by LORRAINE CARPENTER

“When you go on a plane and you’re on a trip, spending doesn’t count anymore,” says local DJ Stephane Lacroix. “You’re there to have fun, you’re not there to count your money.” Such was the general vibe amongst the capacity crowd at Lacroix’s inaugural Invisible Airlines night earlier this October at the Quartier Latin Pub. “People weren’t thinking about anything,” he recalls. “They started buying bottles of champagne and every 15 minutes, there were platters with tons of shooters going around. Everybody had a good time.”

Rewind to mid-September, when Lacroix was racking his brain for a new club-night idea. Inspiration finally came in the form of a New York flyer that featured a die-cut silhouette of an airplane. “The flyer said ‘Invisible Airlines.’ It really stimulated me into thinking, ‘Wow! What if a club could have a night like that?’ It started giving me ideas of how that could be possible.”

Lacroix, who’s also a full-time graphic designer, set about branding his imaginary airline—designing a logo, nametags and IDs, locating flight crew uniforms, acquiring an airline drink trolley, airplane seats and a smoke machine (for takeoffs, of course). Lacroix even went so far as to record a CD of pilot announcements, complete with high-pitched cabin-pressure sounds. “Usually, in the plane, there’s a particular feeling, the feeling that you know that you’re stuck in a room with other people and you can’t get out. I wanted to recreate that by shutting off all the windows, and where there were mirrors, putting paintings of clouds. I wanted to make it feel like, you’re with a group of people and it’s gonna happen with these guys, so get friendly.”

The night, which consisted of six musical “charter flights,” to New York, Rio, London, New Delhi, Johannesburg and Berlin, also gave Lacroix a refreshing creative freedom over his musical selection. “Usually, in this city, if you play a lot of different styles it works against you. For example, I used to be heavy into drum & bass, but if I went for a downtempo gig, they would turn me down because I was into that ‘hard drum & bass stuff.’ I like playing a lot of different styles and it’s really hard to find a way to put them all together. This gave me the prefect recipe for just that.” Indeed, that night the sounds moved from hip hop (NYC) and electro-Brazilian (Rio), to jazzy drum & bass and pop like the Beatles (London), to Bombay beats and Asian breaks (New Delhi), to Afro-Latin house (Johannesburg) and finally topped off with some pumping dancefloor techno (Berlin).

For Lacroix, high-concept nights like Invisible Airlines are few and far between in Montreal, a fact that he hopes will change. “I think that’s something that people are going to focus on more. The further that things go with DJs, the more that it has to go beyond just a guy playing behind turntables.” •

The next Invisible Airlines is at
Quartier Latin on Saturday, Nov. 16

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