Montreal is known for its exciting nightlife, teeming with live music, outdoor festivals, and sweaty dance clubs. Lately, a different kind of outing has emerged on the local scene. Instead of dancing, you sit. Instead of talking, you listen. No beat or booze, just bliss.
“In my community, a lot of us meet on the dancefloor, but it doesn’t necessarily facilitate a space for deep connection,” says Elle Zinck, the “kreator” of Koala Karnival, an ambient music event series of live performances by professional DJs. During the pandemic, she started noticing a BPM (beats per minute) slowdown in music and wanted to satisfy a craving for closeness she had noticed among partygoers. At Koala Karnival events, soft instrumentals without defined beats are combined with various sounds to evoke meditation and contemplation. The goal is for audience members to experience a personal sonic journey. The popularity of these events is growing. At the 2024 edition of FrontRite’s Front Republic, a community-led electronic music and wellness festival, the pop-up Kommunal Garden featured international DJ Bodaishin and attracted 150 attendees.
Earlier this year, I was invited to experience a seven-hour Koala Karnival gathering, held at the organizer’s apartment. I walked through the quiet cobblestone streets of Montreal’s Old Port area and rode up a creaky elevator. At the end of the long hallway, a koala-bear keychain hung on a doorknob. Inside the apartment, forty people were gathered around a tall wooden potluck table. Dressed in pajamas and cheetah-printed robes, they hugged the people they knew and introduced themselves to newcomers.
Zinck banged a gong and guided us to the silent second floor. The DJ deck was on the floor between two speakers illuminated by candlelight in the dark room. The ceiling sparkled with green star-like lights, and colourful images of nature, planets, castles, and koalas were projected onto the wall. We grabbed a seat, shoulders pressed against each other. This closeness never felt odd in a nightclub, I thought, but here it felt unsettling.
The “Kollective Kircle” broke the ice by inviting us to do breathwork and share an embarrassing story about ourselves. I turned to the stranger beside me and opened up. Amid our whispers, she became the only other person in the room. With every word, we sank deeper into our seats, with only a stuffed animal between us.
Tony Kassia stood up and moved to the deck. Beyond the soft piano and harp, notes lingered beneath a subtle drum sound, layered with the lullabies of the late British writer and “philosophical entertainer” Alan Watts. A breeze blew through the sounds of chimes and rain. Was it music I heard or the patter of raindrops falling on the skylight? Kassia, an active performer and organizer on Montreal’s dance scene for over a decade, told me that Koala Karnival allows artists to share a more personal side of themselves with audiences that want to listen deeply. His set was a homage to his late dog. “Dance music goes by fast, and you’re right next to the next drop—it’s euphoric, it’s happy, it’s uplifting,” he said. “But with ambient, [you’re telling] a short, slow story. You let people sit with it as you navigate through songs.”
Catherine Bournival, who attended the first Koala Karnival in 2023, says the music allows listeners to follow someone’s journey while exploring their own in a magically healing way. “I feel the music naturally takes you to the depths of yourself. It can bring up some emotions that were suppressed. It can take you to nostalgia, gratitude, or melancholy,” she says.
For her set, Zinck invited us to wear blindfolds. The music swelled with overlapping, looped sounds, increasing in tempo and volume with a frantic intensity. A cinematic orchestra of wind and string instruments caused each of my thoughts to develop on its own black branch as my heart pounded with overwhelming discomfort. It turned out that Zinck’s performance was inspired by her experience of a three-day retreat in pitch black. She wanted to describe the experience with sound because she had been unable to do so through words.
After the set, many people felt lighter and drifted off to sleep, cuddling like koalas. The colouring station near the tarot card room was busier than the puzzle area. Pockets of people chatted on the kitchen floor while others did yoga beside hanging plants. One person sat alone in a mini circus tent, a girl covered in butterfly wings smiled at her friend, a man was mesmerized by the flame of an incense stick. As I wrote in my journal, I felt as if I had been transported to another era.
Zinck calls this audience activity a period of co-regulation, during which an individual’s emotional state influences the entire group. “Everyone is finally fully sunken into the experience; that’s when the magic happens, because the whole room just drops,” she says. “It creates this communal bubble where our collective nervous system is fully relaxed and we finally feel that exhale in the room.” Other artists who performed that night incorporated guided meditations, vocals, and instruments into their sets.
This new type of nightlife for young adults, surrounded by sound instead of substances, is catching on, Zinck says. “With the high-stress environment that most of us live in, [this is] an experience where you’re being invited to do the opposite. Life is asking you to be productive and do a bunch of things. Here, just being you is enough.”
At 3 a.m., one final upbeat track brought everyone out of their slumber and I began to notice the brick wall, the wood floor, the textured blankets. I remembered where I was because, for a while, I’d been somewhere else: in my own inner world.
Some music encourages you to listen to your body and shake it all off. At Koala Karnival, the music moves you to listen to your soul and use the space as a vessel for individual experiences that unfold side by side.
ALESSIA PROIETTI is a Montreal-based writer and freelance journalist, with an interest in local techno and electronic music scenes. She began her career reporting the local news in Red Deer, Alberta, and has since written for The Costco Connection, Everything Lifestyle, and Ski Canada Magazine.