The trajectory of the Montreal-based band Orchestroll is a circuitous and slow-burning arc.

Its founder members Jesse Osborne-Lanthier and Asaël Richard-Robitaille have over 20-odd years become central characters in an exclusive but sprawling Dramatis Personae of Montreal’s experimental music scenes. Long associated with fellow local artists like Marie Davidson, Alex Moskos, and Bernardino Femminielli, the two have each independently achieved a sort of mythical status.

Yet despite a string of legendary works under various monikers including Meat Parade and Noir, Bataille Solaire and L’Œil Nu, releasing their music through fabled record labels such as Los Discos Enfantasmes and Ninja Tune, and performing at festivals like Suoni per il Pololo and Mutek, neither quite launched stratospherically in the way the aforementioned acts did.

Now, nonetheless, operating as a core duo with expandable potential, Osborne-Lanthier and Richard-Robitaille seem to have finally hit their stride, coalescing and combining their collective expertise into an endeavour that is one part musical group, one part design team, and one part ritual cult.

Together, Orchestroll concoct an intoxicating sonic tonic, a potent blend of timeless and contemporary acoustic and electronic instrumentation that at once is uncannily familiar and defies categorization. Across four releases in the span of two years, beginning with 2024’s Hyperwide Lustre and culminating in a limited-run cassette called Big P, Orchestroll have verified their credentials among this city’s most talented artists.

Generically speaking, they might be placed at the overlapping margins of techno, ambient, and industrial music, enchanted sorcerers of organized sound somewhere within a Venn diagram of Russell Haswell, Coil, and György Ligeti’s Atmosphères. But pinpointing their origins is a murkier task.

“It’s very hard to find the genesis of Orchestroll,” says Richard-Robitaille on a recent visit to their new studio space, a residential apartment adjacent to Osborne-Lanthier’s home in Saint-Michel.

“It was more of a code name,” Osborne-Lanthier explains. “I had a file of stuff called Orchestroll.wav in 2015 on my computer. I kept that name as something I wanted to use at some point. The initial idea was to involve different people for every record, for it to be like this orchestra thing. And then Covid happened, and it became the two of us. The idea of it being collaborative just disintegrated.”

Richard-Robitaille, 40, hails from near Quebec City, having arrived in Montreal in 2004, while Osborne-Lanthier, 38, relocated here from the Gatineau region in 2009. The two have been friends since 2011, meeting in passing while performing at La Brique and The W()mb, two of the city’s now-defunct loft spaces which at that time headquartered a significant stronghold for Montreal’s DIY community. Self-organized events and spontaneous performances routinely erupted in these spaces, providing an alternative nightlife to Montreal’s Grande Public culture.

Richard-Robitaille began playing guitar as a child at his father’s influence. He later studied Classical guitar in CEGEP and attended but did not complete the composition programme at La Conservatoire de musique de Montréal. “I realized that practicing guitar for three hours a day was not my thing,” he says.

Conversely, Osborne-Lanthier’s musical abilities were entirely self-taught. “I built a studio in my mom’s basement when I was 16,” he recalls, “and just kept building on that and moving it with me, learning as I went. When I wanted to acquire a new technical skill, I would just go on YouTube or download the manual.”

I first saw Richard-Robitaille perform as Bataille Solaire at La Sala Rossa in 2012. Playing a set that would have eclipsed James Ferarro while looking like Hunky Dory-era David Bowie, I remember it as one of the most exciting electronic music performances by a local artist that I had attended until that point.

I discover on this visit that Bataille Solaire is an anagram of Asaël Robitaille. “It’s a little over-the-top. But there was always a bit of humour involved in that project,” he claims.

I caught Osborne-Lanthier for the first time as one of the local openers for the American artist Pete Swanson’s gig at Casa del Popolo on 1 September 2012. Of that show, I wrote in the December 2012 issue of The Wire: “even the heartiest in attendance is left feeling rearranged.” A hallmark of any transformative experience involving sound is that it can literally reconfigure one’s constitution, frequencies realigning us physically as well as emotionally in profound and unexpected ways.

In May 2025, Orchestroll released their magnum opus, a double LP entitled Corrosiv, via the New York City-based 29 Speedway record label, featuring a host of guest appearances including Milanese musician Heith and saxophonist Habib El Bardi.

“It’s been an ongoing project that ended up at the studio here. This record came together as a sort of broken thing where we were working on three different conceptual things that we would take along with us wherever we went. When we got here, finally, we could look at the stuff with a new perspective,” Osborne-Lanthier tells me.

“And keep the strongest stuff and refine the strongest stuff and blend it together and mix it into one concept,” says Richard-Robitaille, picking up the thread. “It’s been two or three years.” He describes the recording as the “baptism” of their new studio. “It was the first Orchestroll project that’s been produced and finished here,” he says.

Osborne-Lanthier explains: “We spent a month refining it in this studio, but it took years elsewhere in other spaces.”

The modular modus operandi befits Orchestroll’s vibe, a kind of alchemical purification process that distills their sound to its rawest essence. The tone is quietly confrontational, a reflection especially of Osborne-Lanthier’s reputation for being an outspoken, endearingly curmudgeonly, uncompromising voice on the Montreal landscape.

This approach at times has undoubtedly ruffled feathers and perhaps alienated the duo from local power brokers. But one thing Orchestroll cannot be accused of is pandering to the politics or tastes of the day. If you live by the motto ‘DIY or die,’ at times you have to accept the latter.

During our freewheeling conversation, Osborne-Lanthier takes aim at several deserving targets. The internet: “It’s a weapon used against people to dumb them down and have them subdued”; Artificial Intelligence: “It’s techno-feudalism at its best”; the corporatization of protest music: “Punk now is buying a pair of jeans online and wearing them cool”; the city’s current administration: “The municipal government seems bent on creating a nightlife where opening a pub up on Stanley until 6am is a way to boost culture.” The salvos land aptly.

“I’m so far from nightlife culture that I just disconnected myself,” Osborne-Lanthier admits. “It’s not my cup of tea anymore. I’m not involved as much as I used to be. It’s a very weird relationship. I feel like I have to go elsewhere to find what I’m looking for in music. There’s not enough in Montreal. There’s not enough infrastructure. There’s not enough money. There are not enough venues. It’s hard to really find a sustainability here in music.”

Richard-Robitaille agrees. “I feel like since the pandemic, things have changed,” he observes. “Inflation and the housing crisis — I think that maybe Montreal isn’t as welcoming and easy for a starving artist anymore. That was the luxury that Montreal had: you could have the shittiest part-time job and make art the rest of the week.”

“There’s no shortage of people doing amazing things here,” Osborne-Lanthier notes. “But there’s a hell of a lot of venues that are missing.”

Indeed, with Montreal emulating the concessions of other big cities like Toronto and New York to the whims of real-estate developers and neglecting what made Montreal an attractive destination for groundbreaking creative communities in the first place, it is unclear what the future holds for the next generation of boundary-pushing artists from Montreal and abroad.

“There’s still ways of keeping it alive,” Richard-Robitaille offers, optimistically.

“The first thing would be for the city to invest in actual culture and facilitate bridges so that people can learn. For the younger generation to have access to platforms and locations where they can actually enlighten themselves and take risks and become actual artists,” Osborne-Lanthier suggests.

“I wish it would happen,” he laments, “but it’s so hard to be hopeful. To the younger generation, stick together and keep doing your stuff. Keep hosting DIY events and use the infrastructure you have to keep raving.”◼︎

Orchestroll perform 14 August 2025 at the Society for Arts and Technology, 1201 St. Laurent Boulevard.

_{Cover image: Orchestroll photographed for NicheMTL.}