The Rialto Theatre is located on the corner of rue Bernard and avenue du Parc, in Montreal’s Mile End neighbourhood. It was built in 1924 and was one of thousands of ornate movie theatres built in North America at the turn of the century, at a time when films were first entering the mainstream.
These theatres were called movie palaces — a fitting title as they were defined by an over-the-top ornamental aesthetic that evoked old world grandeur. Think limestone balustrades, wrought iron railings, gold molding and red velvet curtains. Most of the movie palaces in the 1920s were built to pay homage to architectural monuments in Europe. The Rialto itself was styled after the Paris Opera House by Montreal architect Joseph Raoul Gariepy. It has been designated as a heritage site by all three levels of government and is considered by its residents to be as much a part of the fabric of Mile End as its bagel shops, cafes and madcap personalities.
The Rialto has stood mostly vacant for the past few years, while its owner, Elias Kalogeras, looked for buyers. Kalogeras had owned the theatre since 1983. During this time it underwent a number of transformations. He purchased the Rialto with hopes of turning it into a mini-Eaton Centre, but the Ministry of Culture intervened and his plans never materialized. Since then it has been a nightclub, a concert venue, a repertory theatre, and a steakhouse. Kalogeras was confronted with many of the problems owners of defunct movie palaces faced: the difficulty of successfully filling such a cavernous space while maintaining the charm of a historic building and keeping it updated to the needs of contemporary society.
These days, the sweet ballads of Cantopop might seem like they are smothering whatever creative spark Hong Kong’s music scene might have, but that wasn’t always the case. In the 1970s, Cantonese pop was populist, exciting and avant-garde. Until then, most of the popular music recorded in Hong Kong was in Mandarin. It was the rise of the local TV and film industry to make Cantonese music for the masses, often in the form of theme songs that ran during the opening credits (a tradition that still exists on television today).
Ask anyone who defined the sound and ethos of 1970s Cantopop and Sam Hui‘s name will invariably crop up. Raised in So Uk, a public housing estate, Hui sang humourously about everyday Hong Kong life in a vernacular language that people could easily identify with. (His song about the 1960s water shortage is a classic.) He was also an actor, appearing two dozen movies between 1973 and 2000.
The opening sequence of the 1976 comedy The Private Eyes is a great montage of Hong Kong street scenes, accompanied by a song by Hui with the usual topical references to Hong Kong life and culture. There’s a funny English version, but it’s meaningless — all of the local commentary has been removed.
Last night I attended Time Out magazine’s showcase of Hong Kong indie bands and my ears are still ringing. There weren’t many surprises — A Roller Control was excellent as usual, as was Chochukmo — with one exception: Choi Sai Ho, a one-man audio-visual electronic act whose frenetic music and jittery on-stage personality embody Hong Kong more than any other act I’ve seen.
Choi, dressed in a white button-down shirt, jumped wildly around on stage like a Hong Kong office worker unleashed from the burdens of his day job — awkward but endearing. Several songs were complemented by videos in which the features of Hong Kong’s cityscape — its trams, anonymous apartment towers and highways — jerk around in tune to the music. One representative piece is “Violin Cityscape” for which Choi plays ordinary, acoustic violin against looped electronic sounds. In another video, “The Educators,” Choi reduces Hong Kong to a maddening abstraction. “Weird Mind,” meanwhile, takes a (relatively) more conventional approach to the same themes.
Outdoor concert on St. Viateur Street in Montreal — something that could never happen in Hong Kong under the current noise regulations
Last month, on a muggy Saturday afternoon, a couple of hundred people gathered in the courtyard of the former Central Married Police Quarters for a taste of something rare in Hong Kong: live outdoor music. Three French-speaking hip hop groups from France, Canada and Belgium took the stage as the crowd in front danced and cheered. But audience members standing further away looked rather less impressed.
Noise complaints had been coming in all afternoon, starting with the sound check, and police had told the concert’s organizers to make sure the volume of music never exceeded 70 decibels. So they muffled the sound, irritating performers and audience members alike. “The ambiance is really hot,” said Canadian DJ Félix-Antoine Leroux as he surveyed the crowd. “It’s just too bad about the sound.”
The hip hop show was the third installment of The Indie Ones, a series of free concerts organized by composer and musician Kung Chi-shing for the Heritage X Art X Design festival. Each show received noise complaints and police orders to turn down the music.
“The police came three or four times during the first one,” said Kung. “Every time they came we turned it down. At the end we weren’t even using a mic for the drum set, but the police still wanted to give us a summons. We had to talk them out of it. The funny thing is that I got government support for the shows. They support outdoor music but don’t help you deal with the noise issues.”
Like many people in Hong Kong, I first heard about Red Noon through a YouTube video that showed them rocking out on their iPhones in the MTR. At first I thought it was a gimmick, something like the iPhone orchestras that have become popular lately, but later, after I met the band, they explained that it was actually part of their overall schtick. While they spend as much time in the studio and on stage as any other band, Red Noon also like to go in public and play for strangers — not as buskers who stand on a streetcorner waiting for an audience, but as travelling musicians who actively seek listeners.
Last November, I followed Red Noon as they wandered around the pedestrian shopping district of Tsuen Wan, not far from their band room. They approached people with a rather ambiguous greeting — “Would you like us to play you a song?” — and their audience was usually sceptical, if not downright apprehensive, as they started playing. But Red Noon’s songs are catchy and accessible; after 30 seconds of listening the audience would usually give in and start dancing to the beat.
Franco-Algonquin hip hop is the last thing I expected to encounter in Hong Kong, but that’s exactly what I heard this past weekend at the former Central Married Police Quarters, which has suddenly become the most interesting cultural space in town. Over the past month, the Heritage X Art X Design festival and the Indie Ones series of concerts have used the space to great effect, transforming its concrete courtyard into a fake lawn (in contrast to the beach created by November’s Detour festival) set in front of a bamboo stage illuminated by red market lamps.
Samian is the son of a French-Canadian father and an Algonquin mother; he grew up on a native reserve in Abitibi-Témiscamingue, about 800 kilometres northwest of Montreal. He started rapping when he was a teenager, first in French, and later — after he met the influential hip hop crew Loco Locass — in Algonquin.
Samian took the stage on Saturday in a performance that was energetic but marred by poor sound, which was mainly because the organizers had to muffle the vocals after the police got a slew of noise complaints from nearby luxury apartment towers. (“At least in Quebec we have until 10pm before we have to keep quiet,” Samian’s DJ said to me after the show.) The crowd responded enthusiastically even though most of the people there didn’t speak French.
I’m a great fan of Jean Leloup not only because we share a name (though his is made up and mine is real) or because he lived near me and I used to see him on the street every other day. I like him because he’s probably the strangest, most brilliant musician to have ever performed in Quebec.
The video for one of his earliest songs, “Isabelle (J’te déteste)” pokes fun at Jean-Luc Godard’s seminal New Wave film, À bout de souffle, with some great scenes of Montreal and New York in 1991. It also opens with a fantastic cameo by Julien Poulin, the actor who became famous by playing Elvis Gratton.
Last week, I posted a video by Thomas Lee in which he asked passers-by on Sai Yeung Choi Street where they would go if they could open a door to anywhere. Now he’s back with another great video, this time a (well-subtitled) Cantonese-language rap by MC Yan, whom you might remember as the founder of Radio Dada and one of the first Chinese rappers.
I helped produce this video (though I can’t claim much credit — after introducing him to MC Yan and participating in a brainstorming session, nearly all of the work was done by Thomas). What struck me from the beginning was how passionate MC Yan is about Hong Kong, despite the cynicism that defines his lyrics. He’s genuinely fascinated by this place, rooted to it not only by birth but by a desire to improve it, and the way he expresses that is through unrelenting criticism of Hong Kong’s government and leaders.
In the video, he takes us on a tour of three important parts of Hong Kong — Causeway Bay, Central and West Kowloon — drawing inspiration from the social, political and cultural geography of each.
Thanks to Montréal Multiple, an excellent blog about multiethnic Montreal written by two La Presse journalists, I came across this video video for L’oubli, the new single off of Dramatik’s new album La Boîte Noire. Dramatik, who suffered a childhood as a rest-avec — a modern-day house slave — in Haiti, raps about Montreal North, the borough that was wracked by riots last year after police shot and killed a young teenager, Fredy Villaneuva. The song’s refrain says it all: “Did you forget that we lived here?”
I liked this song when I first heard it on CBC Radio 3, but when I saw its music video, I liked it even more. “Sweet Sixteen” by Think About Life is light, ironic dance-pop, and the video is similarly fun, especially in the stylized way it reflects the (hipster) Montreal landscape.
First there’s the giant “Ouvert 24 Hrs” sign in the background of the opening scene’s diner, then a poster-clad hydro pole set against a background video of a distinctly Montreal park (look at the benches!), a passing Hassid (who later makes an appearance at the final dance party) and, later, a cameo by Tong, a waiter at La Maison VIP, one of Chinatown’s best late-night eateries. I especially appreciate the detailed rendition of a Montreal bus, right down to the yellow stop-request wire and blue seats.
In the interests of flagrant self-promotion, I’m sharing with you my first foray into the world of francophone music pseudo-journalism. Earlier this summer, Bande à part, the excellent web-based indie music radio station, asked me to do a segment on the Hong Kong music scene for their weekly video podcast, L’actualité musicale. I decided to talk about hip hop. My dispatch took the form of an interview and my photos were remixed by DJ Ma; you can find it 10 minutes in.
Cantonese is a particularly good language for rap, thanks to its many tones, nuances and potential for wordplay, and a number of MCs and groups have taken advantage of this, making what people tell me is some very clever music that reflects Hong Kong culture and is often quite critical of the social and political status quo.
Time-lapse footage of big city traffic is a bit of a cliché, but this isn’t time-lapse: it’s stop-motion. Edwin Lee has managed to capture Hong Kong’s evening energy with this animation made from more than 10,000 still images of the city. It’s meant to serve as a music video for an instrumental piece by the local band A Roller Control, whose song “TV Dream” serves as an excellent companion to the images. The video is also a finalist in I Shot Hong Kong‘s MV category. (I attended ISHK’s premiere the other night, incidentally, and the festival’s program includes some excellent short films — but also some that are entirely cringe-worthy.)
Another video by Lee, “The Way Home,” is much more conventional, but pretty enjoyable nonetheless. It reminds me why I always make a point of sitting in the top deck’s front seat whenever I ride the bus.
Since I now live in Hong Kong, I might as well get to know the local music scene. My Little Airport, an indie band that does slight and amusing twee-pop ditties, is one of my favourite local acts. The simplicity of their music and lyrics belies a wry and irreverent take on life in Hong Kong.
“Romance in Kowloon Tong” (浪漫九龍塘) is a song off their most recent album. Kowloon Tong is one of Hong Kong’s wealthiest areas, but tucked in between the expensive international schools and luxurious villas are secretive hotels, where people with money take their other significant others for a bit of love-by-the-hour. “I want to sing you a song / about me and you went to Kowloon Tong / we have to be very strong / if we want to do something very wrong,” goes the song’s English chorus. Its music video is especially adorable.
I took a walk through Kowloon Tong not too long ago. It’s a bit of a strange experience to suddenly leave the noise of Mongkok, pass under the KCR tracks and emerge into a suburban enclave of pastel-coloured walls and broad vistas. The love hotels make it even more bizarre: as posh as they are, they very concept is kind of hilarious, especially after you walk past a few and notice all of the luxury cars parked in front, their licence plates concealed by special little signs or curtains.
“Les peaux de lièvres” is quintessential Tricot Machine. Deliberately innocent but twinged with melancholy, it revels in the simple pleasures of life, like wandering through a snowy, nighttime Montreal. I have to be honest when I say that I probably wouldn’t have remembered it if it weren’t for this music video, which is probably the first stop-motion animation I have seen that uses knitwear as its medium. It also features a nice visual narrative that takes us past Mount Royal and the downtown skyline and up the side of the Olympic Stadium, weaving between the intimacy of personal life and the greater experience of the city.
