NIGHTLIFE RENAISSANCE
Cultural collectives thrive in city
Montreal’s famed nightlife scene has more than partying on its mind these days.
Creative collectives are forming and thriving throughout the city, made up of musicians, visual artists, clothing designers, entrepreneurs, venue operators and more. It’s in this nocturnal arena where famous DJs cut their teeth, influential brands find their earliest adopters and cultural barriers are broken down. It’s where Montreal’s coolness is birthed.
While Artgang, Moonshine, Never Apart and SaintWoods all have their unique origin stories, business portfolios and long-term goals, they all share something in common: reverence for the creativity that bubbles in Montreal when the sun goes down and people from different walks of life come together.
“Montreal is in the middle of a renaissance of sorts,” explains Never Apart executive director Michael Venus. “As a teenager in the ’90s, I’d come here for the club scene. It was infamous for that. Today, I feel something else is brewing.”
Never Apart is an almost whimsical place off the beaten path, in a residential stretch of Mile Ex. Initially a movie producer’s halfluxurious home, half-production company office, it became e-commerce startup Lightspeed’s headquarters. Lightspeed and Never Apart have the same founder, Dax Dasilva, who moved his company elsewhere and returned the building to its artistic roots.
It has multiple rooms for art installations, a 10,000+ vinyl collection, and a pool in the back. Although not strictly an LGBTQ space, Never Apart houses the popular Colour by Icons illustration project of queer history trailblazers, and hosts the annual celebration Wiggle, starring American trans actress Candis Cayne. They also have artwork and discussions with Indigenous artists. The socially conscious work they do is then immortalized in a monthly online magazine.
“We’re a reflection of the times,” says Dasilva. “People want to engage with their art.”
Around twice a month, the Never Apart crew sets up shop in a different location for a late-night event, like a recent live music show at St-Laurent Blvd. porn theatre Cinéma L’Amour. What ties everything they do together is a desire to create a diverse, welcoming space. Dasilva admits it’s easier said than done, but feels they’ve made considerable progress since opening two years ago.
“There’s a learning process we’re all going through,” Dasilva says. “It’s one thing to say you accept all people, but it’s another thing to listen and understand where people are coming from. When you have real empathy and understanding, that’s when you can start working together.”
When SaintWoods founders Nathan Gannage and Zach Macklovitch set up shop on St-Laurent Blvd. in 2013, the once-vibrant street was at its nadir.
“The trend was vacancies and a stale club scene. Things were dire,” recalls Macklovitch.
Despite warnings from friends about the neighbourhood, they helped establish the restaurant SuWu. Five months later, they opened Apt. 200, a club stylized after New York loft spaces. They’ve now expanded into a creative agency with six full-time employees that works with international brands and represents local artists. They’re about to enter the vodka business and also regularly attend Société de développement du boulevard Saint-Laurent (SDBSL) meetings. They’ve helped revitalize a struggling commercial stretch.
“When we started, we didn’t have two pennies to rub together,” says Macklovitch, who got his nightlife start on the Main as a teenager handing out flyers. (His cousins are Dave 1 from Chromeo and DJ A-Trak.) “Apt. 200 let us define ourselves.” The SaintWoods collective has a reputation for parties, but also as tastemakers. Instead of shying away from their corporate work, they’re open and proud of their associations with the likes of Hennessy and Perrier.
“The inspiration behind everything we do is to be creative, but you also have to keep the lights on,” says Gannage. “It’s about finding that balance that allows you to work with people who can help you keep doing what you love.”
Macklovitch adds: “I eventually want to grow into more corporate opportunities, or even the public sector. You have to be as comfortable on the indie side as you do the corporate side. It lets us live that double life we want. We can do cool stuff at night and be a little more business during the day.”
In a converted hardware store in a shopping district known more for wedding dresses, Artgang in Plaza St-Hubert is a gallery, coffee shop, terrasse and venue — malleable depending on the event. They can host a raucous party starring BBC Radio 1 DJ Benji B and Juno Awardwinning local Kaytranada, exhibitions of contemporary and graffiti artwork, or a three-hour lecture with American photographer Jamel Shabazz. Artgang and their collaborators have helped beautify the neighbourhood by painting murals.
“We don’t have the F1, bottleservice crowd,” says Artgang programming director Malick Touré. “We’re for people who are looking for more than just a regular night out at a club. If you 9-to-5 it every day, why would you want that 9-to5 mentality of doing the same thing every time you go out?”
The Artgang group started as Alexis Masella’s Fake pop-art clothing brand, which had a shop on Rachel St. Now boasting the Artgang logo, they moved the retail store to St-Laurent Blvd. They’re best known for hats and shirts bearing an interlocking MTL logo reminiscent of the New York Yankees’ lettering. If you haven’t seen them yet, you likely will by the end of the summer.
“It’s not just a Plateau thing — I’ve seen the logo all across town,” Touré says.
The emblem is the sort of grassroots success Artgang prides itself on achieving. “We want to build from scratch,” Touré adds.
Moonshine doesn’t have a specific place to call home, but the nomadic collective does own an exact time: the first Saturday after a full moon. Minus one month off, Moonshine has hosted 32 parties around town since November 2014. It’s a de facto digital music label as well, with a distinctive, influential sound of live Afro-Caribbean percussion with electronic music.
“I get a lot of ‘I didn’t know there was this type of people in Montreal.’ But Montreal is about more than just the Plateau and Mile End,” says co-founder Hervé Kalongo. “You don’t see a lot of Cartierville or Little Burgundy in the music scene here.”
Adds Moonshine member and musician Pierre Kwenders: “It’s important for us to show more diversity, not just in music, but the entertainment business as a whole in Quebec.”
Because they tend to select unofficial and unconventional factory floors and lofts instead of licensed venues, there’s some secrecy around getting into a Moonshine party. The day of the show, you have to text an SMS system they invented (and hope to export), which will give you the address.
“We hope your GPS doesn’t give you the right place and you have to stop and ask someone,” jokes Kalongo.
The Moonshine look and sound has crept into more conventional places. They’ve curated events at museums, visual artist Boycott has gone on to work with Quebec singer-songwriter Daniel Bélanger, and when Arcade Fire frontman Win Butler began dabbling in DJing and Haitian rara music, he performed in relative anonymity at Moonshine nights.
Although some of their parties have been shut down by police, they’ve never had any incidents of violence.
“It’s always friends of friends. That’s what’s different between what we do and a club,” says Kalongo. “At a club there might be division because you don’t know where someone is coming from. But at Moonshine there’s always two degrees of separation.”
We’re for people who are looking for more than just a regular night out at a club . ... Why would you want that 9-to-5 mentality of doing the same thing every time you go out?