Like waking from a long, pleasant, lucid dream, I am refreshed and renewed. Ready to re-enter the routine of city life in the fall.
There’s a host of happy sentiment washing over me from the festival, but I am left primarily with a deep respect for the volunteers and organizers of the festival. Their vision and hard work transforms a small community each year from proud industrial town, to a cutting edge showcase of emerging artists that is without peer anywhere in Canada. It has ceased being just a music festival and is now a unified artistic gathering of international musicians, chefs, writers, photographers, videographers, painters and installation artists, to name a just a few creative categories.
I have also realized that FME could not exist anywhere else. It has the trifecta of enthusiastic community support, artistic vision, and location working for it. The relative isolation of Rouyn-Noranda from Toronto or Montreal makes it a true escape from typical urban festival fare. Crowds are smaller, shows are much more affordable than in a major city, the venues are all located within walking distance of each other and it is in a generally more hospitable place, nestled within forest and lakes.
For someone such as myself who spends too much time in Toronto; the contrasts between similar events in my city are stark. One especially refreshing aspect of FME is the lack of beer garden quarantine zones, as is typical of Ontarian events. Doing away with this puritanical mentality virtually eliminates the phenomena of binge drinking and the predictable fallout. It encourages family inclusivity and fosters greater community support. Even after the mosh pits of Metal Night, crowds remained amiable.
As I mentioned in my first post, I consider myself very lucky to have been introduced to Rouyn-Noranda and FME. It’s too easy for nerdy, introverted city dwellers such as myself to become too content in a predictable comfort zone. FME is a cathartic, polar bear swim away from my comfort zone: culturally and musically.
Well, that’s it! With any luck I’ll be back next year, reunited with friends and diving right back into the mix…and hopefully with a command of French that’s beyond my current LOL Cat level of speech.

À bientôt, Rouyn-Noranda!

Zeus

The derrière numbing 7 hour drive back to Toronto from Rouyn (one of the first great monikers I’ve learned for that place is “Loin-Noranda”[…or, “far-Noranda”]) allowed ample time for my colleague Harvey Métal and I to debrief on the highlights of this year’s festival…

…The closing day was bittersweet as always, but a downright beautiful segue of beachfront idyll to politically charged hip-hop to the thundering double-kick mayhem of Le nuit Métal (Metal Night).

The stunning new floating venue at Plage Kiwanis (Kiwanis beach) was the perfect location for the free closing show. The beach was happily packed with an all-walks-of-life crowd, soaking in the perfect sunset, which framed the stage and set the mood for great performances by Bernard Adamus , Dumas and Jean-Piere Ferland.

I had to cut my beach time short however, to make it back to the hip-hop show at Agora Des Arts for an amazing set from Koriass. The originality, impeccable flow and raw crowd pleasing power of the top French-Canadian hip-hop acts is stunning. Groups such as, Radio Radio, Gatineau, Alaclair Ensemble and the closing night’s acts are developing a following far beyond French Canada.

I was unprepared, though, for the sheer intensity of the much anticipated closing set from Loco Locass, which very nearly brought the former church down.

Unless you’ve been spending your summer beneath varied rocks, you’ve probably heard of Quebec’s summer of university student strikes, the pots and pans protests… and of course a provincial election campaign. Tension is palpable. Whatever your political stripe, no-one can fail to be impressed by the level of political awareness and engagement displayed by youth (and not so youth) at a Quebecois hip-hop show. Loco Locass closed with a catchy number called “Libérez-nous des libéraux” (the translation should be fairly easy). By the first chorus, I was deeply concerned about the structural integrity of the floor.

Comparatively, Metal Night at Le Petit Théâtre was actually kind of mild. Hyperbole of course… (plus I don’t want to offend any fans of Obey the Brave who displayed nary a sign of mildness in the mosh pit).

Fun Facts: Did you know that there are regional variations of mosh pits? (Quebecer death metal aficionados prefer “the circle pit”) Did you also know that there is an unwritten, but well understood code of conduct in a mosh pit that maintains a type of anarcho-aggressive equilibrium and keeps people from killing each other? They should give workshops at next year’s FME.

Maybe it was the 4 day non-stop marathon of musical merry making or the double kick drums thundering at a frequency that perfectly resonated in my chest cavity, but I was ready to call it a night before the last act hit the stage.

Our friends had reached a similar breaking point and retreated to Chez Morasse for one last Italian poutine.

More closing thoughts soon, my friends…

Cheers,

Zeus