A 2013 Montreal indie show was held inside a working laundromat

Back in the autumn of 2013, a four-piece band from Mile End climbed onto a makeshift stage wedged between two rows of front-loading washers and began to play. The windows fogged with steam, the dryers thumped in time with the kick drum, and a small crowd of friends, neighbours, and curious strangers watched from a row of folding chairs dragged in from the alley. The show had no marquee, no flyer posted on Saint-Laurent, and certainly no bouncer. What it had was a way of making everyone in the room feel like they were witnessing something that did not happen every day.

The story has since passed into folklore among Montreal's tight-knit indie community, partly because of the absurd venue choice and partly because the set itself turned out to be the kind of performance that quietly redirects a band's trajectory. It is also a useful reminder that some of the most memorable gigs in any city are not the ones bought with corporate sponsorship, but the ones staged by someone willing to swap a sold-out bar tab for a roll of quarters.

The night the washers started spinning

The show happened on a Thursday in late October, when the Plateau-Mont-Royal air had already turned sharp and most locals had started wearing their coats indoors. The band arrived with borrowed amps, a borrowed pedalboard, and a borrowed drummer who had agreed to play for the price of a slice of poutine. The owner of the laundromat, a middle-aged woman named Diane who had lived above her machines for nineteen years, cleared a strip near the back and strung a single string of warm fairy lights along the pipework.

Tickets were free, but there was a small donation tin by the change machine, and anyone who wanted a demo tape had to bring their own blank cassette. Six songs were played before the first wash cycle finished. By the eighth song, the front row had to step sideways because someone had decided to dry a heavy wool blanket in the unit closest to the stage. Nobody complained. In fact, several audience members filmed the moment on early-generation smartphones and uploaded it that same night.

The band behind the hum

The group at the centre of the night has since gone on to release two EPs, tour through Quebec City and Ottawa, and play a string of basement shows that have made them favourites on campus radio. Their sound sits somewhere between dream-pop, jangle-folk, and the kind of reverb-soaked chamber pop that recalls early Stereolab records. The singer, Marie-Hélène, has a voice that sounds like it was carved out of cedar smoke, and her lyrics lean toward quiet domestic imagery: unmade beds, library books, kettles boiling over.

What made the laundromat version special was not only the venue but the way the band reworked the set to suit the room. They dropped the louder drum fills so they could be heard over the machines, replaced the electric guitar intro of one song with a ukulele, and stretched the final track into a slow, almost ambient number that ran for nearly twelve minutes. The detail that the drummer wore rubber-soled boots because the tile floor got slippery is the kind of thing that rarely makes it into a press release, but felt important at the time.

Why a laundromat, of all places

Laundromats occupy a strange corner of urban life. People go there alone, often late at night, carrying baskets they would not show in public, and they tend to drift into private mental space while the machines do their work. That quiet, slightly melancholy domesticity turned out to be a natural fit for a band whose songs were built from exactly that sort of slow, low-lit feeling. The machines became percussion. The detergent smell became atmosphere. The low ceiling trapped the sound in a way that made even the quietest lyric feel close to the listener's ear.

There is also a long tradition of unorthodox venues in Montreal. Church basements have hosted punk shows for decades. Bookstores have put on poetry-and-noise nights. Café-concerts slide into late-night gigs with little more than a sign flip and a chair moved aside. The laundromat slot pushed that tradition further than most, and it worked because nobody tried to control the room too tightly. The washers kept running, the band kept playing, and the boundary between everyday errand and concert hall simply dissolved for an hour.

Audience, atmosphere, and unwritten rules

The audience was somewhere between seventy and ninety people, which is roughly three times what the room was designed to hold. Some stood, some sat on top of dryers that had been turned off, and at least one couple arrived halfway through the second song carrying a laundry basket, having seen the chalkboard sign outside and decided that the spinning machines were not going to stop them from buying detergent. By the end of the set, several audience members had slipped quarters into a dryer simply because they wanted the warm air on their legs.

This is not entirely unlike the spirit that runs through Australian DIY scenes, where a band might share a bill at Melbourne's Tote one week and play a backyard in Marrickville the next. In Brisbane, festivals like Bigsound have helped turn small-room gigs into genuine launching pads, while in Hobart, the annual MONA FOMA festival regularly stages concerts in cold galleries, on ferries, and inside a working museum. Across those cities, the rule is the same as it was in that Plateau laundromat: if the room feels right, you do not argue with it.

A second, smaller audience gathered along the street outside, listening through the open door whenever someone stepped out for air or to check on a damp shirt. Some of them had walked past the laundromat a hundred times without ever noticing it could hold a band, and a few came back inside with the people they had arrived with, deciding on the spot that the show mattered more than the errands.

Wider context inside the indie world

The laundromat gig did not exist in isolation. It sat at the tail end of a wave of community-driven, low-budget events that had begun reshaping how independent music reached listeners in the early 2010s. Female and female-fronted acts in particular were searching for venues that felt safer than the typical bar scene, and many found them in coffee shops, bookshops, art spaces, and yes, occasionally laundromats. The economics were simple. Rent was low, capacity was small, and the door could stay open to whoever could make it across town.

This kind of thinking is part of a longer conversation that has been documented in pieces like the story of a feminist indie zine that grew into a record label, where print culture and touring bands fed into the same small pool of readers and listeners. The same impulse that put a photocopied zine into someone's hand in 2011 also put a flyer on a laundromat corkboard in 2013, and both approaches assumed that a small, deliberate audience was worth more than a large, indifferent one.

Why the DIY spirit travels

There is something quietly radical about staging a show where the seats were never meant for sitting and the acoustics were already claimed by household appliances. The risk is real. The plumbing might leak. The power might trip. The owner might get tired of the noise. The reward, when it works, is a memory that people carry for a decade, plus a few demos that sound like nothing else in the catalogue.

Australian artists have long chased that same feeling. Sydney's inner-west has produced countless house shows since the early 2000s. Perth's Rosemount Hotel has staged stripped-back sets where a single guitar was all the band brought. Triple J Unearthed has turned bedroom demos into national radio play, and the assumption underneath all of it is the same: a song does not need a polished stage to land. The Montreal laundromat show simply carried that assumption into its most domestic possible form, and it did so with the kind of dry, good-humoured stubbornness that keeps independent music alive in every city that lets it.

Element	Typical venue show	The 2013 laundromat show
Capacity	150–400 paid guests	70–90 free-admission friends and strangers
Sound system	Professional PA, formal soundcheck	Borrowed amps, no soundcheck
Atmosphere	Controlled lighting, bar service	Fairy lights, working dryers, detergent smell
Memorabilia	Merch table, official poster	Cassette demo on blank tape, chalkboard sign
Risks	Low — venue handles logistics	High — plumbing, power, neighbours, moisture
Outcome	Setlist, ticket sales, photos	Three videos uploaded the same night

What the night left behind

Two clear legacies came out of that October show. The first was the band's own trajectory: within eighteen months they had signed to a small Quebec label and were selling out the kind of mid-sized rooms that no longer required a wash cycle as backing percussion. The second was the example set for other acts who saw the gig videos and asked themselves why they had been limiting their shows to the usual list of licensed bars.

For anyone in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, or anywhere else with a stubborn DIY circuit, the simplest move is to book the unusual room, hang a string of lights, post the date on a community board, and trust the audience to show up curious.