Tonight’s humble event showcases two disparate talents, with a sole unifying factor: a basis in Montréal, Canada. Congolese-Canadian act Pierre Kwenders, otherwise known as José Louis Modabi, mixes musical styles of the black diaspora – hip hop, dancehall, highlife, to name a few – into an energetic and multitudinous whole (whether he’s singing in English, French, Lingala or Tshiluba). Caila Thompson-Hannant, aka Mozart’s Sister, stands in a different field entirely, specialising in sugar-sweet synthpop (with the ‘pop’ suffix firmly dialled to mid-to-late-noughties). It’s a heady concoction, and there’s ecstatic energy contained within the narrow confines of The Glad Café’s back room – bewildering, as the venue is barely half full.
Mozart’s Sister gets the show going, propping herself on stage in an enormous t-shirt, like a low-rent David Byrne. As it happens, her onstage presence flits back and forth from industrious knob-fiddling to a cross between Byrnian non-dancing and Britney Spears pop posturing, flicking her head of blonde hair back like a trained sea animal. Tonight’s set is mostly made up of new material from her latest release Field of Love – a short album of gooey pop faux-naïveté – which sounds astonishingly sophisticated live, largely due to Thompson-Hannant’s big stage presence and sweeping vocal range. The upbeat heartbreak of Moment 2 Moment seems to imagine a world where South Korean K-pop was instead forged in Canada (C-pop?), while the syrupy bombast of Bump sounds ripe for spitting verses. To all ears, Mozart’s Sister sounds practically chart-bothering – but the slow build of set highlight Angel and offbeat synthpop of Plastic Memories (containing clearly discernible Skype sound effects and the immortally bizarre line “I am a death messenger”) hints toward something altogether much stranger than your run-of-the-mill mega-pop fare.
Next comes the second act of the evening, as Pierre Kwenders takes to the stage wearing a tall leopard-print hat (tonight is full of bold fashion statements) and dives right into afro-house remix favourite Popolipo and the jubilant chant of African Dream, coolly rollicking about and amiably encouraging the audience to feel the interminable groove – not that they need convincing. Each and every track is thick with obscure pan-African samples and infectious rhythms, pieced together and profoundly realised in this live setting by dexterous multi-instrumentalist Jalouse, who stands guitar-ready behind a vast control desk. Latest single Woods of Solitude is a noticeable departure from Kwenders’ 2014 debut Le Dernier Empereur Bantou, as a hard backbeat locks in and out of groove to an exuberant highlife guitar lead that wouldn’t sound out of place on an Ismaël Lô record. By the time Kwenders rolls out the sample-heavy Sorry near the end of his performance, it seems a great loss not to have heard more new material from such a magnetic set.
It may be so that tonight’s twin headliners are somewhat mismatched, but it can’t be denied that both are similarly accomplished in nailing their respective sounds. Does it matter that, after finding themselves in a tiny back room in a venue across the Atlantic Ocean, actually not very many people came out to bear witness? To performer and modest audience alike, it doesn’t matter a jot. What’s more, the closeness and conviviality at The Glad Café tonight feels precious – something rarely shared in a more densely crowded venue.