From Hotel2Tango to Studio PM, Montreal's producers, engineers and string arrangers quietly shaped some of alt rock's most influential albums, from Arcade Fire and The National to Sarah McLachlan and Frank Ocean.
A federal radio quota, a small Toronto label, a Montreal recording studio in a former garment loft, and a juried prize designed to ignore sales numbers, four pieces of infrastructure that turned a mid-sized country into the gravitational center of English-language indie. The pieces still exist. The result no longer does.
