The audience refused to leave at the end of Montreal psych-rock band TEKE::TEKE's performance at Highlands. A surging ovation carried calls for "one more song" and "encore" until lead guitarist Sei Nakauchi Pelletier came back on stage and politely let everyone know that the band didn't have an encore in store for them. The crowd finally dispersed, but not without a daze — for many, myself included, it was the first time experiencing TEKE::TEKE, live or otherwise.
The beginning of their set was a stark contrast to how things ended. It was right after dinner and not many had gathered their bearings when TEKE::TEKE took to the stage. But their sound was enigmatic enough — so unlike any other act presented by the festival thus far — that people emerged from all around and gathered at the foot of the stage, curious to see the source of such beguiling havoc, like a bewitching fever dream. Soon, every inch of the planks of wood set on the ground to provide steady footing against the muddy terrain was occupied, and sooner still the ground began to quiver and shake. Lead vocalist Maya Kuroki's words (and sometimes her cowbell and small gong), Pelletier's jolting and blazing guitar, Yuki Isami's ethereal flute and Ian Lettre's drums had made their way into everyone's body, nary a soul could be found not swaying or dancing to the music.
The band's sound — harnessing the narrative and psychedelic trip of '60s and '70s Japanese film soundtracks, and infecting it with a quintessentially Montreal flair, chic and so impossibly cool the band seemed to redefine the term — had a dissolving effect. As Kuroki sang, sometimes screamed, in Japanese — of being wrenched apart by crises of identity (within the self and in inanimate yet animated objects), ephemerality, climate anxiety, entrapment within manufactured environments — her voice bore into everyone's soul and moved and trembled every body, so that the crowd moved as one being. And just as a whirlpool churns faster and faster at its core, so too the crowd directly beneath TEKE::TEKE began churning as people began moshing. On stage, Isami, wielding her flute, danced like a possessed doll, Pelletier headbanged while his guitar screeched with an ancient soul of its own, and trombone player Etienne Lebel weaved his way through them, sounding like a frantic beacon.
TEKE::TEKE prompted a oneness as they eroded self-scrutinizing egos and brought everyone together with movement and, above all, a newfound love for their music. After their show, it seemed as if everywhere you turned, you could hear a person saying, "Holy shit that was amazing." "They should've been the headliner," said a girl before me in line for the washrooms after the show. "I suddenly love Japanese psych-rock," she said. It seemed that Highlands had, inadvertently and most beautifully, prompted a mass conversion.