I am sitting across from Roger Tellier-Craig, the legendary and decidedly niche Montreal electroacoustic musician, at a wobbly brown table in the back room of Caffè Italia on Boulevard St. Laurent.

Tellier-Craig is telling me that his brief stint in the early 2000s as what he describes as a “hired gun” for the exponentially more legendary and decidedly less niche Montreal band Godspeed You! Black Emperor has hurt rather than helped his musical credibility.

“The people who love Godspeed aren’t into experimental electronic music, and the people who listen to experimental electronic music hate Post-Rock.”

Ambivalently, I concede, those two scenes and their members have little overlap. And consequently, counterintuitively, Tellier-Craig’s connection with one of this city’s most venerable musical outfits falls largely, proverbially, upon deaf ears. But Tellier-Craig’s sound goes well beyond the binary.

Even though he has been associated with everyone who’s anyone here — from Godspeed, Fly Pan Am, and Jerusalem in my Heart, to the filmmaker Karl Lemieux, and the intermedia artist Alexandre St-Onge — his solo work has been under construction for almost as long as Montreal itself.

I have followed Tellier-Craig for more than a decade, having discovered Le Révélateur — the musician’s influential collaboration with the video artist Sabrina Ratté — at Mutek in 2012. Later that year, I interviewed him for a Global Ear feature on Montreal in The Wire magazine.

Subsequently, Tellier-Craig has completed a degree in Electroacoustic Music at the Conservatoire de Musique de Montréal, collaborated with Karl Fousek and Devon Hansen, and ripened into a wise elder statesman of sorts.

It feels as though several lifetimes have come and gone since then, and it’s not just the pandemic time warp.

The Montreal Maple Spring soured into the cynical tolerance of capitalism and an acceptance of a provincial swing rightward. Now-ambient disruptions in technology and culture constantly destabilize how and where and why people engage with music. It is safe to assume that Tellier-Craig is not on TikTok.

That is not to say that his music is retro, nor his modes old-fashioned. Roger Tellier-Craig has reached a plateau at which he can focus upon the present, looking neither forward nor backward, content just to be.

Cut back to Summer, 2022. Tellier-Craig and I are sitting at Monarque in Old Montreal. The restaurant has graciously allowed us to film an interview in their dining room, as long as we do it between lunch and dinner service. I have no idea what I am going to do with the footage. But the thing about Tellier-Craig is, like the seasons in Montreal, he’s sure to come around again.

“Things have changed so much that I think the information I have acquired through this experience is kind of irrelevant,” says Tellier-Craig when I ask what sort of advice he might offer to the kids these days.

“I started making music in an era where you would put out records. Now you’re flooded with this information, this cultural information. How do you say, ‘Hey, here I am, listen to my thing?’ Everyone can make music. It’s readily available through things that we now, 20 years later, take for granted. People have access to MacBooks and laptops and GarageBand or whatever. The DIY mentality is even applicable to stuff that ends up sounding commercial. That’s very different from when I was younger.”

Certainly the world is awash in music. But it was not always so, and his particular encounters with Popular culture as a youngster formed Tellier-Craig’s sensibilities early on — and for a lifetime.

“My dad used to record this show called Friday Night Videos,” he recalls. “This was in 1983 or ’84. And every Saturday we would watch that. At the time, there was no other way to watch videos, so we would just religiously watch this every weekend. And I really got into Culture Club, Duran Duran, Michael Jackson, Madonna, Greg Kihn Band. Pop stuff. I remember getting Thriller on cassette. That was a big one.”

Tellier-Craig evangelizing about music is something like an encyclopedia on tape. He seems to know every little thing about every band, big and small, and makes hyperlinked leaps from one reference to another. “I know all those Beatles songs and ABBA songs by heart, but I don’t remember really listening to them. Music wasn’t as clearly important until I discovered punk. No no no,” Tellier-Craig backtracks, “when I discovered Pink Floyd. And the Velvet Underground. Because I watched The Doors. By Oliver Stone.”

Tellier-Craig cherishes musical breakthroughs as an intrepid explorer might have cherished landing upon some alien shore. His enthusiasm for high and low culture is infectious. Though he flatly denies guilty pleasures. “If you like it, you just have to own it,” Tellier-Craig claims.

“This came from me discovering Scott Walker — but the early Scott Walker, not the late Scott Walker. I discovered the early stuff when I was around 22. During that time, I was starting to discover some French Pop, too — like France Gall — and I knew that this music sounded kitschy to some people. But I was like, I really have to own that. I’m not liking this because it’s ironic. I’m not liking this because it’s cute. I like it because it really means something to me. It resonates on an emotional level.”

There is something inherently Montréalais about Tellier-Craig, and something inherently Tellier-Craig about Montreal. I ask what it means to be an artist in this city, and he contemplates for a long time before replying, “Montreal is accessible, not so expensive like Toronto or Vancouver, but still metropolitan, which means that a lot of people gravitate towards Montreal. A lot of talented people. Maybe people who are a bit more on the margins. To me, Toronto has always sounded more accessible or industry-like. Whereas Montreal has always sounded a bit more weird, in a good way. Like, people are taking risks.”

It has perennially struck me that artists from Montreal, and Canada, more broadly, need to make a name for themselves elsewhere before we take them seriously chez nous. It seems as though Tellier-Craig’s life story so far is about possibilities — possibilities to travel, possibilities to return, and now the chance to stay close to home.

“When someone gets successful outside of Montreal,” Tellier-Craig supposes, “it does make people here want to take notice more. Because they’re like, ‘Oh wow, this has an impact, other people think this is relevant, so I should pay attention to this now.’ But, for example, I remember seeing Godspeed before I played with Godspeed, when they opened for Sonic Youth, and people loved it. They were a band from here and they weren’t famous. Nobody cared outside. Nobody knew about them. And I remember people really, really loving that. It’s not black and white here.”◼︎

Roger Tellier-Craig performs 7 December 2023 at the Conservatoire de Musique de Montréal, 4750, Av. Henri-Juilien.