Last night a Mixtape saved my life

The end of the last millennium and the start of the new one marked a small but momentous revolution in the music scene of Montréal, beyond italo-disco, jazz and musique actuelle.

The first thing that comes to mind is obviously post-rock: Godspeed You! Black Emperor, A Silver Mt. Zion and Esmerine. But the scope widens to embrace pop, techno, indie, as well as sound art, field recording, drones and film music, from Arcade Fire to BIG|BRAVE, passing through the soundtrack of Stéphane Lafleur's film "Tu Dors Nicole" (2014), which closes with Sean Nicholas Savage's best-known track, "Disco Dancing".

Montréal is a melting pot of communities from every corner of the world, and it epitomizes their fruitful coexistence, expressed above all in the meeting of art forms guided by music, where the languages of film, dance, poetry, and electronic and digital arts converge.

This is the city of Constellation and Arbutus Records, poised between post-rock, songwriting and clubbing, between performative and multimedia arts (Martin Messier, Godspeed, Jerusalem In My Heart, Fly Pan Am, Marie Davidson). It's the place where the body dissolves into sound (Colin Stetson and Jason Sharp) and where the final albums of Vic Chesnutt were welcomed and incubated ("North Star Deserter", 2007, and "At The Cut", 2009), along with Matana Roberts's "Coin Coin" project (Matana Roberts), whose first chapter ("Gens de Couleur Libres", 2011) was recorded at Hotel2Tango studios by Radwan Moumneh (Jerusalem In My Heart, Land of Kush).

Happy listening… and happy travels!

Ride the wave of great music

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28/11/2025