Arrivals and departures

>> Montag’s electro-pop takes
flight on Going Places

SOUNDING PINK AND PURPLE: Montag

by LORRAINE CARPENTER

With an excitable sense of wonder, and guests such as Ghislain Poirier, Owen Pallett (Final Fantasy), Amy Millan (Stars) and Victoria Legrand (Beach House), Montag’s Going Places flutters and soars where his previous two albums cruised and coasted. Though his music always emitted warmth in its acoustic/digital balance and refined textures, and this record is not without its minor minutia, it’s clear that he’s working with a new palette and tapping into his love of pop.

Having moved from Montreal to Vancouver two years ago (for love), he’s had no shortage of new scenery to inspire his music, though difficulty adapting to the West Coast probably had a bigger impact on the record than all the mountains, beaches, Starbucks and junkies Vancouver has to offer.

A more direct influence was the eclectic batch of sounds he received from strangers around the world, people who read his plea late last year on Web sites like Pitchfork and various message boards affiliated with music magazines. All 70 sounds, from babies to trains to musical instruments, can be heard on the record’s title track.

The Mirror met Montag (aka Antoine Bédard) on the sunny terrasse of St-Viateur’s Café Olimpico to discuss relocation and redecoration.

Mirror: Is there a connection between your moving to Vancouver and this new sound?

Antoine Bédard: When I was in Montreal, I would write really mellow music because my life was so hectic—it was kind of therapeutic that way. But when I moved to Vancouver, things slowed down so much that I kinda needed the opposite—let’s make it happen, let’s make it poppy and fun. I needed things to be faster, I needed things to be a bit louder, and that’s another reason why I asked a lot of people to collaborate on the record. And it gets a little lonely making music on your own.

M: Yeah. You’ve got plenty of name collaborators, and of course the “Going Places” project. How did that come about?

AB: I didn’t really know where I was going with the record. The songs were almost all recorded, and “Going Places” was one of the last songs I was working on and I really needed some kind of kick in the butt. I felt like I had used all the sounds that I could have possibly recorded and I needed some that were not mine to finish it.

So I had that idea one day, thinking about the theme of the song, which is travel, and understanding that when you’re in a relationship and the other person wants to travel, you have to let them go if you really care for them.

I got a lot of responses, and I was just so grateful. It really gave me the energy to finish the record, getting all this—oh my God, I’m such a Vancouverite!—getting all this positive energy (laughs). It helped me to be less hesitant, because a lot of the songs seemed almost too poppy at first. I thought, “My lyrics are stupid, it’s so ridiculously naïve, it’s basically gay” (laughs). If you describe the sound with colours, I definitely went for flashy pink and purple this time instead of different tones of grey. I redecorated my music room—it’s like the previous record was the primer and then I added so many colours, and basically made this giant painting around me.

With Miracle Fortress and Woodhands at
Fringe Pop, Parc des Amériques (corner Rachel,
St-Laurent) on Saturday, June 16, 6 p.m., free