POP Montreal is the international music festival that kicked off last night with, among other happenings, a show by local favourite, Coeur de Pirate, aka Beatrice Martin. As described on the website, the” annual not-for-profit curated cultural event champions independence in the arts by presenting emerging and celebrated artistic talents from around the world.”
It runs until September 20, featuring 450 bands and more than 200 multidisciplinary artists in 14 sites in the city. It’s estimated over 65,000 fans will attend.
Along with the up and coming bands and musicians, some of the eminence grise of music are also featured this year. Today the festival presents The Icon: Montreal’s Andy Kim Talks Songwriting with Torquil Campbell. Andy Kim, left Montreal in the 1960’s to go to New York and worked as a songwriter in the storied Brill Building. His hit tune, Sugar Sugar is still played and danced to, along with several of his other hits.
And special guest, Giorgio Moroder, the Italian producer who filled disco’s with some great music in the 1970’s is here for two shows Friday night. At 75 he is again involved in Electronic Dance Music, or EDM.
In a recent interview with Montreal’s Gazette newspaper he explained the renaissance, ““My wife is my tour manager, so she organizes everything,” he said. “All I have to do is relax. We get to stay in each city and check them out. Two weeks ago we were in Istanbul and we visited all the museums. I was just in Santiago, where I performed up in the Andes inside an igloo.”
In Montreal he is performing at St. Jean Baptist, formerly a church, it is now a concert venue. Moroder described his evolution to the Gazette “In the last few years, we’ve grown to think of the DJ as much more than just the guy who puts the music on,” he said. “It’s totally different from 20 years ago, when the DJ would just put on one song after the other. Now it’s a full show. It’s very intensive as work, too — it’s not like the way it used to sometimes be at a discothèque, where you put a song (on) and let it run for 15 minutes while you had a drink. For the big shows, you have to be creative and you have to be great.”
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