FME 2012: Feist, Godspeed You Black Emperor Anchor Quirky Northern Quebec Fest

ROUYN-NORANDA, QUEBEC - From California's Coachella to Chicago's Lollapalooza to Montreal's Osheaga, there's a certain formula for a successful North American summer music festival: lure every available A-list artist to a popular travel destination, pack the schedule with round-the-clock performances across multiple stages, get corporate sponsors to underwrite the expense, and pray that it doesn't rain. Given that it's located in a remote mining municipality a good eight-hour drive north from both Toronto and Montreal, the Festival Emergent de Musique (FME) is seemingly at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to attracting both big-name acts and music-loving tourists. But this four-day event -- which took over the town this Labour Day weekend -- has managed to hit its 10th anniversary by adhering to a simple but highly effective strategy: provide a festival experience you're just not going to find anywhere else.

As the festival's name suggests, FME's mission is to showcase emerging regional artists, most of whom are unknown outside their native Quebec. (In fact, a fair share of this year's line-up could be described as One Degree of Karkwa, as the 2010 Polaris Music Prize winners' frontman, Louis-Jean Cormier, performed solo, while percussionist Julien Sagot turned in a set of smoky, Gainsbourgian art-rock on a Saturday-night bill at the Paramount Theatre opening for Marie-Pierre Arthur, whose band includes Karkwa keyboardist François Lafontaine.) The quality of year's headliners, however, exemplified FME's increasing renown and reach: indie-pop queen Feist and reunited orchestro-rock overlords Godspeed You! Black Emperor (a band known for being particularly picky about where it plays). Other notable visitors included Montreal prog-pop outfit Plants and Animals, rising indie-rock dramatists Half Moon Run, and doom-folk oracle Timber Timbre.

But the real star of FME is Rouyn-Noranda itself, which is utterly transformed come festival time: parking meters and Jesus statues get outfitted with wool-knit technicolour cozies, church towers grow antlers, back alleys turn into impromptu venues, and streets get shut down for afternoon raves that attract little kids and 80-year-olds in wheelchairs alike. And if these surface indicators aren't enough, the weekend yielded more supporting evidence for FME's growing reputation as the quirkiest festival in Canada:

The laissez-faire scheduling: Where most festivals tend to showcase non-stop music from noon-till-midnight, FME's daily programming is generally broken up into three manageable blocks: happy-hour sets from 5-7 p.m. (a.k.a. the notoriously boozy "cinq-a-sept"), prime-time shows from 8-11 p.m., and after-hours events that begin at midnight. Presumably, these hour-long, between-set breathers are meant to accommodate poutine runs to 24-hour grease-slingers Chez Morasse. But the more casual scheduling also encourages exploration of the surrounding areas: nothing cures a hangover quite like a zip-lining expedition, or a 30-minute hike up the Kekeno mountains to dive into an elevated lake oasis.

This festival welcomes underground music -- literally: Rouyn-Noranda's industrial heritage -- as signified by the towering smokestacks that loom over the town -- provides adventurous performers with all manner of rogue venue options. After Montreal's Patrick Watson staged a concert alongside train tracks at last year's FME, his mates in Plants and Animals went one further -- or rather, 2,600 feet further -- to perform a Friday morning set for CBC's Bande a Part station in one of the town's subterranean mine shafts, head lamps and all. The elevator ride down reportedly took 10 whole minutes; the emergency ladder would take some four hours to climb. (It's safe to assume the band didn't have to resort to the latter measure, as they arrived at their evening set at the Agora les Arts on schedule.)

The locals can watch Feist from their apartment windows: Recent years have seen the festival shut down 7ieme Rue -- a small, block-long shopping promenade -- to host the festival's outdoor stage, the gateway to which is formed by massive, 10-foot-high lightboxes that spell out the letters FME. This means that, if you live in the apartments above one of the retail storefronts, you need not leave your domicile to enjoy a perfect, balcony view of FME's main-stage offerings, nor brave the port-a-loo lines.

It puts the "eat" into "beats": On Saturday night, the aforementioned FME sign was transformed into an elevated performance stage itself for Le Mix de Chefs, which is exactly as it sounds: DJs and chefs perched overhead, Hollywood Squares-style, chopping beats and chopping beets, as it were. Each track was introduced with a video-screen overview of the dish to be prepared, before each party began flexing their respective mixing skills. And it wasn't just all for show: samples of the edibles were delivered down to the crowd alternately via clotheslined take-out boxes, balloons that concealed dumplings, and by men in strange, Clockwork Orange-style get-ups distributing soup shooters from shopping carts covered in Christmas lights. The music was garden-variety circa-1999 downtempo-house fromage, but the beef tartare and gazpacho were delicious.

You get to see Godspeed You! Black Emperor from, like, 10 feet away: As all of the above examples illustrate, what really makes FME special is its sense of intimacy, and nowhere was this more apparent than at Saturday's late-night performance from Godspeed You! Black Emperor at the Agora Des Arts, a 300-person-capacity converted church roughly four times smaller than the sort of rooms they could normally fill. At the outset, the crowd sat on the floor, as if attending an elementary-school recital, but the sheer force of experiencing music this apocalyptically intense in such cramped quarters had an inhibition-loosening effect I had never witnessed when seeing this band play in big cities: a couple were taken to dancing during the thrash-klezmer climax of "Albanian" while, by set's end, the crowd was on their feet, headbanging as if they were observing the blackest of sabbaths. Following a show like that, a 2 a.m. run to Chez Morasse for a gravy/curds injection was no mere late-night indulgence, but a necessary comfort-food comedown -- though gratification was delayed somewhat by the large wedding party standing in line.