Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville 2025

Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville
Victoriaville, Quebec
May 12-18, 2025

The 41st edition of the Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville was the second with Scott Thomson as artistic director, after taking the reins of the festival from festival founder and artistic director Michel Levasseur following the 39th edition in 2023. This year's affair was drastically reduced from the usual 20 concerts over four days to two concerts on Saturday evening, May 17 and several satellite events. Thomson presented this mini version of Victo, as the festival is popularly known, as the festival restructures and transitions to a new production team. The sound installations circuit, which has been part of the festival for the past 15 years, remained as a week-long part of the festival.

This is not the first year that a full festival wasn't presented. There was no festival in 1993, when it moved from an October event to the Victoria Day long weekend starting in 1994. Again, in 2009, there was no festival at all amid a restructuring, and FIMAV returned with a four-day rather than the traditional five-day schedule of concerts in 2010. The 2020 edition was canceled because of Covid, and the 2121 festival was a smaller event that took place under restrictive quarantine conditions with only musicians from Canada, mostly from Quebec.

While a number of music festivals around the world are in trouble or have folded in this post-Covid era, mainly due to rising costs, Thomson was quick to assure that FIMAV's finances are in good shape. Instead, the decision not to present a full 20-concert lineup was forced on Thomson by a staffing crisis. Michel Fordin, FIMAV's long-time technical director, had to step down last fall due to a diagnosis of stage 4 cancer. (Fordin passed away on May 8.) Thomson explained that this was one of several departures that happened around the same time, such that all at once, the festival was without an artistic director, communications director, and administrative director.

"I basically had no staff," Thomson said in an interview a few days after the festival. "I said to the board of directors that it's going to be really hard to piece together a huge plane while it's already flying. So let's do a reduced edition this year and take the time to restructure the organization properly so that we can come back with a full edition in 2026."

All that said, Thomson was satisfied with what he was able to present this year. Mats Gustafsson came to town and rehearsed with a group of stellar Canadian musicians from across the country, including Lina Allemano, Nicole Rampersaud, Jesse Zubot, Josh Zubot, Bernard Falaise, and Jean Derome, for his Fire! Orchestra project. Their performance at 8 pm on Saturday, May 17 could be called impeccable, a series of six compositions that were coherent, balanced, funky, and joyful.

Sleepytime Gorilla Museum performed at 10, in a metal adjacent manner with dark, heavy colours, costumes, and custom-made instruments to a full house at Victoriaville's Carre 150.

Of the two satellite events held on Thursday and Friday, the more impactful in terms of audience intrigue and the always important post-concert conversation was, according to Thomson, the presentation of Gustafsson's 1+1+1+1 on Friday evening. The composition is comprised of a series of one-minute improvisations by one musician in front of an audience of one. To clarify, one musician and one audience member were brought into a room, where the musician played for one minute to the single audience member, after which they left to be replaced by another musician and audience member who were brought into the room to repeat the process. In all, 51 of these one-on-one encounters were presented over a period of about 90 minutes.

"It was remarkable," Thomson told me. Moving between backstage and the front of the hall, Thomson was able to see the reactions of both the musicians and the audience members.

"People would come out, whether they were musicians or audience members, with this look on their faces, and then people around them would ask them what happened and how was it? It wasn't only a musical experience; it was very much a social experience as different people had these different one-minute experiences that they could compare to one another. It felt amazing."

On Thursday evening, at a small venue called the Lewis Café, Thomson was interviewed in front of the audience before a duo performance by Josh Zubot and Jean Derome, followed by a trio set by Lina Allemano, Jesse Zubot, and Allison Burik, all for free.

"Small-scale, informal concerts of improvised music basically don't happen as part of this festival. But it's something that we did this year because of the circumstances, and it worked really well. People were really happy to have this different point of access. And it's something that a number of people were explicit that this is something that should be preserved in one way or another, and I think I agree. It's a question of how that could be implemented, but it's definitely on my radar."

So while this year's Victo was not a normal affair, Thomson took advantage of the opportunity presented by having Gustafsson and the members of the Canadian edition of the Fire! Orchestra to do something different, and out of that came new ideas about what to include in the festival in years to come. Considering the sad circumstances, this was not a bad outcome, and longtime FIMAV attendees from across North America will potentially have some different experiences next year at this venerable and most resilient of festivals.

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