chord shared resonances

Garcia Avila,

Design Editor

NERiMA’s singer and guitarist Lexi Oriaf said. “The Toronto music scene is already so established and has so many expectations. But Montreal is very welcoming to emerging acts.”

Iconic Montreal-born acts like Arcade Fire, The 222s, and The Normals have seen their lineage continue in the city’s bustling punk scene. Last April, Jess drove in on tour from New York along with Television Overdose, another heavy punk rock band, to perform at Bar L’Escogriffe. They too felt called upon by Montreal’s creative spirit and enthusiastic crowds.

“Montreal [was] the best show out of the whole tour because those fucking kids […] don’t fuck around,” Jess said. “They came for fucking punk music. The crowds they pulled [were] insane.”

Montreal’s music-lovers’ enthusiastic energy has inspired them to return to tour their future music, which follows a more mature, but still “baby-faced” petty sound authentic to the band.

“That one show we had in Montreal [...] made me immediately want to go back,” Jess said.

The art, community, history, and spirit that are at the heart of Montreal’s creative presence allows emerging artists and independent creatives to flourish. Indie concert venues such as Turbo Häus, Bar L’Escogriffe, and L’Hémisphère Gauche nourish the city’s artistic scene by offering musicians and creatives their own, individual spaces to build and captivate an audience. In recent years, though, such venues have struggled to survive under pandemic losses and forced closures. Even as the pandemic individualized our practices of consuming music, we can’t forget the necessity of the collective and community music scenes we forge and share in together. But as I’ve learned, nothing in life is permanent, and as we did with the pandemic, the collective music scene will continue to change and evolve as time progresses.

The universal lyric

Though my time in Montreal is fleeting, I know that I’ll always be able to return to these transient moments by using music as a tool to map out the city. Various artists bring different seasons to mind. Hearing Sløtface’s punkrock, political sound in my headphones transports me back to spring-time walks in the Plateau, the smell of sidewalk cherry blossoms and cool spring breeze encompassing my senses. Playing Willow

Smith in Mont-Royal reminds me of the precarious time it took to find myself during my first semester at McGill. Lorde brings flashbacks of B.C. mountains and ancient trees that have witnessed (and will continue to witness) more life than I will ever experience.

But music brings more than reminders— it makes tangible the inexplicable complexities of our emotions. I feel the sharp stab of hurt when I listen to heavy metal, and find euphoric excitement in EDM. Laying in bed, I draw my heart out to alternative-indie, and dwell in the dull ache of midwest emo nostalgia. I love words, but they so often fail me when it comes to naming emotions: Where I fall short, music rises to the occasion.

As a songwriter, Jess relates to using music as a timeless, personal language. They are continually inspired by songs they’ve written about the past, and how their perspective on it evolves over time.

“When I listen to that song, it still brings me a present feeling,” Jess said. “It might not necessarily be about the person I wrote it about, but it’s definitely a recurring feeling and I think that’s the beautiful part of it, too. You write for what it is at that time but you hear it a year or two later and you’re like, ‘Whoa, I resonate this to [my] present self.’”

“Music has made me so much more comfortable with who I am becoming…[it] changed everything [....]

Music is so infinite.”

Lexi from NERiMA shared how music has shaped her, not only as an individual, but as an active creative in sonic communities.

“I would not be the same person, and I already know who I would be,” Lexi said. “[I] would be so lame without music.”

In the end, there is no definitive conclusion to the argument I make, nor can there be. Music itself is and will always be bigger than any words I have, and the collective emotions it draws from a crowd are greater than my individual feelings.

But my hope is that you, the reader, walk away from this piece looking at seemingly quotidian things a little differently, knowing that music can bring ordinary moments, such as chores or homework, to life. And perhaps you might discover music to be more than what you originally thought it to be, or find comfort in knowing that others share in this feeling—the pleasure of hearing music as more than mere sound, but as a compendium of emotion and the embodiment of experience. Maybe the only language we might ever have in common is the feeling of music.