Howard Bilerman probably shouldn't have been walking into Montreal's Les Foufounes Électriques in 1987.
"It was scary," he recalls. "There were, like, real punks with real Mohawks, doing real cocaine off the bar and carrying real knives and wearing real Doc Martens — there was a danger about it, and I was underage, but, like, I was quote-unquote part of the crew because I was with the band and I was there to record."
Bilerman was a teenager at the time, hanging out at the storied music venue that became a hub for Montreal punks in the '80s. He took it upon himself to document everything he heard at Foufounes and other venues around town.
"I was the kid who had a handycam and I would take this everywhere," he says. "Every show I went to, I would videotape."
Save for a major upgrade in his equipment and space, that's essentially what Bilerman still does to this day. He's a record producer, sound engineer and the co-owner of Hotel2Tango, an analog-based recording studio he operates with producer Radwan Moumneh and Efrim Menuck and Thierry Amar of Godspeed You! Black Emperor fame.
For our latest Sense of Place trip to Montreal, World Cafe's Raina Douris sat down with Bilerman to learn exactly how he went from taping shows as a kid to producing some of the finest records to come out of the city, including Arcade Fire's Funeral and songs from Leonard Cohen's final album before his death in 2016, You Want It Darker.
Bilerman also dives into the gentrification of Montreal's Mile End neighborhood and how it's impacted city's music scene, including ongoing tension over noise.
Interview Highlights
On finding spaces to record
"Which, in the mid-'90s in Montreal, was easy-peasy, because there were so many empty commercial lofts. The economy was so depressed and all the business had moved out that you had all these empty spaces. I rented a 2,000-square-foot loft with 21-foot-high ceilings, all wood floors, for $893 a month. That was my first recording studio."
On the rise of noise complaints in Montreal
"Montreal, the past decade, has just a really depressing history of one person who lives next to a venue making a noise complaint, and that venue shuts down. So, La Tulipe, Blue Dog, Main Hall, Divan Orange: These are all places that people could play for free. You didn't have to pay for a sound person. You didn't have to pay for security. You didn't have to pay for a door person. You played, you got most of the money from the door. They're all gone, and they're all gone because Montreal seems to value their condominium-owning taxpayers more than these sandboxes for bands, which is really strange, to me, because politicians have been bragging about, quote-unquote, 'the Montreal music scene.' But item by item, they're actually decimating what made Montreal amenable to having such a great musical community."
On recording with Godspeed You! Black Emperor
"Godspeed is a really difficult band to record for a variety of reasons. There's a lot of them, which means you need a lot of space, and they're a really loud band. They're so habituated to playing live and in their jam space — where there are no headphones, there's no levels to worry about — that then to have that translated to a recording studio and have that band sound like what they sound like live is a really big challenge...
"You'd have these producers intervening, saying, 'Well, it would just sound better if we record the drums to a click track and then put bass on top of it and then put the guitars, and then do the vocals and the backup vocals.' But it just seems ridiculous, to me, that here's a band and they write their song all together; they play it in their jam space together — at the same time and in the same room; they go on stage together; they play it at the same time. Why, then, at the most important moment of that song's life — when it is being preserved for all of eternity — why would you change that winning combination?"
On recording the Shaar Hashomayim Choir for Cohen's "You Want It Darker"
"For all of the recording sessions that really, really matter to me, the thought bubble in my brain is, 'Don't mess it up.' But you've done this, like, 10,000 times before. You've set up mics every single day of your life for the past 35 years. The mechanics of what you're doing are no different. So just, like, breathe and do what you do, y'know?"
"I tell my kids this all the time. My son plays baseball, and when he has two strikes, like, Eli, it's the same deal — you're just at bat; you're just hitting the ball. Forget about the two strikes part. The job is the same: Hit the ball. So at a certain point, set up the mics, make sure everything's good, and it sounded good. The choir was happy and Adam [Cohen] was happy. Then, the nerves had evaporated very quickly."
This episode of World Cafe was produced and edited by Miguel Perez. Our senior producer is Kimberly Junod and our engineer is Chris Williams. Our programming and booking coordinator is Chelsea Johnson and our line producer is Will Loftus.
