I've already fallen behind the ball on this month-long celebration that has aurally-inclined Montrealers doing cartwheels for an entire moon-cycle. June comes and stalks us once again, and thanks to the fine folks who run the Suoni per il Popolo festival, it is a true test of endurance to keep a person's set of ears up to date on all of the wonderful sounds that hit the stages of la Sala Rossa and Casa del Popolo over the festival's run of 30 days.
On Sunday, the first day to roll around, I scrambled up to Sala Rossa and sat in the warmth spread by the deep-red walls. Shalabi Effect were setting up, and the quartet's piles of aural toys cluttered the stage. Sam Shalabi, himself, sat tucked in a corner, up-stage-left, entirely obscured by the upright bass of Alexandre St. Onge; from here, the Montreal band's namesake maintained a quiet control and mystery.
Their songs, winding and elegant, wove pulsing basslines and homemade and traditional Indian percussion with fuzz-soaked slabs of endless guitar lines, electronic voice manipulations, oud drones, and jelly-roll slide-guitar into dreamscapes. Shortly the room was hypnotized, half a dozen folks lying on their backs to try to hold-dear the meditative electricity that Shalabi Effect washed over them. The group landed several sharp psychedelic stabs to remind those who weren't bent over in bliss that their lush sounds were a layered and living scape.
Excepter shortly climbed to the stage, slowly building a glowing electronic hum: the chanting of an invisible mechanical beast. Usually incarnated by six operators, this mechanical beast clamboured to its feet, which helped to shake the remainder of dream-sleep from the audience's ears; this night, only four were required to bring the beast to life. Of Excepter's sound operators, one lovely lady in robes slunk to the stage wearing layers of masks wrapped around her head, which she shed as she ploughed into command of a digital drum-panel. This became the beast's footsteps; it was steered by a laptop from the rear and drove in time, rather than space.
Behind glasses whose frames were disco beats, one of Excepter's operators built a heartbeat by pounding together rods of dark-matter that the beast perhaps stole from another star. The beast shifted and swayed, tugged by a shimmering synthesizer rope; its movements stumbled and struggled in the darkness of a foreign solar system. Truly the beast of Excepter's sound exists in outer-space, sometimes, its skin decorated with glistening kisses from solar flares and cloaked in the rumbling clutter of space dust. The audience reached and stretched their arms, hoping to hold Excepter's mechanical sound beast, but as their fingers groped closer and closer, some grabbing on to the beast's fingers, Excepter's journey slowed to a roll before planting its feet sturdily. Heads spinning, it took the audience some time to comprehend the quest they had just attempted to follow.
Expect to hear much more, here, about Suoni per il Popolo, for this festival still offers more than fifty concerts over the course of the next several weeks. Right this moment, I'm training my ears, in hopes that they will be able to handle the excitement that this festival offers.
If you happen to be in the Montreal area, or are in any way capable of making it this way, key your way to http://www.casadelpopolo.com/suoni/about.htm to find a full festival schedule, images of some of the delightful silkscreened posters for some of the shows, and many sorts of wonderful and helpful informations.