Venue: La Sotterenea (4848 St Laurent Blvd, Montreal, Quebec H2T 1R5) Date: October 11, 2025 Doors: 7:30 PM Music: 8:00 PM
Tickets: $15.00 plus taxes and fees in advance / $20.00 at the door NOTAFLOF
Advance Tickets: https://tickets.venuepilot.com/e/flux-festival-presente-violence-gratuite-moose-terrific-2025-10-11-la-sotterenea-montreal-6ab1fc
Facebook Event: https://www.facebook.com/events/1098044369199649
Co-presented with Canadian New Music Network, daphne, EAF, Innovations en Concert, International Institute for the Critical Studies in Improvisation, Interzone, Le Vivier, Mardi Spaghetti, McGill University’s Laboratory of Urban Culture and Québec Musiques Parallèles.
A multidisciplinary artist and curator, Violaine Morgan Le Fur (aka Violence Gratuite) has spent the last few years sharpening her creative perspective, developing documentaries, producing exhibitions, and directing music videos and short films. ‘Baleine à Boss’ isn’t just her debut album, but her first venture into music production; Le Fur had only begun to experiment with music software a few weeks before dubbing the record, a fact that makes this unique set only more bewildering. Singing and vocalizing candidly and producing each track alone, she sounds profoundly polished, invoking a beguiling haze of chanson, rap, no wave and experimental electronics that hovers around the margins of pop and the avant-garde.
Le Fur grew up in Paris’s sprawling suburbs, and was provided with a diverse coterie of influences by her Breton mother and Cameroonian father. She’s channeled her ancestry into her work before, splicing material from her mother’s film archives with her own footage recorded in Bamiléké land to develop the autobiographical documentary ‘À L’ouest’ back in 2017. As Violence Gratuite, Le Fur thinks more cryptically, considering the vast forests of western Cameroon, lands ravaged by generations of bloodthirsty men and looping pulsing techno rhythms with fractured trap and the ghosts of French pop.
Her voice stands out proudly on opener ‘Iséo’, layered into a charming mantra over a brittle, grime-y beat assembled from stuttering samples and 8-bit blips. Acrobatic yet somehow casual, Le Fur splits her delivery, singing in French over undulating chants and spectral coos. And she switches up the flow on ‘Olive’, rapping in an icy cool deadpan while spiky synths bubble around jerky, Neptunes-like stabs. Then, on the nocturnal ‘Smooth Operation’, Le Fur guides us towards a moonlit ritual, crying sweetly into the darkness as hand drums and dreamy plucks chatter in the background.
On the title track, Le Fur strips the rhythm down to a moody, skeletal rumble, using rubbery drums and trapped chorals to mire herself in negative space. Speaking in a low rasp, she brings to mind Tricky’s eeriest early material, or the wonkiest output of French no wave hybridist Lizzy Mercier Descloux. But the record switches gears relentlessly, lurching towards the Caribbean on ‘Ragga Nieztches’ and into spannered dembow on the hypnotic closing track ‘Bad à Bras le Corps’. ‘Baleine à Boss’ is an unpredictable, labyrinthine suite that refuses to stay static, a variety show that’s as comfortable in the club as it is at a fest noz.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sawqBEoayKo
Moose Terrific is an experimental electronics and synth duo composed of Montreal based Sam Shalabi and Tamara Filyavich. The pair focuses on classic synth sounds but with a lot of polyrythmic, symphonic, post-punk ,North African and Eastern European influences. They have released a debut album called ‘The Drinks’ on the Irish label, FortEvilFruit in 2018 and a 2and album ‘Nude Beginnings’ on Lebanese label Ruptured in 2024.