Alternate Scenes
Article reserved for subscribers
For twenty-two years, the event has brought together the cream of the alternative scene every summer in the very isolated mining town of Rouyn-Noranda. An indie paradise that is still thriving despite its institutionalization, in a Quebec context that is not necessarily easy for artists.
“Come on, let’s go to the laundry room.” Sure, the bus ride from Montreal to Rouyn-Noranda took more than ten hours between forests and lakes, we didn’t take a shower and a few fluorescent yellow mustard stains subtly stain our T-shirts, but for half a second, we are piqued by this invitation: are we really that dirty? Fortunately, the inclinations of our evening companion are purely musical and said laundry room is only the landmark to find the secret show taking place outdoors that evening, as part of the Festival de musiques émergentes (FME). The cultural event has been held every summer for twenty-two years in every corner of this mining town in Abitibi-Témiscamingue, the Canadian copper capital with bucolic landscapes albeit soaked in arsenic, and has lost none of its pioneering energy despite its institutionalization. Thanks in particular to a breath of fresh air brought to the prog team which was recently enriched by the duo of barely thirty-year-olds Marilyne Lacombe and Philippe Larocque, co-founders of the Montreal label Mothland and eminent connoisseurs of the alternative scenes in Quebec.
Before our eyes, haggard with fatigue and local IPA, a Montreal group, visibly bottle-fed on Osees, unleashes itself, accompanied by a kind of surfer elf in orange jogging pants, Crocs and a t-shirt. «Chill since 1993» (“relaxed since
