(Photo: Duchess Says)

The Comet correspondent, Jeremy Simon, reports from FME, an emerging artists festival in a small Canadian industrial town. From Duchess Says to Patrick Watson playing an upright piano on a bleak patch of wasteland – expect the unexpected, surprising, and unforgettable.

It’s early afternoon and Festival de Musique Émergente (FME), which runs Sept 1- Sept 4, is easing into a long day of music. Traditional Quebecois musicians are playing on the main stage. Families wander about enjoying free sweetcorn and the last of the summer rays. It has the cheerful feel of a small town fete. It’s hard to imagine that within 12 hours the town will be turned over to fierce electro and blistering rock n roll.

Victor and Marc-Antoine, two friends from Montreal, are sitting in their green VW van (also known as ‘the apple’ and ‘home’). It took them three days to travel from Montreal to Rouyn-Noranda. They are discussing their experience here, and in doing so they capture the true spirit of this unique festival. It’s a test ground for new music, and a chance for bands and music fans alike to expand their horizons (and earn some bragging rights in the process):

“We live in Montreal but don’t often get to see shows there. We come here to discover new music, new bands, all together in the same place. Afterwards we will take the good news back to Montreal. We can go back and say ‘go see this band.’ When you don’t know what you are going to see, you don’t expect anything. Sometimes you are surprised.”

Things start getting weird in the late afternoon as the sun is setting on this industrial but lovable Canadian town. Singer/songwriter and local hero Patrick Watson is playing at an upright piano. Not untypical, except that the piano is sitting on a bleak patch of wasteland next to a goods yard and a huge copper foundry.

This surprise show was put on by FME organizers, to the delight of a crowd of locals and festival-goers who walked over train tracks to gather round the piano. Watson’s first notes are accompanied by a deep ominous boom from the foundry. The industrial setting, luminous in the evening sun, is in powerful juxtaposition to Watson’s simple piano lines and high pure vocals, washed out with delay and reverb.

Watson is planning a ‘backyard tour,’ in which he intends to play in the most unusual backyards he can find. He is unlikely to beat this setting for plain weirdness.

Back in the town, things are really kicking off. No more so than in a packed Scène Desjardins Petit Théâtre, a mid-sized venue with an array of incongruous white bird cages hanging above the throng.

Duchess Says have been around the Montreal scene since 2003, but their brand of demented punk is timeless. Singer Annie-Claude Deschênes yelps and shrieks, crowd surfs, shakes her hair and pounds her fists like a petulant child. She is Montreal’s answer to Karen O (the band toured with Yeah Yeah Yeahs in 2009).

Behind her, the band hang back and churn out eviscerating moog-driven rock. For its rawness, the music is surprisingly complex with syncopated rhythms and tricky stop-start arrangements. Keyboardist Ismael Tremblay wins the festival’s Most Captivating Hair Award - a full Ramones bob which seems to move independently to the rest of him.

Straight afterwards in the converted church next door Young Empires are setting the mood for the saturday night electro party. This Toronto-based three-piece keep things simple on stage. For them the attention should be on music and movement, two things they do really well. The band expect people to dance, and singer Matthew Vlahovic leads by example. At one point he demands that more people join the lone girl dancing in front of the stage and the crowd cheerfully complies.

Young Empires worked hard to build this enthusiasm. When Vlahovic announces early on that the band are from Toronto there are as many boos as cheers. But by the time the beat drops on their final song – one of the few encores of the festival – the venue is packed, the floor is shaking and hands are in the air.

Later in the evening the venue is transformed into a club, with ambient lights blazing through thick smoke, and some gorgeous deep techno being spun on the decks. It’s a surreal site, out here in the wilds of northern Quebec, to see so many people gathered in a former church dancing until dawn. It’s unexpected, surprising, and unforgettable. FME, ladies and gentlemen.