by LORRAINE CARPENTER

“At the show we’re playing [this week], there’s gonna be a real mess of opening bands,” says les Angles Morts’s Owain Lawson (synth, drums). “It’s gonna be a chaotic experience, and by the time we go on it probably won’t matter what we play ’cause everybody will be in a bit of a frenzy.”

“Hopefully,” adds Myles Broscoe (synth, guitar). “That’s the idea.”

Since Lawson and Broscoe first joined forces with Brendan Reed (drums, bass) and Kyle Fostner (guitar, synth) in 2002 (when Broscoe and Reed were members of the Arcade Fire), les Angles Morts have mutated beyond anyone’s expectations. What began with a 10-minute video, a live score and a seated audience has turned into a speed art show, with frenetic, psychedelic, homemade videos, music fuelled by adrenaline and crowds trashed on booze, drugs, slam-dancing or other debauched, almost dangerous behaviour.

“It’s a lot more fun than having people sitting down watching your videos and judging you,” says Lawson. “Instead, we have people who can’t see anything because they’re being thrown around.”

Seeing friends crowd-surfing at their shows in Montreal only hinted at the formative, sometimes frightening experiences that the road had in store.

“We kinda got broken down by this jousting event and a few other things we were just totally horrified by,” says Broscoe, referring to Brooklyn’s annual Bike Kill. “People were almost dying. It was, like, the scariest experience ever. And we played with some bands that were so tough that we couldn’t possibly do a conventional video-scoring show, so we didn’t really have any choice but to move in other directions.”

Far from being traumatized, the band began to thrive on bizarre tour experiences, like replacing their broken-down keyboards with a puny Casio and vocals in North Carolina, playing to eight punk kids in a New York State mansion and playing a tiny bookstore with no PA for a kid’s birthday party in Florida. The band adapted by cranking the pace of their set and refurbishing their songs so they could stand alone, if necessary.

“For a long time, we were a little worried about whether the songs were really strong enough by themselves ’cause there really is interplay—it’s like the video is an instrument,” Lawson says, “but when we recorded the album, we realized how much we could really craft the songs.”

The band’s long awaited debut LP, What’s Real?, is out this week on the Blue Skies Turn Black label, and its crashing, keyboard-driven psychedelic art rock needs no videos or vocals to get its point across. Of course, the obvious solution to the band’s multi-media conundrum would have been to release a DVD, as planned early on.

“That idea was shelved when we realized, ‘Oh wait, recording an album is so much work,’” says Lawson. “We could barely handle it. It’s so hard. We’re so lazy.”

Though they suggest they’ll still produce a DIY DVD to hock on the road, the increasingly popular format has lost some of its appeal for les Angles Morts. Perhaps they’ll hop on the next trend in audio-visual technology.

“Maybe one day there’ll be new technology that’s like laser beams that shoot [visuals] into your eye,” says Lawson, “or some sort of hologram that lets you enter into the music. That would be awesome.”

With Emerald Cloud Cobra, Gavin Deathfucker, DJ Hatchmatic and guests at the Cocoon (5334 de Gaspé, #801) on Friday, Sept. 2, 9 p.m., $5

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