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In the days ahead of Palomosa, as the city readies its best alternative outfits, nervously eyes the weather report for hints of sunshine amidst the rain, and speculates on what an MGMT DJ set may entail, PAN M 360 sits down with Mathieu Constance: The booker for Montreal’s newest, coolest festival.
A year-round show-booking extraordinaire, Constance has outdone himself with this year’s lineup. And despite the fact that he’s come down with a cold this week, no doubt due to the extraordinary pressure of maintaining the festival’s exceptional success streak, he’s as psyched as ever to welcome Montreal’s club kids to Parc Jean Drapeau this weekend, rain or shine.
We caught up with Mathieu to get his take on how Palomosa stacks up against more established festivals, his sleeper picks to see this weekend, thoughts on controversies in years past, and which ritual sacrifices to perform to get your favourite bands on the bill.
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PAN M 360: For those who don’t know, could you tell us a bit about yourself and your background in the festival and booking world?
Mathieu Constance: I’m the booking director now for Multicolore, so I receive all the bookings for Piknic Électronik, Igloofest, and Palomosa now. We also do a lot of hard ticket concerts and club shows throughout the year in between our festival seasons through the (Avec) Courage! brand. Upwards of a thousand shows a year.
PAN M 360: What’s different about working on Palomosa versus these other festivals you’re involved with?
Mathieu Constance: Palomosa is kind of our foray into the more ‘live’ side, and more alternative sounds. We never had a festival place to put these acts on. Historically, Piknic and Igloofest have been very DJ-focused and very electronic. And while that remains a part of the DNA, we’re doing more and more alternative, cloud rap stuff, more indie and punk, and a little bit of everything. And we’re realizing that there was no real place for these artists to showcase themselves on a festival stage in Montreal. So it came out of that, and the way it’s been received since the first year has been pretty validating—there are definitely people who want to see this, so I’m very excited for our return this week.
PAN M 360: Who are your standouts to see this year?
Mathieu Constance: There are a couple of less obvious names I’m really excited about. One of them is Ear, who’s really been blowing up. We were lucky enough to have them on the Yung Lean show we did at MTelus back in October. And they’re really one of the cool new bands to keep an eye on.
And Poison Girl Friend—a trip hop legend that’s still touring and still doing shows. I think that’s gonna be a really cool, mellow vibe in the middle of that mainstage day on Friday, which is going to be really sick. And on Saturday. I’m very excited to see one of the local artists called kinji00, who’s kind of our incarnation of the Bladee and Yung Lean sound in a French, Québécois setting, which is really interesting. And to see that influence and to see how big he’s become here has been really special. So we’re excited to have him at the festival for the first time. Those would be my kind of sleeper picks for this year.
PAN M 360: How are you discovering some of these more niche, online artists, and balancing those with more mainstream acts?
Mathieu Constance: We always try to balance it out, in general. We have some more established names on the lineup, who were obviously big before this whole internet culture emerged.
But I think it’s interesting to see the way music is being consumed now. It’s changed so drastically in the last couple of years. And the fact that names are popping off and blowing up on socials in a month’s time and becoming superstars overnight—it’s clearly had an impact on how music is consumed and how shows are performing in general. So it’s a balance between keeping an eye on that and seeing how kids are reacting to different trends. We tapped into that, and with Palomosa specifically, we’re curating to this crowd. So we need to be aware of what they’re interested in and make sure there’s a place for them.
PAN M 360: The festival has consistently had these bigger names to help anchor it down. Which begs the question, what kind of blood ritual did you have to do to get MGMT on the lineup this year?
Mathieu Constance: Sometimes it’s just leverage. Sometimes it’s just sheer luck. We were lucky enough to have Andrew (VanWyngarden) from MGMT play a solo set as one of the first club shows we did for Palomosa, a bit more than a year ago. That went well, and there was some intent to keep it going, and this year, the stars kind of aligned, the blood ritual worked. We got it done, and I think it’s gonna be really exciting to see what they pull out of their DJ bags.
PAN M 360: Is there a dream artist you’d like to book for Palomosa someday, even if you don’t know if it would ever really happen?
Mathieu Constance: I think there would be something really interesting about a whole day of programming around someone like Skrillex, really leaning into the different influences of his sound, whether that’s the more pop stuff he’s been doing, some of the more Latin sounds, and some of the more OG dubstep things. I think that would be something really cool to do curatively that would speak to multiple generations of fans. So that’s always on the table, one of the first things we love to look at, but it’s not been very easy to land.
PAN M 360: On the note of bigger artists, did your life flash before your eyes at all when MIA went on her Trump rant onstage at Palomosa last year? Did that affect booking this year?
Mathieu Constance: …Well, I mean, it was pretty obvious we weren’t going to rebook a headline for the second year in a row. And it’s not something that we would want to get into at all in the future. It seems there was an incident recently on the Kid Cudi tour that she was pulled off of. So, honestly, yeah. It was pretty stressful.
PAN M 360: Lastly, what are you hoping people will take away from this year’s Palomosa? Maybe a dry weekend for a change?
Mathieu Constance: Yeah, a dry Palomosa would be a bit of a first, we’d be really excited for that. But for me, come as early as you can. I know a lot of people are coming to see Fakemink and MGMT. But we have this programming that can reach these people. And I hope a couple hundred or a couple thousand people can walk away and be like, ‘I really loved Ear or Sophia Stel,’ when they weren’t familiar with them, but now they have a memory to hold dear. Because most of these, we strongly believe, will be blowing up soon, if not blowing up already. That would feel like mission accomplished for us.
