Montreal’s Fairmount Theatre is compact enough that every sound feels close, even when the bass rattles your ribcage. On August 12, the intimacy contributed to a night that was anything but small. Local hero Backxwash and Los Angeles experimentalists clipping. turned the venue into a pressure cooker, each act pushing intensity in very different directions.
Backxwash opened with a set that was pure confrontation and catharsis. Her industrial-leaning beats slammed hard, and her delivery cut through with the kind of fury that feels personal even when you’re standing twenty rows back. Montreal crowds have a reputation for playing it cool, but here they were shouting along, some visibly stunned, others raising fists in approval. For a hometown show, it felt less like nostalgia and more like a statement of power.
clipping. shifted the mood but never dialled down the volume. Daveed Diggs prowled the stage, firing off rapid-fire verses that seemed to bend physics. His bandmates, William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes built a sonic environment full of jarring glitches, sudden silences, and bursts of noise that landed like shockwaves. At times it sounded like machinery breaking down in real time, only to reform into something danceable.
The combination was dizzying. Songs blurred at the edges, interrupted by bursts of static or sharp blasts of distortion, before snapping back into Diggs’ pinpoint delivery. The unpredictability became part of the thrill: one minute the crowd was bouncing in unison, the next they were caught in stunned stillness before the next beat hit.
What stood out most wasn’t just the technical wizardry, but the way the audience bought in completely. People were locked in, heads nodding, bodies moving, and eyes fixed on the stage. clipping. pulled everyone into their world, and for a while Fairmount Theatre felt like a different place entirely.
Review & photos – Steve Gerrard
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