As I grow older, I grow increasingly dumbfounded. There’s absolutely no reason Michel Lemieux shouldn’t be a household name now. Here I am looking at a video performance from his salad days and I see a superstar. Much like Peter Gabriel and Laurie Anderson, who he is both compared to in his Wikipedia entry, so too does Michel have that special “it” factor that is completely unique. The music. The dance. The theater. The vision. Michel appeared as a multidisciplinary artist perfectly placed for a new era of mass media. Somehow, someway, though, we just didn’t get it. At least, if you don’t call yourself a native of Quebec, specifically, Montreal, where Lemieux made its fascinating release.
Before the Arcade Fire, Grimes, and after Leonard Cohen and Harmonium, few would be hard-pressed to signal exactly what kind of musical scene Montreal had. It’s only recently that native Montrealers have dug deeper into their own cultural history to rediscover an interesting side they might have completely glossed over.
While ‘80s America saw New Wave as a call to arm itself with wirey guitars and even wirier neckties and England got progressively more glossy in techno sheen, Montreal, somehow, took to New Wave much more like Japan and Berlin. Montreal became “Synth City”.
If ever you’ve stumbled upon Alain Cliche’s music doc Montréal New Wave you’d discover a sampling of a vivid scene led by groups like Men Without Hats, Rational Youth, spilling over to bands like Le Groupe Pied De Poule or outre electroacoustic labels like Empreintes DIGITALes that allowed young musicians from Montreal’s arts scene to create a style that combined their very askew interests which didn’t just stick to music alone. Experiments with video, language, art, fashion and technology were par the course and synthesizers largely ruled the musical landscape.
Michel Lemieux might have gotten his entry into this world by composing for Quebec’s pioneering contemporary dance group La La La Human Steps but his own journey started far earlier. Born in Indiana but moving with his parents to Montreal, in Montreal he had grown up performing at home from about as young as he could remember. As he grew up, Michel would pick up anything he enjoyed doing — photography, dance, music and theater — and never let go of its grip. Before he knew what a multidisciplinary artist was, he was anti-disciplinary, doing exactly what he wanted. His father’s love of cutting-edge gadgets had afforded him the ability to comprehend new concepts quickly.
When Michel graduated from the National Theatre School of Canada rather than solely focus on one discipline he began to stage his first performance art pieces, typically solo affairs that combine all his loves: visuals, music, and drama. As a gay man, performing solo pieces afforded him the ability to share an identity that could have remained hidden and create those of others to draw on universal themes that speak to all. Michel’s first widely known piece, 1982’s Le Tympan de la Cantatrice brought into light his way of combining music and performance art.
In 1983, Michel would establish his 4d Art project as a way to promote and cultivate art that was medium blurring. Rather than turn towards pure abrasive experimentalism, Michel’s first noted work under this umbrella would be L’Oeil Rechargeable (or The Rechargeable Eye) a self-described solo stage show where “where funk music meets opera and vocal experimentation surpasses convention”. Visually and musically stunning, it merged a creative light show with impressive stage performances that were meant for a wider crowd. Here Montrealers got their first chance to experience his multi-octave vocal range and wildly imaginative choreography folding in entirely physical musical pieces, befitting a city in the throes of “modernizing” itself and trying to figure out its ties to its continental European lineage. Rather than leave it onstage, Michel would release a single parsing out two gems from its performance: “Venitia” and “I Wait”.
Just a year later, Michel would create an even more visionary show he’d dub Solide Salad. More three-dimensional than distant performance, it features Michel donning elaborate costumes, dancing to an even more impressive light show, and singing insanely catchy numbers that drew you into the performance. Solide Salad was equal parts comedy, elegiac ode, and dark madness, that many saw as hi-tech cabaret act, as it sold out countless showings in and across Canada. Rather than poo poo technology, as Laurie did cheekily, Michel would absorb technology, introducing a robot and having fun with all sorts of gadgetry on stage, trying to instill a drawdown of hostility towards it.
As always his ever increasing compositional chops had found a way to mix electronic funk with a new kind of operatic sensibility, allowing songs to shift thematically myriad places…all in the course of a 4 minute song. Accompanied by only a tape machine and his DX7, it was more the whole of his whole creation absorbing the looks of the room. In spite of all this, even Michel left spaces for the music to breathe allowing the audience to get more of what was behind the surface.
It was on the strength of the surprisingly successful Solide Salad that Montreal’s indie label Audiogram signed him shortly thereafter. 1986’s Lemieux were collected and recorded versions of all of the most prescient numbers from Michel’s star making shows in Canada. Here you get to hear longform versions of “Romantic Complications”, a song approximating the mutant funk of latter-day Talking Heads. Joined by members of that Montreal scene he had deep ties to, aesthetically, Lemieux plays like a “greatest hits” mixtape of the Synth City ethos ecosystem.
Dance itself, even on tape, formed a foundation for a lot of the music you’d hear here, as other songs like “Fog Area” perfected these ideas of using every medium to strike a universal hook. Songs like “Venitia” now get the full band treatment in order to highlight Michel’s imaginative fourth world-esque mix of latin grooves and decidedly, European, oddball sentimentality. Then you had sampledelic tracks like “Miniature III” that have a serious comicalness to them that makes them both satirical but also intriguingly emotional. And then once you start to get into the groove of this brilliant album — just like that — it’s done. That era still wasn’t quite ready for that kind of multimedia work.
In the span of thirty minutes, perhaps a shorter timespan than it took you to listen to this album and/or read this blog entry (and sadly, me to write it), idea after idea, that Michel tries in the course of a half-hour, in the course of a minute, in the course of a few seconds, is unforgettable. Then, you tie Lemieux’s songs to its visual beginnings and you can see, the brightest stars are sometimes that one that seem the furthest from us.
Well that’s of course if you’re not a devoted follower of musical theater where, rightfully, Michel (along with his partner Victor Pilon) found a way to translate his imaginative ideas that failed on that platform to elaborate into large personal stage shows that rightfully cement/merit his Officer of the Order of Canada insignia.
Being big in Canada, at least in this case, should afford him a second chance at retaking audiences elsewhere. And who knows, I know Michel doesn’t like to look back, but what else had he hidden in the can then for us who missed this all?