MTL Sauce Piquante

The album has its genesis in 2017, when after the club night MTL Pachangón would end, a large crowd would end up in Oonga’s kitchen, talking, singing and laughing until early in the morning. These parties were punctuated by beatmaking, rap cyphers and jam sessions, and happened in English, French and Spanish. Often featuring some of the most respected musicians in the Montreal scene, this multilingual, multicultural and multigenre type of party spawned the idea of MTL Sauce Piquante. 

Bringing in a kitchen-party-at-2-am-banging-pots and-pans attitude to the sound, the music includes mixtures of urban music and ska, tropical bass and samba punk, calypso funk rock and dembow punk, with themes of feminine empowerment, celebrating immigrant experiences, personal and political struggles for freedom, protecting mental health, and finding power in community.

The 10 tracks of the album started out as beats, raw experiments made in Oonga’s home studio aka his living room. In early 2023, the government decided that these experiments were worth supporting, allocating some funding to record a full album.

This a studio recording made in a living room, with a carousel of guitarists, horn players, keyboardists, bassists, rappers, singers, poets passing through, sitting on a couch and adding their special ingredients to the sauce, sometimes alone, sometimes in a group. The music was performed, debated, torn apart and put back together again by many of the participants, a collective process that took months and spanned a lot of bottles of El Yucateco.