Standing Up, Never Alone
Photo by Bernard Bastien
No industrial music festival existed in Montreal for a decade until AMP launched one last year. In a city with such an alternative, rebellious streak as Montreal, this absence strikes as strange. After all, there was once an era where Montreal was one of North America’s capital for the industrial music scene.
But AMP is back this very weekend, and the industrial lineage they draw from is far older than its two-year run. With mainstays of the local industrial scene on the team, like Nathan Gaudreau and David Julien, aka DJ LVX, the 2026 roster runs “from local to international, from Gothic to Industrial, from traditional to neo, from the tangible to the phantasmagorical,” in AMP’s own words.
The instinct to meld genres, dissolve boundaries, mix the senses, is reminiscent of the broader Montreal arts scene sensibility across both musical genre and art form.
AMP runs two rooms with a distinct atmosphere, the first a live stage and the other a concurrent DJ section with vendors like Diabolik. There are platform groups that span electronic body music (EBM), techno, post-punk, and industrial. Besides the music, they’ve incorporated the work of multiple VJs across both editions, striking a clear multisensory tone, meant to “encompass the entire spectrum of industrial & goth music and culture.”
This year like the last, they platform both emerging artists and established icons, artists hailing from as far as Europe or the US, as close-by as Montreal itself, or provinces across Canada. International acts include Echoberyl (France), Electronic Substance Abuse (UK), SYNAPSCAPE (Germany), Statiqbloom (Brooklyn).
But the festival still boasts a strong roster of local performers, including Creature (Montreal), Automelodi (Quebec), Laura Krieg (Montréal), iVardensphere (Edmonton), and The Marquis Is Dead (Montreal) in their return from living in Belgium. Some of these acts might ring a bell if you were around Montreal’s industrial scene over the last 10 years. They’ve survived the demise of one of Montréal’s great industrial festivals.
KINETIK FALLOUT - 10 YEARS LATER
The story of Montreal’s industrial, dark music scene goes far longer than AMP’s first festival in 2025. For an era, the city was once a leading beacon of the global scene. The key festival was COMA, from 2004, which restarted as Kinetik from 2007. It launched among a stacked and increasingly mature global ecosystem of industrial and dark music, including talents from North America such as Front Line Assembly, Ministry, and Nine Inch Nails. However, while Europe could boast of an existing festival circuit, especially in Germany, North America had yet to host their own industrial festival.
When COMA kicked off in 2004, it was an organic creation of the scene itself, the culmination of decades of fermentation in Montreal’s industrial scene. Montréal’s home-grown industrial festival would become the first of its kind in North America and the blueprint for many a festival in North America afterward.
In their almost 10 years as a continuous industrial music festival, Kinetik hosted some of the major acts in the world, including Front 242, Nitzer Ebb, VNV Nation, Front Line Assembly, Die Krupps. With Montreal’s characteristic flair, Kinetik always had one ear towards Europe, the other at North America. For leading European industrial music groups, Kinetik put Montreal on the map as a decade-long entryway into their North American tour, or as a major stop of their world tour. Finally, Kinetik also hosted numerous local groups, giving a major stage to Montreal and Quebecois acts like Headscan, Decoded Feedback, Iszoloscope, and many more.
The festival ended with a whisper not a bang in 2013, with an eleventh-hour word to all the acts they would need to cancel due to undisclosed legal reasons.
Brian Graupner of Gothsicles and Causticles was quoted in the aftermath saying, “Ever since it started, Kinetik was the gold standard of North American industrial festivals from a performer’s perspective.” One era of North American industrial music closed the door. An attempt to revive the festival in Toronto lasted only the first edition. The Terminus festival in Calgary and Cold Waves in Chicago each eventually became success stories as their own post-Kinetik project. But for the next decade, no festival would lay a stage for industrial and dark music in all of North America’s east coast.
However, the same current that hummed through the heart of Kinetik and the broader industrial scene would stay active, as they had since before Kinetik had ever started. Concurrent with Kinetik, AMP had formed as their own group since 2006, gathering together some of the mainstays of Montreal’s industrial scene as a complementary events promoter.
They threw underground parties and events, between the vibe of a DJ set and live show. Notable among them is Nathan Gaudreau, who also performed at COMA and Kinetik under the DJ monikers of DJ Na or Creature, acting as one of their earliest performers (and Stage Manager for Kinetik’s entire run). After years of dreaming, they finally launched their own festival under their own name, AMP Industrial Festival, in the fall of 2025.
MEET ME AUX FOUFOUNES
AMP kicked off the opening edition of the festival at Foufounes Électriques, a legendary venue in Montreal’s downtown for all things dark, alternative, and experimental. They’ll return again this year, to a venue that had never hosted the Kinetik festival. It’s an iconic choice, even an obvious one, the long homecoming of a scene that has always fought for its right to exist.
The story of Foufounes Électriques itself crisscrosses the broader story of the city’s industrial music scene. Three friends from musical theatre opened Foufounes in 1983, circa the economic depression and bar closures after the fallout of the referendum. The name comes from early performance art, wherein they’d paint themselves in bright colours and flash their foufounes (butts) at the audience from emptied TV screens.
The emergence of Foufounes was part of a broader, new alternative scene and the rise of global industrial music from the 80s. It dovetailed with the decline of disco in Montreal during the era’s economic recession. Much of theGay Village’s rise occurred in tandem with this new nightlife; Foufounes remains one of the only venues still standing from this era.
Some of the iconic industrial groups that played at Foufounes include Front Line Assembly, KMFDM, and a young Skinny Puppy. While you might’ve thought they were ‘christened’ by the performance of Nine Inch Nails there in 1990, two almost-bankruptcies would occur in the same decade. One of them involved the revocation of their permit, a curious harbinger of the era of noise complaints that has characterized the struggle of Montreal nightlife since the late 2010s.
This first era of industrial music, including all the iconic venues that emerged alongside, arose as a response to hardship, to absence. If difficulty and loss have acted as a great destroyer of scenes, they have also acted to create new ones. I think of the challenges posed by both the pandemic and by aggressive city regulation, the innumerable casualties lost to history now.
AMP as a group predates this challenge, but their festival is part of the era immediately after the pandemic. Will it be the start of something new?
You’ll need to be the judge of that.
WHAT: AMP Industrial Festival
WHERE: Foufounes Électriques, 87 Rue Sainte-Catherine E, Montréal, QC H2X 1K5
WHEN: 9-11 October 2026
METRO: Saint-Laurent (Green)
DETAILS: AMP Industrial Festival
