On November 23 at Club Soda, Peter Peter offered his first show in the venue since 2017, accompanied by Laurence-Anne as the opening act.
From the first seconds, the artist plunged Club Soda into an atmosphere where poetry and dance intertwined in a palpable rebellion, revealed by the screams in the mic of the artist. The live experience was much less smooth than the one you can experience when listening to his latest records. We found the spirit of his first eponymous album, whose fragility hid a raw beauty, that which is born from cracks and slippages. And in this imperfection, in these strange movements of the body, in this refined poetry, we have rediscovered Peter Peter, or perhaps we have simply found him again.
“Montreal, if you knew how happy I am. If you knew…”
Just before 20k hours of solitudewhere Peter Peter declaimed: “Montreal, if you knew how happy I am. If you knew…” It was his first concert at Club Soda since 2017, and for him as well as for the fans of the man who wrote Pale blue crystalit was an expected moment, full of symbolism.
Fcking Poetryprobably the most aesthetically interesting song of the last album, followed in an already well-established atmosphere. When Peter Peter danced frenetically like Thom Yorke in a trance, existential anxiety was transformed into magic, and we believed it. Every gesture became an impulse, every word had a cathartic effect. And it is in this alchemy between body and sound that Peter Peter’s genius was revealed, in this metamorphosis of vulnerability into power.
Music without borders
The audience, receptive to everything that Peter Peter had to offer, became for one evening a sort of living mirror of his questions, his reflections, but also of his abandon in the dance. It wasn’t really a performance show, but rather an exchange. Peter Peter’s inner world was his own, for one evening.
The artist got off the stage to We need love in a corridor of dazzling light, breaking the boundary between the stage and the crowd. The song took on a dimension both tragic and liberating as passions rose at the center of Club Soda (which became a veritable club for the occasion). When he returned to the stage, synthesizers mixed with the audience’s continued screams to create an end-of-the-world texture.
Finally, for the nostalgic among you, we cannot ignore the renditions ofAn improved version of sadness with his saxophone solo like a takeoff out of time and space and Very realwhose arrangement differed subtly from that on the album Black Eden.
A performance worthy of the artist, which will undoubtedly remain engraved in memories as one of the most memorable moments of the musical year in Montreal.
Laurence-Anne: dreamlike and elusive
In the opening, Laurence-Anne and her two musicians established their strong personality from the first texture. THE trip began with deep and mysterious synthesizers, a start full of promises, with titles taken fromOniromancie as Supernova et Politenesswhich deployed increasingly overwhelming waves of sound. Laurence-Anne’s voice, as ethereal as it is immersive, floated on the surface of this sea of synths, both delicate and invasive. The sound, too deep in the bass (a Club Soda classic), did not always allow us to grasp the richness of the arrangements, but allowed us, by closing our eyes, to drown happily in its eddies.
But despite the undeniable beauty of the music, a sort of wall stood between the artist and the audience. If the quality of the performance of the three musicians was in no way questioned, something prevented a connection with the crowd. Laurence-Anne sang magnificently, but we had the impression that she carried her melodies sometimes in the manner of a hymn, without really always inhabiting them fully, as if the artist herself was a little distanced from her own world. .
That said, we must highlight the richness of the music throughout his catalog, and moments like the performance of Birdssong featured on his second album, Musivisionwho speaks in Spanish about missing birds and secrets over a Thom Yorke-esque beat and Nyxwith its Grizzly Bear melody, lifted the spirits eager for good music. Laurence-Anne offered an invitation to introspection, to an experience where beauty is hidden in abstraction. There is no doubt that, in a different configuration, this distance could dissipate to make way for an even more immersive, revelatory experience in the future. Laurence-Anne’s project is probably one of the most interesting projects in Quebec at the moment and it is difficult to resist the desire to unlock its secret.
