La Noce festival has become the beating heart of Saguenay's music scene

In translation, the three dayer is what it says on the tin – a sprawling backyard 'wedding party' of around 5000 people dotted across the hillside remains of a late 19th-century paper mill, complete with the kind of idiosyncrasies one would expect from the zesty and amiable Québécois. Imagine Woodstock relocated to the Packard Sawmill from Twin Peaks after an earthquake and you’re halfway to grasping the joyfully surreal setup of La Noce.

Set in the heart of Chicoutimi – the most populous arrondissement in the city of Saguenay – it’s an easy six-hour drive from Montréal through motorways surrounded by thick forests. Located around the body of water that spreads from Minnosota and Wisconsin north east into the Atlantic, Saguenay is a head-clearing place to spend some time in, both remote and populous in the best possible way.

The warp and weft of La Noce is an extension of the city’s history and character, and marked by its paper mill – La Pulperie – which lies close to the Chicoutimi river, now repurposed as a cultural and tourism centre dedicated to preserving the massive industrial heritage of a city that was once the largest producer of mechanical pulp in Canada. The earliest building on the site dates from 1903 when there were no more than 4000 people living in the area - half of whom worked there. It's a place known to most residents from numerous school trips and held fond memories for festival founders Éric Harvey and Frédéric Poulin. The Chicoutimi school friends were already veterans of the Québec music industry before the idea for La Noce started to take shape. Moving to Montréal, the pair retained a strong sense of belonging to the Saguenay-Lac-St-Jean region – Sagamie, as the locals call it; a portmanteau of Saguenay and Piekuakamu, the Innu name for Saint-Jean.

“I was in a record label,” Poulin tells me as we talk on the opening day of La Noce, “and Eric was in show production, but we’d never had the chance to put on bands in our hometown.” Saguenay’s music landscape was lacking good venues, they tell me, and the festival scene – although vibrant – leaned more towards the commercial and nostalgic (as we talk, Taio Cruz and Papa Roach headline another festival mere miles away). “We have many friends still here,” adds Poulin, “but they didn’t have anything to come to here in the summer - they had to go to Montreal.”

The first years of La Noce mostly took place in Chicoutimi’s port area but putting on a stage at La Pulperie in year two led Harvey and Poulin to officially set up home there in 2021. The inaugural edition of La Noce was just one stage with thirteen bands over a single day. This year there’s close to fifty artists and four stages.

The festival's name was partly inspired by the Honeymoon Project – a huge conceptual art piece created over six years by Catalan artist Antoni Miralda celebrating the symbolic, imaginary wedding between the Columbus Monument in Barcelona and the Statue of Liberty in New York. Carried out in 20 cities across the world, the piece was articulated through a series of public actions tied to the stages of the mating ritual — courtship, engagement, ceremony, and honeymoon. “I just found it really beautiful,” Harvey recalls, "and when we were brainstorming, we liked this idea of the union and of love – not the Catholic thing – but just a celebration of love."

Each edition of La Noce is marked by a wedding anniversary theme; this year it's the poppy (wax and wool have featured in previous iterations). Manifesting the concept of union literally, the festival also features theatrical mock weddings where festival-goers can tie the knot in front of strangers for a mere ten Canadian dollars. "It's always going to be ten bucks to have a wedding here at La Noce,” laughs Fry. “It was ten bucks in 2017 and it will be ten bucks in 2027!” Each ceremony also comes with its own music, courtesy of campy wedding singer Gab Paquet.

While poppies are officially part of the dress code this year, polka dots are almost ubiquitous across the site on opening day, for this year is something of a golden moment for La Noce. A year ahead of its tenth edition, newly crowned hometown heroes Angine de Poitrine are playing the mid-evening slot – and it’s almost all that anyone can talk about.

It’s barely six months since the Saguenéen duo’s breakout session – filmed at Trans Musicales back in December last year – and whether you connect or not with their concept or sound, what they represent to the region’s musicians and music fans is monumental and undeniable. At La Noce this week there are polka-dot patches on biker jackets, customised Québec flags and Angine T-shirts every ten metres. There is a vinyl factory in Québec pressing 10,000 LPs every single week, right now, just for Angine de Poitrine, I am told. "It could have happened with any band or singer from the Saguenay area," a fan named Luc tells me, "but it happened with Angine, who are making a sound that isn't pop or commercial or has made any compromises. This is the real sound of Sagamie!"

Poullin saw Angine’s success coming early, he tells me: “I think for you, Angine de Poitrine is something weird that comes from far away but for us, we knew their first projects, we saw them start this project, we were the first Facebook and Instagram followers so we saw our friends getting big. I’ve seen them play in front of 8000 people who had never heard of them and I saw the reaction then and I said, ‘okay, something’s gonna happen’."

Alexandre Bergeron – who records under the name Mitaine and is playing La Noce for the first time – is equally gushing: “Everyone in the world know Saguenay because of them, so it's fucking cool for the discovery of our region. I’m proud of them, and they're so fucking unique. I heard Dave Grohl saying he loves them and when I was younger, he was like my hero, and he’s talking about people from my hood?!”

For a Francophonic artist to get out of Québec and France is hard, adds Begeron: “Angine’s success says to me that everything is possible. It’s a great model for people from here to go out of the country!"

Bergeron’s also living in Montreal now but is quick to note the differences between the music landscape in Saguenay and Québec biggest city. “There’s something very special in this region. When people come here from Montreal, they see that everyone here knows everyone else, we’re all friends with everyone. The people here are all kind, and this kindness is also in the music too. La Noce is a place when you can relax and nobody is attacking anybody. There’s no violence, it’s just calm, and a fun place to chill, listen, and - for me – play good music.”

I think of Bergeron’s description of the festival throughout the four days I spend in Saguenay. La Noce, just like the city, is buoyed by a crowd whose bonhomie never wanes - even in the drunken, early morning hours. It’s a safe, welcoming and incredibly hospitable place to be in.

Bergeron has grown up with the festival and like many young, local artists playing La Noce for the first time this year, admits his own music taste has been shaped by its curation. This year, crowd-pleasers such as Lou-Adriane Cassidy, Ariane Roy, Malaimé Soleil and Les Louanges go down well with the locals but it’s the festival’s more outlier bookings that really add colour, such as the boundary-pushing Jashim Rodriguez. Originally from El Chocó, based in Montréal and part of the city’s 12,000 or so-strong Colombian community – Rodriguez makes songs that cut futuristic reggaeton into emo hooks, and driving Latinx rhythms alongside a performance that has the energy of Bikini Kill, with the same kind of invention that the artists such as Jim Legxacy have crafted into their sound.

Mothland-signed Yoo Doo Right and Population II are here with Austin-based multi-instrumentalist Nolan Potter; the three released the scratchy, frenetic long-player Yoo II last year, a record made in a single two hour session in a small room; La Noce is the mid-point in a short tour around the country. Fittingly once a wedding band, Etran de L'Aïr are made up of brothers and cousins from the neighbourhood of Abalane in Agadez, Niger and turn out a propulsive and very danceable take on the desert-blues sound. There’s Mexican singer-songwriter Macario Martínez – the Mexico City street sweeper went from making $10 a day as a before exploding on Tik Tok with “Sueña Lindo, Corazón” and a subsequent NPR Tiny Desk Concert.

“La Noce is a communion,” Eleonore Dessureault – another local playing the festival for the first time - tells me. “It's a gift for me to play here…It’s the best festival here in Québec!” Growing up in a family immersed in music in the small village of Saint-Gédéon – west of Sagueny and close to Lac-Saint-Jean - Dessureault has been coming to La Noce since the very start, first with her family and now with her friends. She only released her debut album Le sentier des fougères two months back but playing at La Noce has always been part of her ambition. “It was my best performance ever here,” she laughs. “My dream has been achieved!”

Dessureault is another evangelical Angine fan: “The story of Angine… it makes us dream big, like it's possible for foreign artists from Saguenay-Lac-St-Jean to become so big? Here we know them so it’s really special to see that they are playing in every country across the world. I like music when it’s atypical and I try to be more atypical in my music too, to be more free and crazier in composition. Angine and their success - it makes the spectrum bigger for what we can do in music!”

Dessureault tells me to go see legendary punk artist VioleTT Pi and his partner Klô Pelgag - both play sets on the festival’s closing day, and both embody a spirit and musical identity that feels like it could only come from Québec. Experimental, playful and innovative, VioleTT – the project of Karl Gagnon is, in Fry’s opinion, the best artist the province has produced in the last ten years, and turns in a performance that’s weird, theatrical and punk, with Gagnon smeared in clownish pale face paint.

At the other end of the spectrum, there’s plugg rapper Kinji00. Still in his teens, the Portugal-born and Gatineau-based artist works with his older brother Lb66 – once part of the digicore collective Novagang – and brings a substantially younger-leaning crowd to the front than the rest of the festival’s bookings.

With the festival about to hit a major anniversary, I ask Fry if bringing a lineup as rich as this to the city each year has changed anything in the musical landscape here, ten years on? “Well, it’s telling that we decided to create a festival because these bands weren’t playing in our own town,” he answers. “Because now you have artists such as Patche playing shows on a regular basis in some venues here, and that was so much harder ten years ago.”