything but look bored. As entertaining as it was to see singer Satomi Matsuzaki try to lead about 150 confused francophones in yelling, “PANDA PANDA PANDA!,” I was wondering when the party was going to start. In a basement across the street, I got the semi-unfortunate answer: some horrible band named Crushed Out from Brooklyn, who are “like the White Stripes” in that there are two of them and they play music that sounds just like rip-offs of old blues riffs, got the crowd moving. The drummer was dressed like a hand-crafted mermaid from a Wes Anderson-inspired diorama and the singer looked like Hot Topic surf-punk Julian Assange. The latter had the kind of affected cutesy-ish stage banter that would push someone to punch him at the wrong party. The closers, though—Les Marinellis—were a breath of fresh, wasted basement punk air, their frontman clad in sparkling gold vest and hot pants, guzzling Canadian Club and acting like a brat. Things were looking up.

Friday afternoon brought a detour to one of those fancy industry BBQs, where brutally hungover musicians slink around poking at food with their sunglasses bolted to their temples, entertaining the idea of jumping in a pool based on what stage of the chills/sweats cycle they're in (no judgement, by the way). Chief among them was a shirtless, bathing suit-clad Peter Zaremba of legendary garage-rock band The Fleshtones, going on about how beautiful the spot was for a good couple minutes, oblivious to the corn kernel stuck to the side of his lip. It was nearly as punk rock as the blistering late-night set he did later that night at some bar that looked like the spawn of an Olive Garden and a decrepit honky-tonk. I took off early and left him spinning around on stage, my brain scrambled from earlier in the night. Toronto’s Moon King had slayed at the Agora; francophones Ponctuation got the kids rowdy with a high-energy haze of grimy psychedelia; Duchess Says traumatized an entire room with what I can only call ‘witch-punk’; Peregrine Falls brutalized the basement with destructive ear-splitting muscle-jazz stomp, armed with bows, a theremin, and wacked-out mindfuck guitar solos.

Across from The Fleshtones was a real regulars bar: filled with chain smokers, old ladies, weekend cowboys, and career drinkers. A shitty cover band did their best “Smoke On The Water” cover. It’s the kind of place you expect chicken wire to be protecting the stage, the kind of place where you go to go nowhere. Just down the street a bit further, toward the behemoth Glencore Horne Smelter, lumbering metallic and puffing clouds of smoke deep into the night sky, lots are filled with the same houses as any small town—generic white paint flecking off, shoddily built front steps, broken toys in the yard. A glimpse inside reveals the same linoleum, the same scuffed fridge, the same cracked countertops as each other house. If you’ve ever lived in a neighborhood like that, you know the vibe. It’s half chill, half wary of outsiders. All just a two-minute walk away from glorious, vibrant, artsy downtown, reveling in the abundance of culture. It’s a reminder that no matter how welcoming the town you’re in can feel, you’re not a local.

“It's a whole bunch of people that we don't know, come here, hang around our stuff, our place,” Nick says when I ask him what he thinks the festival means for Rouyn-Noranda. “I've been hanging out at the same bar every day of my life for the past five years. Every day of my life. I get up, I go to the Cabaret, everything's fine. And once you've been doing that, the routine gets on pretty quick, and when you see a lot of people who aren't from here, and are not going to come back 'til next year, it's a bit weird."

Even though Nick certainly doesn’t seem like a stranger to a good all-nighter—when I met him for the first time he was totally wasted, “abandoned” by his friend, slurring his words and without a phone—he has some trouble with the parties at a certain point. “It’s so fuckin’ noisy,” he laughs, describing the endless din of the “techno van” that blasts music all night. “Mushrooms do their stuff, pretty great.” For the most part, though, the locals seem pretty pumped about everything. The street party goes hard into the wee hours (and even harder into wee-er hours if you hit the back alleys where the punk kids who know what they’re doing hang out), the crowds do get into it if it’s the right kinda show (many of which seemed to involve crouching down very low and then jumping up high), and it’s an even better excuse than usual to abuse the 24-hour life-saving poutine restaurant. The music, too, is phenomenal, and FME lives up to its name. As a shamefully uncultured Canadian, the extent of my knowledge of French music was previously limited to Serge Gainsbourg & Jane Birkin’s “Je t’aime… moi non plus” because it sounds like two sexy people having sexy sex with each other. Now I can name at least three Francophone bands. Galaxie in particular put on one of the most mind-blowing/melting/fucking sets I’ve ever seen, like Sci-fi Thin Lizzy on uppers. For their encore, they basically played 20 minutes straight, just solos. Guitar, bass, organ, drums. Just solos. And the keyboard player kicked it off with a smoke in his mouth. How fucking cool is that?

By most accounts, the town is pretty boring for the 361 days FME is absent. “Not that much of an adventure,” Nick says. But why, if everyone agrees it’s so goddamn boring where you live, would you not just split?

Nick’s not from Rouyn-Noranda originally. He’s from Montreal. He looks like acid casualty Davy Crockett, with thick dreadlocks, spaced ears, patchy facial hair, and dark, piercing eyes behind his glasses. Five years ago while hitchhiking across Canada, he ended up in Rouyn-Noranda and asked where he should go. The guy he was with gave him directions to Cabaret de la derniere chance: a bar that looks more like a poorly kept house held together by kitsch, with multiple red rooms and a giant back patio. Montreal buzz-band Heat broke hearts on its stage Friday night. “I walked and I got there, and… there was no one inside. When I came outside, where the courtyard is, there were like seven to ten people playing guitar, smoking joints. I was like, yeah, that's my place. Then I just stayed.”

He disappeared soon after into a now sparse crowd, as drunk visitors started to filter out of the outdoor hub and back to wherever exotic locales they came from, letting Rouyn-Noranda slowly return to its apparently mind-numbing boringness. But when your home is a super-fun, non-stop party for four days every year, Nick’s version of boring—joints, guitars, pals—might just be un petit coin de paradis.

Matt Williams is a writer and photographer living in Toronto. He’s on Twitter.