How Tukan Rewired My Brain

It’s hard to put into words what the TUKAN experience really is, but I’ll try. Let me set the scene. A year and a half ago, during Montreal’s Jazz Fest on July 5, 2024, my friend went to see Berlioz at MTELUS. After the show, she asked the band the classic question: “Where’s the afters?” In what felt like fate, they replied, “We’re going upstairs.” Upstairs was where TUKAN was performing. I wasn’t there that first night, but the next morning, my friend called me and said she’d had the most life-changing experience. She tried to explain: TUKAN is a band that creates a live fusion of jazz, electronic, and instrumental music in real time. She couldn’t stop dancing and wouldn't stop talking about it. The fact that she went back again the following night told me everything I needed to know. I had to experience it myself.

The moment the four members stepped on stage and touched their instruments, I knew this was going to be one of those once-in-a-lifetime shows. From the first notes, I was pulled into their world. My body started moving, not with the usual concert sway of hips or casual shoulder shimmies, but with a flow that felt instinctive, like the music itself was guiding me. Montreal’s concert scene can be intimidating: crowds of stoic faces, subtle nods, and a quiet seriousness that sometimes overshadows the fun. TUKAN flipped that on its head. Their performance drew in people from all walks of life and invited everyone to let go, to dance without pretense. Suddenly, the room was alive with bodies fully surrendered to the sound. Tukan’s music builds in layers, ethereal tones stacking on one another, instruments weaving together until everything erupts in a beat drop that suspends time. In those moments, it felt like the entire crowd disappeared into a single rhythm, lost together in space and sound. With memories of Jazz Fest still burning in my head, the expectations for this night were sky-high.

After the longest introduction possible, let’s finally dive into TUKAN performance on Thursday, September 25, at Pop Montreal. I went with the same friends as last year, so we’d been waiting for their return for months. We walked into Bar Le Ritz PDB at 8:25 pm, just before the scheduled start time. Only five or ten people were scattered across the floor, and for a moment I wondered if we were in the right place. Surely that life-changing experience a year and a half ago had stuck with more people than just us. But of course, this is Montreal. The band was late, and so was everyone else. Our own anticipation made us forget what four years of living here had taught us: nothing starts on time, and nobody leaves the house before 10:30 pm. Still, the early arrival worked in our favour. We grabbed drinks and claimed a perfect spot front and center, barely a foot from the stage. At 9:00 pm, the opener, Poets Workout Soundsystem, burst onto the stage. Andrienne Amato wore a bright fuchsia Adidas tracksuit, while Andrew Whiteman, best known from Broken Social Scene, showed up in a red and white Adidas tracksuit, looking like he had stepped straight out of an '80s time capsule. Together they created fast, playful BPMs layered with groovy beats, radical poetry samples, and trippy visuals. Andrew, masked with oversized bug eyes, broke into funky shuffles and crumping moves that had me and my friends laughing. It wasn’t mocking laughter, more the kind that comes when something is so joyfully strange you can’t help but smile. That joy was the point. Their performance reminded me how fun itself can be a form of resistance. Oppression thrives on people feeling trapped and joyless, and here were two artists sampling poets like Ed Sanders, Alice Notley, and Nathaniel Mackey to argue the opposite: dancing, laughing, and celebrating are part of the fight. They even threw small posters into the crowd with QR codes that linked to a document listing all the poets and texts they had used. It was clear their goal was to educate as much as entertain, and the message landed: joy matters. Fun matters. In a capitalist system that infiltrates every corner of our lives, sometimes the most radical thing we can do is dance.

And just to make the moment even more surreal, Tukan themselves were standing right behind us in the crowd, watching their opener.

After a quick instrument changeover, the lights turned red and the four Belgian musicians who make up Tukan stepped onto the stage. To paint the scene, here’s how they stood from left to right: Samuel, rocking a shaggy blue mullet, stood at the keys; next was Nathan on bass; center stage sat Alexandre, freshly buzzed and with bright red hair that glowed perfectly under the lights as he settled in at the drums; and finally, on the far right, was Andrea on guitar. Samuel started things off, laying down the first notes, and one by one the others joined in, each adding a crucial layer to the sound unfolding before us. At its core, their music is a fusion of jazz and electronic dance, with clear psychedelic rock influences, but even that feels like an oversimplification. Their sound pulls from so many genres that trying to box them in does a disservice to what they actually do. The second the music hit, I was transported. Watching it happen live is like witnessing a shared trance, each member completely immersed in their own world yet perfectly attuned to one another. The music takes hold of them, and at the same time, it takes hold of us. You can feel it ripple through the room.

As I’ve said before, and want to emphasize again, Tukan’s performance is unlike anything I’ve ever witnessed. Words fall short when trying to describe what unfolds before your eyes, and even a video recording cannot capture the sensations or emotions their music evokes. The closest comparison I can offer is that of a religious or spiritual experience. I say this not from personal experience, but from what I’ve learned as a Religion and Cultures major. I have read countless accounts where people struggle to explain their encounters with the divine, where language fails, but the experience is deeply felt. In religious settings, people often speak of embodiment, the idea that the body becomes connected to something beyond itself through feeling. For instance, when someone says they saw God, they may not mean it literally, but the emotions and physical sensations they felt made the experience real. That is what TUKAN's performance feels like. It is not just watching a show, but being overtaken by the sensations and emotions the music creates. Another way to frame it is through this idea that artists talk about called the flow state, where you are so absorbed in what you are doing that you lose track of time and thought. During the show, I entered that flow state completely. I was immersed in dancing, letting my body move without hesitation. In a society where we are constantly stimulated by our phones and distracted from simply existing, it has become harder to just be. I once saw a TikTok that phrased it perfectly: technology used to be a way to escape life, and now life has become the escape from technology. TUKAN does the opposite. Their music launches you into pure presence, where space and time pause. For those moments, it feels like being conscious for the very first time. All that exists is the band, the people around you, and yourself.

There is something different about smaller venue concerts when the artists are only a foot away. It feels far more intimate because they can see you, you can see them, and that closeness changes everything. The people around you also become part of it, shaping your own experience while feeding into the band’s as well. Everyone in that room plays a role in what the night becomes. It is an incredible feeling to stand there knowing we had all just shared a once-in-a-lifetime concert. TUKAN cannot really be compared to any other performance I have been to. They stand apart, creating a genre of their own that pushes against musical expectations and results in something uniquely theirs. As a band, and through their music, they embody this idea of collective unity. Each member brings something essential, and one couldn’t exist without the others. I was blown away all over again by the way they layered and blended their instruments right in front of us. The chemistry between them was unreal. The set flowed almost endlessly. A few songs from their last Montreal show popped up, and my friends and I definitely lost it a bit. Each track made us move in our own way, and none of us cared what we looked like.

In my long-winded way, I want to wrap this up by leaving you with a few things to think about. In a world where so many people worry about how they are perceived, there is something deeply beautiful about letting go and not having a single care. If there is only one takeaway from everything I’ve written, let it be this: go to a concert where you do not already know the artist. This is not to say you shouldn’t go to TUKAN's next show, which I absolutely recommend, but to encourage you to seek out that feeling of organic discovery. Go to a concert where you know just one or two songs and allow yourself to experience something new. That is how I found TUKAN, and it is how I have discovered many of my favourite artists. It sounds so simple, but people often get caught up in the idea that you need to know an artist’s entire catalogue to show up at their show. You do not. Some of the best musical experiences happen when you walk in with no expectations.

One final thought: live performance is often essential to who an artist is, and this is certainly true of TUKAN. A video cannot capture what we witnessed that night, and even their recorded songs on Spotify or Apple Music cannot fully convey the experience of seeing them live. Without the performance, you lose the heart of their music-making process, and that process is at the core of what makes TUKAN so extraordinary.