Tag: Festival d’ete de Quebec

World Music by William Ruben Helms

BLEUFEU is a Québec City-based event organizer and show promoter that presents festive and inspiring events, including the Festival d’été de Québec (FEQ), Toboggan — New Year’s Eve Celebrations and St-Roch XP, as well as hundreds of shows throughout the year at Impérial Bell and a new venue, which will be opening soon.

The BLEUFEU team recently announced the lineup for this year’s Toboggan — New Year’s Eve Celebrations, presented by SiriusXM. Held in the Grande Allée District, in the heart of the gorgeous and historic provincial capital, this year’s edition will take place between December 28, 2023 – December 31, 2023.

2023’s Toboggan gains a new election with the addition of a new stage at Place George V, the SiriusXM Cube, which will host festive electronic music nights between December 28, 2023 – December 30, 2023. The SiriusXM Cube is a must-faced stage that will allow attendees to see that stage’s performances from three sides, starting each day at 5:00pm.

December 28, 2023 will see Canadian duo Loud Luxury headlining, returning after headlining back in 2019. Montréal-based sensation GLOWZI and Québec-based DJ Derrick will complete the SiriusXM Cube’s first night.

December 29, 2023 will see French multi-platinum selling artist DJ Klingande, who has been a mainstay at the world’s major EDM festivals headlining. Montréal-born, Franco-Congolese, Afro House artist DJ Karaba and rising artist Millimetrik will complete the SiriusXM Cube’s second night.

December 30, 2023 will see Montréal-based electronic music pioneer High Klassified capping off the SiriusXM Cube’s final night.

The traditional New Year’s Eve show, which will take place at Place de l’Assemblée-Nationale between 8:00pm-12:30am will be headlined by Italian Grammy-nominated production outfit Meduza will bring in 2024 with a euphoric EDM set. Québecois artist La Diable à Cinq, Les Louanges and Mike Demero will complete the night’s wild party.

On-site, visitors can also enjoy the Winter Village, which will feature heated areas under tents and relaxation spaces to enhance the experience, starting at 1:00PM each day. (Believe me, from what I understand, those heated areas will be prime real estate for an outdoor festival in Québec in late December!)
And this is all 100% free for visitors to enjoy, making Toboggan a great destination to celebrate the last days of 2023.

“New Year’s celebrations hold a special place in the hearts of the people of Quebec. We are very pleased to offer these four festive evenings free of charge to the entire population in the heart of our beautiful city,” BLEUFEU’s CEO Nicolas Racine says.  “With each new edition, we aim to establish Toboggan as a must-attend event and showcase the potential of Quebec as the ultimate Nordic destination,” he adds.

“We are excited about the new stage at Place George V. It was high time to equip the event with a stage setup and production worthy of the EDM festival it has become. Performances by artists such as Loud Luxury or Klingande will take on a whole new dimension,” explains Louis Bellavance, VP Content and Artistic Direction at BLEUFEU.

Lastly, as a festival, Toboggan is environmentally conscious and seeks to reduce its ecological footprint. Among their many actions taken, the festival will soon be carbon-neutral, with the greenhouse gas emissions generated by the event being offset through Planetair. They also produce sustainable mobility through its communication campaigns, Additionally, the festival will warm attendees in an environmentally conscious fashion, by using eco-friendly logs in its outdoor fireplaces.

The festival also has come up with a Good Festivalgoer Guide, which is available on their homepage, and offers festival goers a series of green actions that they can do to minimize the ecological impact of their visit.


Video by William Ruben Helms

Live Footage: Lisa LeBlanc Performs “Dans l’jus” at Francos de Montréal 2023

Lisa LeBlanc is an acclaimed Rosaireville, New Brunswick-born, Montréal-based singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist (banjo and guitar), who proudly claims Acadian heritage — and comes from a family of passionate music lovers. (In case you’re curious — as I was — Cajuns are often described as descendants of Acadian exiles, who went to Louisiana during Britain’s Great Expulsion of Acadians from what is now known as Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, parts of Eastern Québec and Northern Maine. To simplify it a quite a bit, Acadians and Cajuns are historically very deeply connected, although it’s kind of confusing.)

LeBlanc can trace the origins of her professional career to when she turned 14 and stared to write her own original songs. She played her first shows at O’Donaghues in Miramichi with her mother accompanying her because she was underage — and couldn’t be legally in the bar by herself. But despite her relative youth, she quickly received recognition for her guitar playing and for being a promising singer/songwriter when she won 2010’s Festival International de chanson de Granby – singing material in French.

The juried award brought her to the attention of the country’s Francophone media. And as a result, she wound up playing Coup de cœur francophone, FrancoFoiles de Montréal and at Festival d’été de Québec by the following year.

Building upon a growing profile across Francophone Canada, LeBlanc’s full-length, self-titled debut was released in 2012 by Montréal-based label Bonsound. Primarily written while she was still living in her native Rosaireville, studying at L’École nationale de la chanson with portions written in Montréal, where she eventually relocated, the album was recorded by Karkwa’s Louis-Jean Cormier at Studio Piccolo. The album is best known for the single “Aujuord’hui ma vie c’est d’la marde” (“Today My Life is Shit”) – and because of the success of that single, the album eventually was certified platinum by Music Canada. 

2014’s Highways, Heartaches and Time Well Wasted, her critically applauded and commercially successful English-language EP debuted at #7 on the Canadian Album Charts. 

LeBlanc’s sophomore album, 2016’s bilingual Why You Wanna Leave, Runaway Queen? featured songs both in English and French, as well as a thrash-folk cover of Motörhead’s “Ace of Spades,” which helped to establish what she has dubbed as thrash-folk. The album was on that year’s shortlist for the Polaris Music Prize. 

Back in 2020, LeBlanc, under the pseudonym Belinda released It’s Not a Game, It’s a Lifestyle, a five-song EP of disco songs specifically about bingo – yes, bingo.

The Canadian artist’s third album, last year’s Chiac Disco is a glittery, dance floor friendly tribute to disco, funk and Lee Hazlewood with colorful lyrics sung boldly, loudly and proudly that was released to critical acclaim from CBC Music, La Presse, Le Journal de Montréal, Montréal Gazette, KCRW, Exclaim!, and countless others.

Today, the acclaimed Rosaireville-born, Montréal-based artist announced a Stateside tour in December that will include a December 6, 2023 stop at Café Wha? (Tour dates are below. But you can get more information, including tickets here.)”I recently dug up some photos from our last East Coast tour in the US from 2018,” LeBlanc recalls. “I remember during our New York show, there was a record snow storm and the city was a total ghost town with subways canceled and everything. Despite this, about 300 people came and I couldn’t believe my eyes and kept pinching myself that we were playing NYC for a room full of beautiful people. Needless to say, I’m really excited to come see you all again on my upcoming US tour in December!“
 
Along with the announcement, LeBlanc shared live footage of her and her backing band performing “Dans l’jus” in front of 45,000 people at this year’s Francos de Montréal, an annual, eight-day Francophone music festival with 250 shows in venues across Downtown Montréal, including a massive, outdoor festival stage in the city’s Quartier des Spectacles section.

“Dans l’jus” is a bombastic dance floor banger that’s roughly one-part Talking Heads, one-part Blondie, one-part glam rock and three-quarters glittery disco funk grooves built around a hypnotic, hook-driven arrangement paired with lyrics that openly discuss the seemingly omnipresence of burnout, frustration and dissatisfaction in our society.

The footage is a small portion of an entire show that was originally broadcast on ICI Radio-Canada Télé, but it reveals a super tight band that can quickly get into an irresistibly funky groove, fronted by a high-energy, dynamic frontperson. LeBlanc and her backing band headlined an M for Montréal showcase at Darling Bowling last year, and it was one of the most memorable and downright fun sets of that year’s festival. So trust me on this, if she’s playing at a city near you, don’t fuck up and miss her.

News/Announcements by William Ruben Helms

Summer Festival season is coming y’all. And naturally, that means a boatload of festival-related announcements over the next handful of months.

So let’s get to it, eh?

Founded in 1968, Festival d’été de Québec is a massive 11-day musical festival that hosts over 150 shows featuring internationally renowned and beloved headlining artists and emerging artists from all over the world in all genres playing on multiple stages in the heart of historic Québec City, Québec’s capital and one of the oldest cities in North America.

Festival d’été de Québec’s main stage is located on one of the most notable historical sites in Canada: The Plains of Abraham, where the British and French fought a decisive battle in the Seven Years’ War. The battle not only decided the fate of New France, but also led to the formation of Canada.

From what I’ve been told, FEQ is the closest North American analog to European city festivals like Wireless Festival, Primavera Sound or Roskilde. And because of its location, Québec City is arguably the closet thing to a European city within driving distance across the Northeastern US. And if you don’t feel like road tripping, you can take one of 21 direct flights to Jean Lesange/Québec City International Airport.

The 55th edition of the festival will take place from July 6, 2023 – July 16, 2023. Featuring over 200 artists, this year’s FEQ continues the festival’s long-held reputation for being a smorgasbord for any kind of music lover. Fans of stadium/arena rock can catch Foo Fighters, Green Day, Imagine Dragons, Quebecois icons Les Cowboys Fringants and Les Trois Accords. If you want something harder and more punk, you can catch Lamb of God and Bad Religion. The indie crowd could catch Lana Del Rey, The Smile, Feist, The War On Drugs, Alvvays and Saskatchewan-based singer/songwriter Andy Shauf. Hip-hop heads can catch rising stars Lil Durk and GloRilla, the legendary Cypress Hill and Canadian emcees bbno$ and Killy. Rising country artist Zach Bryan leads a group of country artists that include Megan Moroney and Québec’s Quebec Redneck Bluegrass Project. Pitbull and Illenium will provide dance floor bangers. French outfit Christine & The Queens will offer Francophone pop tunes. Additional artists on the bill include Heart’s legendary Ann Wilson, Quebec’s Robert Charlebois, Sudan Archives and Meet Me @ The Altar.

So pass for FEQ are available. The passes are fully transferrable — fans can share with friends and family if they’re unable to attend any of the 11-days. The passes start at$140 CAD (about $103 USD) or about $12.72 CAD per day (about $9.27 per day). Passes and information is available HERE.

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Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Montreal’s Les Deuxluxes Releases a Flamboyant and Psychedelic Visual for “Lighter Fluid”

With the release of their critically applauded mini-album, 2014’s Traitement Deuxluxe, the Montreal-based psych rock duo Les Deuxluxes, vocalist and guitarist Anna Frances Meyer and multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Etienne Barry, quickly exploded across  Quebec’s music scene. Building upon a growing platform across the province, the Montreal-based duo released, their critically applauded full-length debut, 2016’s Springtime Devil. 

Since the release of Springtime Devil, the duo of Meyer and Barry have released a handful of attention grabbing singles, including the French translation of album title track “Springtime Devil,” “Diable du pringtemps.” Along with that, they’ve made appearances across the province’s major festival circuit, playing sets at Montreal Jazz Fest, Festival d’ete de Quebec, POP Montreal and M for Montreal — and they’ve opened for the likes of Lisa LeBlanc, Marjo, and Jon Spencer. They ended 2016 with a mini-tour of South America that included stops in Santiago, Chile; Valdivia, Chile; Buenos Aires, Argentina; and Sao Paulo, Argentina. 

Written in the remote Quebec countryside, where the duo isolated themselves and recorded live to tape in a 19th century church, Meyer’s and Barry’s latest album, Lighter Fluid, the duo’s first album in over three years was released last Friday through Bonsound Records. Centered in old school rock ‘n’ roll riffage, the album’s 11 tracks draw from psych rock — while arguably be some of the most eccentric material they’ve written and released to date. Interestingly, the swaggering album title track “Lighter Fluid” is a perfect example of the album’s overall sound and aesthetic: power chord driven riffs, thunderous kick drum and enormous arena rock friendly hooks with boy-girl harmonizing paired with Meyer’s powerhouse vocals. The end result is a song that seems — to my ears, at least — indebted to classic AC/DC, JOVM mainstays White Mystery and The Black Angels. Simply put, this one fucking rips.

Directed by Ariel Poupart, the recently released video for “Lighter Fluid” is a mix of the fittingly flamboyant and psychedelic with the occult, as the band performs the song in front of a boiling cauldron and in front of some trippy and mind-bending backdrops.