The Postal Code Was the Name: How Mile End’s Cheap Lofts Built Montreal Post-Rock

Ask why Montreal produced a post-rock scene in the late 1990s and the usual answer is a sound: long instrumental pieces, strings, tape loops. That answer is backwards. The sound came out of a set of buildings, and the buildings came out of a property market. A handful of musicians used a cheap neighbourhood to build every piece of infrastructure a scene needs, in this order: a loft, a label, a studio, two venues.

Empty Buildings and a Province That Liked Long Songs

Ian Ilavsky and Don Wilkie, who founded Constellation Records in 1997, are clear about the precondition. Quebec nationalism drove an exodus of Anglophone wealth out of Montreal from the mid-1970s, leaving a sluggish economy and piles of empty warehouses, with a safety net that kept it from becoming a Detroit-style collapse. Their phrase: an artist paradise. Run-down, palatial lofts at rents that let people live on almost nothing.

They add a stranger one. Quebec had a long love affair with progressive rock, so an audience already existed for twenty-minute pieces without singing. And wordless music crossed the language line: Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Fly Pan Am and Exhaust all had Francophone members, and a band with no lyrics could build a following on both sides of it.

A Loft Above a Garage

In 1995 Mauro Pezzente, later Godspeed’s bassist, moved with his partner Kiva Stimac into a Mile End loft and ran about one show a month there. Fumes from the garage downstairs drove them out within a year. Efrim Menuck took over the lease and named the space after the first three characters of the postal code, H2T, in the NATO alphabet: Hotel2Tango. The most important studio in Canadian underground music is named after its address.

Godspeed recorded most of their debut in that loft in May 1997, on a Tascam 8-track and an Allen and Heath board bought from Labradford’s keyboard player during a shared tour. The band had planned a self-released double 7-inch. Wilkie and Ilavsky made it Constellation’s third record instead. F♯ A♯ ∞ came out on 14 August 1997 as 500 hand-numbered LPs, each sleeve glued together by the band, the label and local artists, with an envelope of inserts that included a Canadian penny crushed by a train. Track titles were scratched into the run-out groove and printed nowhere.

Rulers, Exacto Knives, Glue Guns

Constellation’s first run in 1997 was 300 7-inches and 1,000 CDs for Sofa, Ilavsky’s own band, plus those 500 LPs, paid from savings while both founders kept day jobs. They learned packaging by tearing apart records they liked to see how the flaps and glue worked. That same summer they had given up on opening a licensed venue and run a monthly loft series, Musique Fragile, instead. The venue idea failed first; the label grew out of what was left.

When the Loft Got Too Popular, the Bassist Opened a Bar

By 1998 Hotel2Tango was one of the busiest alternative rooms in the city, doubling as a silkscreen workshop and a rehearsal space. Then the crowds outgrew it: thefts, an unmanageable door, and the loft shows stopped. What happened next is the part most scene histories skip. The infrastructure moved from an illegal room to a legal one, built by the same people.

Pezzente and Stimac opened Casa del Popolo in September 2000 at 4873 Saint-Laurent, in a space that had been Artishow, an underground venue known for serving alcohol in teacups. Capacity: 60. In 2001 they booked Arab Strap and sold out in an hour. Pezzente walked across the street to the Centro Social Español at 4848, a 1936 building commissioned by the Arbeter Ring, a Jewish workers’ mutual aid society, and asked to rent the 250-capacity hall upstairs. The club was losing members and needed the money. La Sala Rossa has run there ever since; the Spanish club says the rent is what keeps it alive.

The Loft Became a Studio, Then Bought a Building

In 2000 Howard Bilerman moved his 16-track studio into Hotel2Tango and joined Menuck and Thierry Amar. They built walls, split the loft into control room, live room and common area, and bought a 24-track 2-inch machine. For years it worked almost only for Constellation acts; later Arcade Fire, Wolf Parade and Vic Chesnutt recorded there. In early 2006 people around the label and studio bought an abandoned industrial building two blocks away that was about to become condos, and moved in February 2007. It now holds the studio, Grey Market Mastering and Constellation’s offices.

Read the sequence again. Loft, label, studio, bar, hall, building. Every step answered the previous one outgrowing its room, and every step was taken by a musician or a label, not a promoter. Post-rock is often described as music about ruins. The Montreal version was built out of them.