Meet Pelada: Montreal's after-hours duo gets above ground at MUTEK

I don't know much — hardly anything — about Montreal's current after-hours music scene.

In the last two years, I've only been to Moonshine, a monthly warehouse party put on by Montreal's Kruger Originals.

There, I've taken in lots of afrobeat and other really good electronic music, as well as observe the really cool fashion on a crowd of a few hundred people just committed to dancing of the real sweat-it-out kind.

The scene and the secret location takes me back to a time in my life when I had more energy to stay at the party past 1 a.m.

In the early '90s, when I was a hip hop purist (I'm still a kind of hip hop purist, I guess) warehouse parties and raves were a thing. I had friends who were regulars of those parties in clandestine locations around the city — they were white kids, black kids, Filipino kids.

Some of them, I know now, were queer with punkish sensibilities and equally versed in Chomsky discourse. They liked deep house music, hip hop, trip hop and jungle.

In the hours before a warehouse party was going to happen, I remember a frenzied excitement on our CEGEP campus of that group of 19-year olds waiting for the hotline to open to find out where the illegal spot was going to be — you had to call a number that was on the single 4x4 flyer that one person had that was circulating around the building.  

The other thing I remember was being witness to the growth of what seemed to be a sort of independent state of free people: free of colour, free of class, free of gender roles, and all of that released through really freeing music and art.

In a recent conversation I had with Montreal-based electronic music duo, Pelada, I learned that the city's after hours scene is still full of exactly those kinds of people.  

"There's sort of safe spaces taking place outside of the margins," explained the bespectacled Tobias Rochman, the music producer half of Pelada.

"I think that a lot of interesting art is made on the fringes, so that's sort of where there's a lot of creativity is living."

The pair are performing at MUTEK, the electronic and digital arts festival, for the first time on Aug. 26.

Honing their craft in a safe space

For the last four years, Rochman and badass vocalist, Chris Vargas, have been honing their craft in those safe spaces.

A little nervous, the pair sat with me in the CBC/Radio-Canada cafeteria, wearing outfits that brought me back to scene of the early '90s: Rochman wore extra loose shiny track pants with a Dupont MotorSport pit-person's jersey.

And no surprise, Vargas wore a Malaria! T-shirt — her fierce red lipstick and slicked back dark hair, an appropriate fashion and musical homage to the Berlin electronic band of the '80s.

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"I think that dance music can be very unifying, different types of people come under one roof and sort of get down for the same reason. I think that it's a really positive idea," said Rochman.

Avowing that their music has roots in Detroit Techno, and Chicago house, and building arrangements with a few synthesizers and drum machines (no computers), Vargas and Rochman mix it up.

They keep it live (no computers) and add politically-charged lyrics in Spanish in a singing style that Vargas says sounds more like shouting (but I've listened to a few and her singing has melody).

"Our sets are really energetic. I definitely exhaust myself to the breaking point by the end of it," said a warmed-up Vargas.

"The music is really easy to dance to. And the vocals are little bit aggressive because I'm yelling."

And Vargas has no intention of singing in English, underlying that that's already a dominant language in music already.  

Coming aboveground for MUTEK

In the past year, the touring has been non-stop.

Thanks to some attention online, with deejays picking up on their music, a buzz started to grow. The two-song ep, No Hay, sold out during online presales, with vendors now pricing their copies of the vinyl at $88.

And since then, Vargas and Rochman have been all around Europe, Russia and parts of the United States.

"We'll do 30 dates in 15 countries, we're playing every night," Rochman explained. "We've just sort of built a fanbase, sort of the old fashion way. Just showing up and going back to the same cities twice and sort of building as organically as possible.

The Montreal fanbase — the community of friends and fellow artists from the after-hours scene who've seen them grow — is expected to come out and show them love at their first show at MUTEK.

For its 18th edition, MUTEK is reaching out to a more daytime public with a few free, outdoor events. Through musical performances, visual art installations, workshops and panel discussions, the festival's theme focuses on the electronic music capitals of the world: London, Berlin, Barcelona, Mexico City and Montreal.

This Saturday at 6 p.m., on the Esplanade at Place des Arts, in the Berlin lineup of the Experience Events, Pelada will bring their sound and style to a new audience.

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Although Rochman trusts that because the sound system will be huge, the show will be great. Vargas admits that the daytime element makes it a different Pelada experience,

"It's weird to have a lot of light on you and yelling at people, and try to control the environment to a space for people to let loose — that's harder to achieve in the daytime".

With her earlier shyness, somewhat behind her, Vargas' solution is pretty simple. No time for warming up the crowd it seems.

"I might start yelling at people right away."