Turbo Crunk: An Oral History

By the mid-2000s, Montréal was grappling with the weight of its own success. Bands like the Unicorns, Arcade Fire and Wolf Parade had given the city’s young Anglo musicians an international spotlight, and the outsized attention had driven creative youth from the rest of Canada and the US to flock to Montréal. Bands, producers and DJs were everywhere as never before, but behind the scenes budgets were often constrained, with label and growth opportunities scarce. Despite its reputation as a leading international creative hub, as theorist Richard Florida would so famously put it, Montréal’s reality was still cold, cashless and confined from the rest of the continent.

Against this backdrop, figures from the indie rock, hip-hop and all-night party sets found common ground on dancefloors north of played-out Plateau Mont-Royal dives. Within that evolving scene in Mile End and beyond, a new movement emerged that would adopt, for better or worse, the moniker Turbo Crunk. From 2008 to 2011, its key players – Rob Squire, Hadji Baraka, Ango, Jacques Greene, Seb Diamond and Lunice – turned out a party that in design and dynamic earned its rightful place in Montréal’s club music history.

Beyond their addictive blend of live analog synths, trashy drums and Southern rap a cappellas, the Turbo Crunk story is defined by intergenerational bonding and rule-breaking. Through unlikely friendships and haphazard circumstances, the main forces behind Turbo Crunk built a camaraderie that has continued through the many successes they’ve since achieved as individuals.

MEETING UP AT ZOOBIZARRE: THE MEGASOID & MOFOMATRONIX ERA

Montréal’s Zoobizarre club on St. Hubert Street was, for a time in the mid-2000s, the go-to party locale. Rob Squire – then known as producer/MC Sixtoo – had moved from Halifax to Montréal, where the label he was signed to at the time, Ninja Tune, was based. Soon after, Squire formed Megasoid with Wolf Parade’s Hadji Baraka, and the duo started a monthly night at Zoobizarre. Meanwhile, high school pals Jacques Greene (then known as Hovatron) and Seb Diamond were joining forces as Mofomatronix, and they landed their own Zoobizarre monthly, Bass Culture. Andrew Gordon Macpherson, who’d known Squire from Nova Scotia, also arrived in Montréal around the same time.

Lunice

First time I set foot in Zoobizarre, we’re going upstairs, and if you don’t really go out, the impression you’ll get of that location is it’s where people get their prom gowns. And then you see this one door that goes upstairs, and you would not expect what’s up there. You just go inside and up this weird tunnel upstairs, to a castle-looking room. It was so great.

Mike D

You were literally partying in a cave. It was awesome.

Jacques Greene

The whole punk rock and indie community in the Mile End and that area, all those kids would definitely go up to Zoobizarre. It was the same people that would be in line at [Mile End café] Olimpico, which is another way that we broke the ice talking to Rob. Seb and I lived above Olimpico for a couple of years.

Rob Squire

I met Hadji in a coffee line at Café Olimpico. Somebody told me that he had a modular and I was like, “Hey, I want to try out a fucking modular.” He was like, “I’m going on tour next week. You can just borrow my shit.” I actually blew it up. It caught on fire at my house. So I was like, “I guess I bought a synthesizer.” And that’s how we became friends. He was super cool about it, in retrospect. We hung out, sitting in the studio and seeing how things are actually supposed to work before a power supply overheats or you put +5 volts back on the rail.

Ango

I’m ten years younger than Rob, but we grew up in the same small town in Nova Scotia, and everyone thought I was his little brother. I was a fan of his, going to his shows when he was Sixtoo. After Rob moved, I went to see him play in Montréal. He was still doing Sixtoo stuff then, but he’d started doing these live shows where he was incorporating a modular synth as a processor for his live show. Which is kind of the early incarnation of what Megasoid would become.

Jacques Greene

We interned at Ninja Tune for a little while, mailing out promo CDs to journalists and stuff like that. We were massive Sixtoo fans at the time and we knew that he was one of the few Ninja Tune artists who lived in Montréal. We remember him walking in the office and being like, “Oh my God, that’s him right there.”

Rob Squire

[Jacques and Seb being kids] growing up in the stockroom of a label, watching the record industry die, as your first job, is a super interesting perspective to consider, as people involved in the music industry for another fifteen years after that.

Jacques Greene

We asked Rob if they would play our party once and it didn’t really go well. He was just like, “You guys are a bunch of bratty kids,” and “Hell no.” It wasn’t even mean. It was just dismissive. Just like, “I’m an adult Ninja Tune artist and you guys are snotty 18 year olds. What are you saying?”

Rob Squire

They’re like “Yo! You have a party in Zoobizarre!” They invited me to theirs and I’m like, “Nah, I’m good man.”  Ironically, a year later I didn’t want to play with anybody else for ten years.

Jacques Greene

We persevered, hung around. We were at every party they did.

Seb Diamond

After months of cold-shouldering us, Rob just walks on stage one night and starts freestyling. It might have been one of the first nights he came to one of our parties, too. Also, clearly we cared about rap because we had good underground rappers performing, such as Subtitle and Cadence Weapon.

Rob Squire

Eventually, I would go to their party and be like, “Oh shit, these kids have work ethic and make their own flyers and book a headliner and are playing shit that no one else is playing.” That in itself is enough. You’re not going to just discount somebody who has that work ethic at seventeen.

Seb Diamond

With good effect, I think, Rob nurtured the younger [among us] as protégés. He was very nice and helped a lot. I could go to him with studio questions. I think only way later did I see him as kind of a peer, an equal and a friend.  I think there was always a sense of the background he had. He really had this unbridled, punk rock, hip-hop, do it yourself, fuck everyone else, “there are no rules” kind of attitude.

Rob Squire

Those guys definitely had as much of an influence on me as I did on them, there’s no question.

Lunice

Phil [Jacques Greene] hit me up over email because we were both big fans of Lil B, and that was right at the time when Lil B was on his Based God stuff. Phil’s like, “You’re from Montréal. I heard your beats, they’re really cool.” One of my first DJ gigs ever was playing Bass Culture with Phil and Seb, and we had so much fun that night. Rob was there as well, and he saw me DJing. He was like, “Hey, I’ve got a night tomorrow called Megasoid. Would you like to play that one, too?” And I’m like, “Yeah, sure.”  From that day on, I just kept playing with those guys and just learning everything. That’s how I got into using controllers and everything. It was those guys.

Jacques Greene

At some point, maybe Rob just gave up and let the barbarian invasion happen and was like, “Dude, we shouldn’t compete, let’s join forces and do this party together.”

Lunice

It didn’t take long before we started the Turbo Crunk night. It started off because either Rob or Phil brought the idea of putting both nights together because they’re so similar. Both of them sort of just played each other’s nights, so we were thinking, what if we make one big event and call it some other name, and then do it every two weeks? I think that’s how we started it, and then we came up with the name Turbo Crunk.

Rob Squire

It was really interesting when Turbo Crunk started to happen and you could take all of these inputs, like Southern bounce music and Bay Area turf shit and hyphy music, and really tough drums from hip-hop-centric music, and curb in whatever your tastes were as a DJ. And then put a cappella on it and just have enough of an anchor there that people would be into it and be like, “Oh, that’s Missy.”

Morgan Steiker

It was a mixture of the best kind of Timbaland, club, rhythmic production, mixed with sounds and textures that were unheard-of in club music. Rap a cappellas mixed with club music that had a really gritty street edge to it, and that’s what blew my mind about it.

THE CODA YEARS: TURBO CRUNK MAKES GLOBAL CONNECTIONS

A new St. Laurent Boulevard party institution in mid-aughts Montréal, the Coda Club became home to Turbo Crunk and its later incarnation, Bridge Burner. Owner Mike de Freitas AKA Mike D saw the value in bringing Turbo Crunk to his club once the event outgrew its first home.

Mike D

Rob wanted to do something there. I was just sort of stupidly throwing money into parties that had no real history of being as big as all that. Rob actively wanted to do it, and Rob’s the kind of guy who wants to do things properly. So we built some budgets around it, we had a few meetings, and then we did Turbo Crunk.

Morgan Steiker

I was writing my column for the Mirror when Coda opened. Coda was the most exciting club in Montréal, and Turbo Crunk was the most exciting night at Coda.

Jacques Greene

Low End Theory and LuckyMe parties and all this stuff started popping up, almost like this zeitgeist wave of things all happening at the same time. Which is great, because by then we were able to start talking clubs into giving us budgets up the ass. We could just fly in all these kids for a modest fee and they’d stay at our place.

Rob Squire

Mike D gave us more cash to work with than anybody else in their right mind would’ve to book these shows.

Mike D

At the time, we’d never really gotten close to five, six hundred people there. We always made our money back, and anything extra that came through the door we always gave to the artists. That was our ethos back then.

Lunice

As Turbo Crunk crew, we started communicating with LuckyMe, booking them, having them fly over. We booked the whole crew. There was Rustie, Mike Slott, The Blessings, which is the two founders of LuckyMe. That was pretty much the gang. That’s when I first met HudMo in person.

Morgan Steiker

Turbo Crunk was the Low End Theory of Canada, of the East Coast. Even New York didn’t have anything on a level of Turbo Crunk. They booked Hudson Mohawke, they booked Flying Lotus, they booked guys that are deep in the game.

Ango

We were always trying to make the live PA the thing that made the party different. It felt not as formal as a show, as well, because so much of it was driven around remixes. People would hear a cappellas of stuff they knew, but all of the music underneath we had made ourselves. It wasn’t really a DJ night. It was usually four or five acts playing and we were constantly evolving with what the live show was and how we could do it and how we could approach it.

Seb Diamond

We would have these master templates that would routinely crash our computers, and we would just bring in our favorite rap beats or cool techno loops. We drop it down and have this huge pastiche of all of these different sounds that we liked, and then on the fly start jumping through them. We treated these machines like video game controllers, more or less.

Rob Squire

What makes performing live really special to me is you have random elements that are introduced. Some chick fucking spilled a beer on your drum machine, and you need to make drum sounds out of a synth. At those parties specifically, I can’t count the amount of times where I got home and just literally would pour an entire Red Bull out of a machine.

Lunice

At the time, Lil Jon pretty much took over the rap scene in terms of being the biggest producer for a lot of people, and his whole crunk thing. “Turbo” was really just an idea of how many remixes we would make. It’s the idea of supercharging information with all you’ve got, with everything at your disposal. That’s the whole idea of “turbo.” It’s like, “This could happen, this could happen.”

Rob Squire

Really, it’s machine-soul music.

Mike D

That kind of bass music, in Canada, kinda broke while Turbo Crunk was still going on. The magazine XLR8R did a report, when that was still a big thing. And they called it “laser bass.”

Lunice

We would play a set with so many songs. We wouldn’t let a song run for more than a couple seconds sometimes. That was the whole idea that I had: almost every Turbo Crunk, we would make a new track. That was the whole vibe to it. Nothing was set. It was just sort of the energy in general.

Rob Squire

We were all listening to the same records and making the same type of shit at the same time. The fact that we were able to have those sort of things all at once was really special. Really, the best shit was always the after-parties for all of those jams. We’d already been out drinking for five hours before we got there and re-plugged in the soundsystem and set up gear. It’s a really great period of a couple years of my life where all that stuff validated the amount of work that you put into it.

POST-ZEITGEIST: INDIVIDUAL GROWTH AFTER COLLECTIVE SUCCESS

Career moves, further changes across Montréal’s nightlife landscape and the reality that all good things must come to an end meant that Turbo Crunk evolved for its key players and regular guests. While no one who participated in the movement will take credit for having directly help shaped modern club rap sounds, they each acknowledge that their individual success, in music and beyond, creates a shared sense of pride in where it started.

Rob Squire

Even when I was working on my main project, doing Sixtoo stuff, there’s always been a really strong body of work, definitive moments in bodies of work where I’m like, “Okay, this is complete,” or “This idea’s matured.”

Lunice

It was as if we all figured out a good style. We were all ready just to put it to a proper project. Because at the time we were all just making remixes, it was very underground, and then everything was sort of, “Okay, we got it.”

Rob Squire

I am somebody that is going to pursue the directions in my music or art that inspire me at the moment and not dwell on one thing for too long.

Ango

As the years went on, things winded down. Turbo Crunk stopped after Rob had left (for Vancouver). I got more focused on producing new R&B music and singing and all of that stuff. Phil and Seb went more towards house and did that. And Lunice kind of stayed true to where he was when he started, very sort of electronic, hip-hop-based stuff.

Lunice

It seems like Low End Theory started focusing. So did LuckyMe nights. When we all started paying attention to how we’re all working with each other, it really became a wave. I remember when I was about to put my first record out on LuckyMe, Flying Lotus was going to put his first record out. The way people reacted felt like, “Okay, if they took that, then they might get into what we’re about to put out.” As Lazer Sword put out their debut album, we all knew and had a feeling that, “This is going to be a really fun year.”

Rob Squire

We all started sharing Lunice’s stuff specifically. It was just like, “Oh, this is weird but still really accessible.” It references a lot of the music that we love, essentially Bay Area shit. I would say the Bay Area had a bigger influence on all of this stuff than people know.  We have LuckyMe that were getting the same thing in Scotland. When I heard what those guys were doing as DJs I was just like, “There’s no fucking difference here.” On the heels of mash-up culture, it was the antithesis of what was happening with Justice and power electro and all this kind of shit that was going on at that time.

Lunice

When all the TNGHT stuff started happening, we were just doing what felt good to us. We didn’t think much about it, and so that sort of just confirmed the whole idea of like, “Ah, you can really just be doing what you want.” But it’s all up to people and how they interpret it, and then how they talk about it in the future.

Ango

Lunice was constantly touring. Jacques Greene had moved to New York and Rob moved to Vancouver. Our different careers in music pulled us in four different directions. Rob was touring in the States and the West Coast. I was touring with Phil for two years, doing the Jacques Greene live show. Then I was doing my own tours in North America. We were all still seeing each other and keeping in touch, but where we did our laundry just changed.

Morgan Steiker

Lunice has been on Mad Decent, he’s one half of TNGHT. Lunice is a legend. He’s undeniable. He fuckin’ opened for Madonna. Jacques Greene had the number one electronic single out on Apple Music when he dropped his new shit, like, a month ago. That shit was number one for a week.

Rob Squire

When you see things that form a trajectory, it’s easier to just let the music speak for itself. Like what’s happened with Lunice, working on Kanye records, or where Phil’s gone with his music, or what Seb’s been able to accomplish as a DJ, or any of those guys. It’s interesting how all of it’s had a level of growth on its own.

Seb Diamond

We were very much a symptom of our environment. A sign of the times. I think that maybe we just happened to capture it in a particular way that was interesting.