Teke::Teke's cinematic sounds illuminate the future of Montreal rock

A quick Google of the Montreal band Teke::Teke and you'll easily find its origin as a cover band. But what that search may not immediately reveal is that the band's venture into performing classic '60s and '70s Japanese music only lasted one night. 

"By the second show, we already had a few [original] compositions," guitarist Serge Nakauchi-Pelletier explains. What started off as a tribute to Japanese legend Takeshi Terauchi (described by the band as the Beatles of '60s surf-rock in Japan) immediately grew into something bigger. 

Maya Kuroki, who joined Teke::Teke for that second performance, and later stayed on as the band's vocalist, is sitting on the same Zoom call and turns to Nakauchi-Pelletier to add, "At first, you had the vision of two different bands," noting Nakauchi-Pelletier's urge to maintain a straightforward tribute band while starting another act that would focus on noise and experimental music influenced by horror soundtracks from Japan. The solution: combining the two to create something entirely new. 

The result is a dizzying display of passion, skill, homage and originality, all swirling together in mid-air like a tornado threatening to crash down on you. Throughout Teke::Teke's 2021 debut, Shirushi, songs swerved from moment to moment, roping in traditional Japanese instruments that brushed up against thunderous guitars and steady drums. Its manic energy is perhaps closest to a punk spirit, but Kuroki's captivating vocals are the eye of the storm, a controlled force that guides listeners with her striking Japanese storytelling. 

It can be hard to distil what Teke::Teke does in musical terms — even the band's members approach things differently, with some entering the group with a classical music background and others with less technical language. (The band has seven members total, including musicians who used to perform with Boogát and Patrick Watson.) But given both Nakauchi-Pelletier and Kuroki's backgrounds in other art forms such as film and TV, it makes sense that Teke::Teke is best seen through the lens of cinema. 

"I don't think we approach our music like pop songs," Nakauchi-Pelletier says. "Most of the time, we talk about music the same way a director would talk about a movie, like emotions, colours, contrast. Plus, we're trying to tell a story so I guess our language is more similar to cinema than just music." 

Funny enough, Teke::Teke has a few different translations in Japanese. While the band's main reason for choosing that name is for its onomatopoeic representation of a surf-rock guitar sound, Teke teke is also slang that Japanese teens use for surf posers. But most famously, Teke teke is an urban legend of a vengeful ghost. While horror soundtracks were an early influence that Nakauchi-Pelletier drew from, he swears the name has nothing to do with this famous tale. 

In fact, outside of their name and origins in performing covers, the members of Teke::Teke don't want to be considered a solely Japanese act. "We feel like a Montreal band," Nakauchi-Pelletier says, noting that he thinks a band like Teke::Teke can only come out of a city like that because of the many different personalities and backgrounds that truly make up the group. Nakauchi-Pelletier does add, though, that the formation of the band was also a result of how small the Japanese community was: "Everybody knows each other, that's how we met!" 

Teke::Teke is, in a lot of ways, just an evolution of the indie-rock scene that blew up almost 20 years ago in Montreal: a place that promoted the idea of collaboration, of blending genres, and of semi-big collectives making waves internationally. Teke::Teke is taking classic influences, transforming them into something modern and, in the process, illuminating the bright future of Montreal rock. Who knows, maybe one day we'll look back at them as the Beatles of their generation.