L'étrange et longue histoire du rock expérimental souterrain du Québec

Talk to any true head of Montreal’s music scene and you quickly learn that there is a largely under-documented, experimental, dissonant, and costume-laden rock lineage from Montreal and Quebec that came long before Khn and Klek Poitrine.

“Angine de Poitrine come from Saguenay, which is like six hours out of Montreal, and it had its own universe back when Montreal was doing its own weird thing in the 80s and 90s,” says Roy Vucino, a musician who now plays in PyPy, The Fleeting Light of Love and Grief, and his experimental hip-hop project, Brakhage. In his mind, the Quebec-born technical thrash metal band, Voïvod, is the group that influenced Angine de Poitrine musically, he says.

Hailing from the Saguenay suburb of Jonquière, Voïvod dressed as typical ‘80s heavy metal rockers. Thanks to drummer and artist Michel “Away” Langevin, their album covers depicted dystopian cyborgs and impossible, alien-like geometry, opening a whole comic book-esque mythology around the band.

Though even before Voïvod, in the late 60s and 70s, Quebec had been quietly and stubbornly producing strange and singular avant-garde music that wouldn’t and couldn’t get the algorithmic push or critical mass of ears that Khn and Klek are accumulating. But they existed, and some acts, regardless of their commercial success, continue to exist in grimy basements, chic dive bars, community centres that still play Aut’Chose on cassette, and on the lips of local vinyl store employees who will talk your ear off about the local new wave punk band, Terminal Sunglasses, after someone brings up The Cramps.

As Vucino tells it, the weird and beautiful Montreal underground scene is like water, flowing and then splashing into other genres, leaving “musical ambassadors, each with a niche sound, that crosses over into multiple scenes.”

Monks and Made-Up Language

In the late 1960s, a group called The Monks, who later rebranded as Les Munks after playing Montreal Expo '67, wore monk costumes while playing original ‘60s pop quite reminiscent of The Beatles or The Animals. Not much later, Harmonium, a francophone prog-folk rock band in the early ‘70s, founded by Serge Fiori, in Outremont, began incorporating more psychedelic imagery and costumes in their live shows. They toured Europe and Canada with Supertramp in 1977.

It wasn’t until the end of the ‘70s that the performative weird avant-rock boom really found an underground footing in Quebec. “There was a band called The Wipers that has a 7-inch called Nome Noma [originally released in 1979], and that was one of the first new wave punk released here, and they invented a language for it,” says Phillippe Larocque, a co-founder of the alternative music collective and label Mothland and co-founder of Distorsion Festival and Taverne Tour.

Larocque has dedicated much of his adult life to ensuring people witness, or at least become aware of, the newest wave of alternative Quebec-based music. When it comes to the history of avant-garde Québécois music, he’s also a walking encyclopedia. “The Wipers dressed up like a space[-fied] KISS for their one video, and there’s now an album compilation series of obscure late ‘70s post-punk from Montreal named after Nome Noma, so they were hugely influential for that new wave punk sound.”

Due to disco absolutely dominating the radio charts in the late ‘70s, The Wipers' weirdness never reached a huge audience, leading members to form other, more mainstream projects like Les B.B. Around the same time as The Wipers, one majorly influential group in the post-punk and experimental world was born in Montreal—The American Devices.

A 1980s newspaper clipping of The American Devices, still Montreal's longest-running punk band more than four decades on.

Rick Trembles' "loose" genealogy of The American Devices, tracing four decades of Montreal band incest, from The Electric Vomit to Men Without Hats to AIDS Wolf. | Image: Courtesy Rick Trembles

Latex, Thorns, and Punk Rock

The American Devices universe deserves its own spot in the Canadian Music Hall of Fame. The band debuted in late 1979 as The D-Vices, and is still playing one show a year, holding the title for the longest-running punk band in Montreal and second-longest in Canada. The D-Vices were founded by Rob Labelle, who played in The Normals, one of Montreal’s first punk bands, and a 17-year-old Rick Trembles, who was a cartoonist and guitarist in a group called The Electric Vomit.

“We had a mascot, a male mannequin torso I found in a dumpster, and we cut a hole in its mouth connected to a tube full of oatmeal and pea soup so that it would “electric vomit” on the floor,” Rick Trembles recalls from a couch in Casa Del Popolo. The Electric Vomit also had one stint where they would smash TVs full of garbage on stage during the song ‘Mind Controlling Melt.’

“The crowd would throw bottles at us, so we took it as, ‘Well, they must like it,’ Trembles laughs.

For Trembles, music and cartooning have always been synonymous, and this vibe continued well into the universe of The American Devices.

“When I discovered punk as a teenager, everything shifted, and I became obsessed with the look of The Ramones and The Sex Pistols. They were like cartoon characters to me, so I started drawing punk cartoons and made myself a cartoon,” he says, pointing to his thick black ‘80s rimless shades.

Trembles also created a mascot for The American Devices, a sentient brain with bat wings and a phallus protruding out of its head, as seen on their only LP, the 1980 release, Decensortized. Naturally, Trembles sculpted the creature and cartoon band members for the LP cover.

Trembles pulls out 20 or 30 faded photos from the ‘80s. “I was super into special FX makeup at the time, so I would put on weird latex masks with welts to look like a zombie, or I had a wolf mask and once I had a crown of thorns, and we would all dress up in drag for the performance art aspect.”

Trembles pauses on one photo of Labelle. “We were in an apartment with dead cockroaches in it, so we glued them to Rob’s face for the show.” Another photo shows a street light with what looks to be a medieval torture rack attached to it. “We opened for Jesus and the Mary Chain on their first tour, and I rolled in on this thing, hanging upside down.” This was in 1984, when, as Trembles puts it, bigger international touring bands rarely hired Montreal bands to open.

“Jesus and the Mary Chain insisted that they wanted a local band—‘the weirdest band in Montreal,’—and we were chosen.”

Scenes from The American Devices universe: stage chaos, sculpted mascots, and special FX makeup at the dinner table.

The Next Noisy Wave

The American Devices went on to influence many Quebecois bands like CRABE, another freaky “present punk” duo that loves to experiment with weird time signatures. CRABE was started by Mertin Poulin-Légaré and David Dugas-Dion in 2007 in Salaberry-de-Valleyfield. The duo loved the sound of experimental wave bands like Lightning Bolt and “any radical music,” Poulin-Légaré says.

He remembers wanting CRABE to be part of the “noisy wave madness” that was coming from Montreal. “So you had a big US band like Arabs on Radar playing in a packed room with local Montreal bands, and this was really weird music, but the people were hungry for it,” he says. And why wouldn’t Montreal’s music scene—a place that has always converted outside energy and culture into something of its own—have an appetite for this new wave of weird musical art?

Vucino says there was also a booming house show scene that was intrinsically linked to the noisy experimental scene. “It was easy to go see experimental shows at house party venues like Friendship Cove,” adds Vucino, who was playing in a noisy experimental band called Les Enfants Sauvage at the time. “So you would have these weirder shows with touring bands from Providence, like White Mice [who wore LED mice heads] and Lightning Bolt, and they would be playing a show with local bands like AIDS Wolf.”

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