- Labor Day weekend in Montreal is always a hectic yet bittersweet affair: you go out like crazy although you KNOW summer is almost over, that school is starting the following week, and that you need to get yourself into full-on flirt mode if you don’t want to spent those cold October mornings alone in bed. Hopefully, there is always a lot of partying going on, but with that many DJs and artists in town, just like there was at the very first Neon Nights festival, who has energy left for sex, really?
This new Neon Nights festival was created by the I Love Neon people, who have been at the heart of Montreal’s electro scene since 1998. Their innovative comprehension of underground clubbing is now taking the shape of a weekend-long party, and it served as the perfect sum of what contemporary house, techno and electro are all about.
The party started on Friday evening with local hero Thomas Von Party (that’s Tiga’s little brother, for scenestering-savvy readers out there) and Berlin’s own Boys Noize. As far as I was concerned, this was the best night of the bunch: Von Party is slowly emerging as a no-generic-boundaries digi-DJ (he promises some his own productions sometime next year), and his acidic electro set was a perfect warm-up for Boys Noize, aka Alexander Ridha. Under his “noizy” moniker, Ridha delivered the crunchiest basslines and the most pumped-up beats this side of the Atlantic ever heard: spinning his own remixes and production, including an unreleased remix of Depeche Mode’s ‘Personal Jesus’ (seriously, this shit is intense, and DM should get an official grab of it NOW), Madonna’s ‘Vogue’ on top of Michael Jackson’s ‘Beat It’ (!) and some old PJ Harvey vocals (!!) on top of dirty electro loops. Even an “oldie” such as Felix Da Housecat’s ‘Silver Screen Shower Scene’ showed up in the set, just to remind us where Ridha’s sound is really coming from.
The next day, Montreal’s own funky hotties Chromeo played some of their forthcoming-album new tracks to an audience mostly made up of suburbanite seventeen-year-old girls and McGill University jocks. Which is just to prove that the scene (whatever you wanna call it) and the Neon nights are definitely open to anyone, even drunk frat boys in the middle of Frosh Week’s watering-hole-craving madness.
By Sunday evening, though, you could feel Montreal’s trendy dancers were starting to get tired of, well, dancing, since not that many people showed up for The Presets concert, who were starting their North American tour that night. It was actually surprising to hear this post-electroclash band in totally convincing live mode. W.I.T. it wasn’t. As Riton took the stage afterwards, though, yours truly’s seasonal allergies and hurt feet – the fact the Montreal Electronic Groove Festival was also going on the same weekend didn’t help either – were impossible to bear anymore, so I ended up in bed quite early, tired and sexless but totally loving those new, colorful Neon nights. Hopefully, this will become a permanent fixture in Montreal’s ever-thriving underground clubbing scene.