TRANSLATION

When I made the decision to bring Montag to a close, it wasn't exactly a joyful one. But after ten years of near-total inactivity, I had to face the truth: I was somewhere else now. I wasn't Montag anymore. I needed to pay proper tribute to the character I'd invented for myself — to thank him for giving me the strength to create my own music.

The idea of gathering unreleased tracks from my early days onto a record wasn't because they're particularly brilliant. I found it more interesting to think of this compilation as an archival document. Premiers Bricolages was a way for me to share this music — not for its "quality," but for the stories that brought it into the world, and especially for the improbable way it was made. I'm still struck by how rarely musicians talk about process — except in more hermetic genres. And every time a musician does take the time to explain how they work, the path they take to create something, the gear they use, or their inspirations, I'm completely fascinated. That's probably what being in love with music actually means.

So I wanted to do the same thing, humbly, and reveal as best I could how I became a composer — a word I would never have dared use to describe myself back then. On the cover page of the story I wanted to share with you, it reads: Montag — Premiers Bricolages (or how it all began)...

We're at the dawn of digital technology. Making music has never been easier: countless programs are circulating freely, and increasingly sophisticated plug-ins keep multiplying online. For the first time in the history of recorded music, producing a record became affordable. The famous home studio had become accessible to everyone. At the same time, the birth of the mp3 suddenly made non-physical music distribution possible. We don't think about it at all today, but it was a real revolution. And more personally, Premiers Bricolages shows what a 23-year-old guy was capable of when he wanted, at all costs, to make music to get through the grief of losing his mother. It's the sound of a sonic signature being born — one that still follows me today. And it's in that context that the son of a hopeless music lover got the idea to make music under a German name meaning Monday: Montag.

I've told the story of that name more than once (a nod to the Truffaut film based on the Ray Bradbury novel Fahrenheit 451) and how Montag himself came to be (shortly after my mother's death, alongside the friendship I built with the British band Broadcast). That's actually exactly what I describe in the liner notes inside the Premiers Bricolages sleeve. That story is mostly about the when, the how, and the why of Montag — less about the music itself and how it was made. That's what I plan to do here, leading up to the record's release: describe each track on the album, one at a time, drop by drop, in a countdown.

Montag's sound was born out of an exploration with no clear purpose — because I never imagined my music would actually be released, even though deep down I hoped it would be. The confidence just wasn't there. My mother's death, which had happened a few months earlier, made me realize not only how fragile human life is, but also forced me to ask myself: "What do you actually want to do?" — as if it were a matter of life and death. The answer was "music," obviously, but what kind of music? In Premiers Bricolages, what you hear is the emerging artistic identity of a grieving son. Everything about Montag comes from the loss of my mother.

I realize now how lucky I was to be born in a time when making music was relatively affordable. I didn't have to pay a sound engineer to record me in a studio at some outrageous hourly rate. Making money wasn't even part of the equation anyway, because to me, this music was never going to exist outside my own four walls. But I still had just enough knowledge of mixing and recording — thanks to a course in my communications program at UQAM — to record all the instruments I'd accumulated over time. Ten years earlier, and I would have had to learn how to splice magnetic tape...

The digital revolution kicking into gear inevitably shaped my emerging sound. Montag's sound is, and always will be, very "early 2000s." It never tried to copy the sound of major past musical movements — no new wave, no trip-hop, no dance or disco, and definitely no house. Since I don't play guitar but violin, no rock, no krautrock, no psych-rock, no shoegaze — none of that. Trained in classical music, I stayed far from jazz. With no voice in the early days, no pop in the commercial sense, no hits, no fame. I knew that from day one. So I wasn't determined to make music for the attention. I simply had to make it — as if my life depended on it.

So how do you compose electronic music when you don't really know how? You imitate your idols by any means necessary. That's what I did, anyway — I had to start somewhere. Montag's sonic ingredients come from the bands of my teenage years, my Beatles and my Stones, respectively: to Stereolab I owe the purchase of a Farfisa electric organ, my Micromoog, and other analog synths, along with a certain melodic instinct; to Broadcast I owe sampling old obscure contemporary music records and those melancholic, nostalgia-soaked atmospheres. I was in love with vintage electronic textures. Among the influences of the moment: Plone, Lali Puna, and other bands on the German label Morr Music. Melodic electronic music was mostly coming out of Europe, and I could barely find anyone in Québec working in that style... But I had to make this music, even if it meant feeling alone.

The other facets of Montag's musical identity were forged out of my own ignorance — both of music composition and digital technology. Let me explain. Aside from one "audio" course at university, in a communications program I'd hated, I had no real technical knowledge to chase "the perfect sound." I wasn't looking for that sound. The idea of slipping into so-called "commercial" music genuinely scared me. I was bound, one way or another, to a very lo-fi, DIY kind of production. Trial, error, repeat.

That's what fascinates me, listening back to these tracks now: my instinct, my stubbornness. I never once relied on music theory to assemble my collages — I created them spontaneously, often in just a few hours, one after another. Ignoring everything related to technique — kHz frequencies, MIDI signals, compression — actually served me well in the end. It was within the limits of my own knowledge that I managed to weave and stitch these sounds together in a way that was entirely my own. And that same completely imperfect approach is what everything I made afterward grew out of. It's a method that inevitably leads to beautiful accidents, and above all, to a distinct sonic signature — even in the midst of doubt. Looking back, I recognize that I did manage to find "my sound." Diving back into these demos is like dissecting my musical DNA. And I'm glad I get to release these tracks, because I believe they deserve to be rediscovered differently: as archival objects. Tinkerings of their time.

If you've read this far, you're a true music geek, and I thank you for it. Welcome to the club. Thank you for lending an ear and taking a look at these little fragments from my very earliest days as a composer.

So, here's what's coming, friends of Montag:

• One track from Premiers Bricolages released for listening each week, following the order it appears on the record — itself based loosely on chronology.

• A short biography for each track, explaining how it was made and sharing what I was going through at the time.

• All of this while we wait for the physical release: Montag's final record, a colour vinyl, including another set of liner notes about its history.

Thank you in advance for following me through the excavation of Montag's archives, before he closes the door behind him — for good. I'll feel a little less alone at his funeral.*

*Forgive my father, also deceased, for passing his dark sense of humour on to me.