The Dud of All Duds

"How bad can it be?"

After the wonderful concert with Sheryl Crow and Brad Paisley on Tuesday night, we returned to Scène Bell on Wednesday night to hear the evening's performers. Lesson #1: If you've never heard of the performer before, do a little research. In this case, the performer was someone named Madeon and he fell into the "electronic" musical genre. Alison and I were familiar with neither the person nor the genre, so we shrugged our shoulders and said "let's check it out, how bad can it be?"

​In short: ridiculously bad.  Our first clue that something was amiss was when we queued up at the main entrance and all entrants were being frisked by security, a pat-down from shoulders to knees looking for (I can only assume) weapons. Undaunted (we should have been daunted), we went in anyway.

​The music wasn't music -- it was noise, and it was deafening beyond comprehension. The "performer" was a single person on stage with a small mixing board with dials and buttons. He "performed" by occasionally pushing a button or twisting a dial, which served to modulate the (still deafening) noise in indiscriminate ways. We stayed for about 10 minutes, then Alison looked over and me and said "let's go get some ice cream."

On the way out of the concert, we passed one of those portable lights providing illumination to an otherwise dark portion of the park. The light was powered by a diesel generator that gave off a thrum that was downright soothing compared to the electronica that was still thumping in the background.

For the record, there were thousands of young people amassed at the front of the stage, waving their arms, jumping up and down and, somehow, singing along with the music. You'd think that The Beatles had reunited and were singing Let It Be. I don't get it.

The Selfies

We returned to Tutto Gelato on Rue Saint Jean, to recover from our disturbing concert experience.

Tidbit

Château Frontenac is the iconic hotel perched on a promontory overlooking the St. Lawrence River. It is one of a series of hotels built by the Canadian Pacific Railway in order to promote tourism across the country.

The hotel opened in 1893 with the hope of attracting European tourists heading down the St. Lawrence to The Chicago World's Fair in that same year, but the hotel opened just a bit too late to capture that traffic.

​The hotel is generally considered to be the most photographed hotel in the world.