Montreal’s teeming cultural and artistic diversity makes it a fertile environment for pieces and performances that shatter the boundaries of disciplines, spectatorship, and even art itself. Even in Montreal, however, it is rare to see a concept so utterly novel – and so deeply explored – as the musical degustations of the Minuscule project.
I arrived at Brou Ha Ha, a microbrewery on the corner of Rosemont and de Lormier, and was asked to register my name on the organizer’s computer. The mouse pointer turned briefly into an hourglass and then my fate was decided. I sat with a randomly selected group and when our turn came we were matched with a beer and – but of course – an experimental electronic musician. We watched the musician, a hip, charming man in his early thirties, as he translated the flavours of the beer into a soundscape. Then, when he was ready, we donned noise-cancelling headphones and entered his interpretation of the brew, which at last, we were allowed to sip as well.
The beer-tasting is the latest in a series of food-music projects that have invited spectator/listener/tasters to sample everything from fine cheese to shellfish while plugged in to the grumbling musical belly of an electronic musician. The computer program ensures that groups are paired with different musicians as they ascend through a series of increasingly intense gustatory experiences (the cheese gets older and older, the beer gets darker and darker). This gradual progression adds to the event not only a sense of escalation, but also invitation. The audience feels more and more at ease with the unfamiliar pairing of taste and sound, and more and more integral to the performance itself.
By the end of the event, initial complaints of not seeing the “point” had almost universally disappeared. Each group had encountered three different musicians’ interpretations of three increasingly dark beers. More importantly, each person got a taste of the immense diversity of electronic music that is not only created on the slope of the Royal Mountain, but performed here as well. The event invited neophytes to experience the entire process of creation, from inspiration to final product, as a unified experience. For a person completely ignorant of the progressive house scene, let alone “noise,” the experience shattered prejudices about music that had seemed inaccessible, cultish, and even unpleasant. Cloistered in my headphones, but partaking of this communal drink, the improvised compositions became stories not only of the beer, but of the interaction among the drinkers. Suddenly, I was aware of something I had always discounted in electronica – life.
Minuscule Bière was presented in Montreal and Quebec in April 2011. Look out for the next “partition des saveurs” on their website at www.bourbaki-rec.com/MinusculeBiere.htm
Dan Ruppel is the recipe specialist at {productions} of the forest, a little theatrical confectionary devoted to presenting new texts in new ways (usually involving food).
