***Okay, I panicked at the last minute when neither Switch, nor Booka Shade had gotten back to me about interviews. It won't be published in the magazine, so get the exclusive, non-existant Disco Volante vol. 49 here. When I'm super famous in Korea, you'll be able to say you read this before it never even came out!
Boozing and Musing
Iwas sitting in the corner of a dilapidated, spacious, colourfully-lit loft a few nights ago, watching several dozen revelers in Hawaiian shirts sock-hopping on the hardwood to 50's doo-wop tunes translated into French, when I began to wonder, as I often do, just what it was that was being toasted. My nighttime forays, once again, brought me to quite a few different celebratory microclimates last weekend. This particular soirée was one of those times when I was tagging along with some friends who coaxed me out of my room at 1:30am, so as I sipped a lonely beer I pondered the excesses of my situation, detached from the crowd, of which I knew no one. It felt a bit voyeuristic, like I was an intruder analyzing the partygoers in their native habitat. Who are these people? What do they do here?
Further along in the weekend I found myself wallflowered at another dark, swanky den, full of crisply dressed dancers with wry smiles, in the upper reaches of some hideous condo complex in the old port. They were laughing and making advances at each other with the confident demeanors that are so troublingly common at such events. No more than a passing glance would tell you that most of these people probably party like that nearly every weekend. But why?
I was likewise situated in another little cultural diorama this weekend, peering into a cozy nest of mild mannered twenty-somethings whose tastes and fashion sense seemed so esoteric and eclectic as to be a visual representation of a google search of the word kitsch. They, too, were merrily entrenched in their tree-house-like vision of paradise, crammed into the creaking corner of a warehouse that had probably seen occupants both stranger and more mundane in its time.
After a while it starts to seem like there are a thousand little compartmentalized ideas of hedonistic perfection in Montreal every weekend, each one with its own quirky tribe of thrill seekers, sousing themselves without a thought of the thinning Somalians, crumbling stock markets, melting icebergs or rampant viruses that seem so pertinent during office hours. The best I can figure is that the night is our cultural oubliette, where we dispose of the venom of the day, like so many mines full of uranium, and postpone thoughts about age, discretion and finding a productive place in the urban community.
Whether you're out for fun or sociology, I can certainly predict a few good bets for excess this weekend. Tonight, Thursday March 15, Parking will be graced by the respectable founder of German record label Poker Flat and purveyor of funky and sophisticated tech house grooves, Steve Bug.
On Saturday night a rather unlikely double-booking will see Montreal's techno elite divided right down the middle. Eclectic house producer cum genre-bending icon Switch hit les Saints along with Jordan Dare, Sean Kosa and DJ Bind. Switches more recent exploits include a fabulous catalog of remixes for the upper crust of the electro scene's darlings, as well production on M.I.A.'s anticipated, forthcoming album, Power Power.
That same night, Get Physical Recordings co-founders Booka Shade will be at the lovely Just For Laughs Museum. Booka Shade's long-running discography shows that left-field minimal house and sterile techno beats can have great accessibility and appeal to the uninitiated, culminating in their moody, driving, second full-length, Movements, which is one of the most humanized experiments in fully electronic songwriting that I have encountered.
Choose wisely. Jack.oatmon@gmail.com