Words by Fin Harrison

Photos by William B. Daigle

Every year, the isolated mining town of Rouyn-Noranda in northern Quebec hosts FME, an emerging music festival with a predominantly Francophone line-up drawn from Quebec and beyond, including a strong contingent from France and Belgium. 

It was among the Belgian arrivals that I stumbled across one of the weekend’s strangest and most captivating acts. 

At Le Petit Théâtre on Friday night, Brussels-based duo Mek’dr’dr delivered the kind of set that makes you immediately want to know more about the people responsible for it. Bassist and vocalist Mien Heyvaert stood barefoot amid a tangle of pedals while Sara De Wit presided over what, at first glance, appeared to be the combined contents of a kitchen cupboard and a garden shed. 

Spades, upturned bowls, colanders, cheese graters and empty bottles all became instruments as the pair built a wonderfully peculiar collision of minimalist post-punk, complex rhythms and vocal harmonies that, at times, sounded as though they’d drifted in from an Eastern European Orthodox choir. It was inventive, eccentric and ridiculously good fun. 

Fortunately, I didn’t have to wait long for a second encounter. 

By the following afternoon, the surroundings had changed considerably. Gone was the darkness of Le Petit Théâtre; in its place were broad daylight, a Tim Hortons and a car park. Because, naturally, that’s where Mek’dr’dr were playing their next show. 

The unlikely setting was home to one of FME’s many secret sets, and having been drawn in by the duo the night before, I was glad for the chance to see the whole operation again in daylight. This time, I could properly inspect De Wit’s wonderfully makeshift percussion set-up and watch exactly how its various bottles, bowls and other unlikely objects were being put to work. 

Afterwards, with the Tim Hortons car park providing an appropriately unconventional backdrop, I sat down with Heyvaert and De Wit to find out how the pair ended up making music with household objects – and why one particular bottle of Stella Artois has survived the journey for the best part of a decade. 

We begin with the obvious question: what exactly does Mek’dr’dr mean? 

Mien explains that the name is lifted from an Ethiopian expression for the peculiar social dance that occurs when somebody offers you something – an impromptu invitation to dinner, for instance – that you’d very much like to accept, but initially turn down for fear of imposing on them. The offer is made again, you politely resist again, and eventually everyone arrives at the “yes” you wanted to give in the first place. 

“This is actually really common in Belgium”, she says. “People turn down invitations they want to accept all the time, just because they don’t want to inconvenience the person that’s asking them. In Ethiopia they say ‘Mek’dr’dr’ when they want to say yes, but also want to be polite and not intrude.” It’s a wonderfully specific concept – and one that feels somehow fitting for a band whose music finds so much fun in the overlooked peculiarities of everyday life.

So far, the band have released just one EP, the hilariously titled No Safer Place Than a Toilet Seat. Across five tracks, Mek’dr’dr explore love, empathy and activism while embracing imperfection, questioning social conventions and finding a strange sort of comfort in chaos. 

“In our previous band, we played these studio sessions in a bathroom in Brussels. You can get a really good acoustic in there. And last year we entered a competition where we had to write a song about Brussels in the city’s dialect, and we immediately thought of the small bathrooms that you find in the cafes, where you have to sit with your legs squished together because there’s barely any space,” Mien explains. 

Sara picks up the thought, painting a familiar picture of the precarious Brussels public toilet experience: “You have to go down these steep flights of stairs to get to a tiny basement toilet, and if you get there without falling and breaking your neck, you then have the dilemma of not being able to shut the door properly because your legs are in the way. It’s awkward to use, but it’s something familiar that we love about the place.” 

The pair’s musical history together stretches back considerably further than Mek’dr’dr itself. They’ve been playing together in various bands for more than a decade, with this particular incarnation taking shape around five or six years ago. Their relationship as musicians, however, began with a slightly different dynamic. 

“I’m actually a classical percussionist, but it’s Sara who plays percussion in this band,” Mien explains. “Sara is so good.” 

“I’m not a classically educated musician,” Sara says. “I did learn instruments growing up but always thought of it more as a hobby. Mien was actually my teacher for about a year before we were in a band together.” 

Somewhere along the way, then, the student became the percussionist – albeit one whose instrument collection would probably horrify anyone expecting a conventional drum kit. 

“At the start we didn’t have many percussion tools,” Sara explains. “Mien had written a lot of these songs and put the demos together on GarageBand, with lots of complex percussion sounds in the mix. When it came to playing them, we either couldn’t find any traditional percussive instruments that sounded like what we wanted, or when we did, we didn’t have the money to buy them. In the end, we started hitting all kinds of things with beaters to see what worked and what didn’t.” 

What began with three or four objects gradually took on a life of its own. 

“With each new song we made, the number of things on the table in front of me increased,” she continues. “Now it’s at the point where we’ve had to start hanging some things up, because the surface area on the table is getting a bit too tight.”

Among the increasingly crowded assortment, one object had particularly caught my attention. Towards the end of their set, De Wit had taken an empty Stella Artois bottle and a wine bottle – objects I’d already watched being struck as percussion – and repurposed them once again, this time blowing across their openings and turning them into makeshift wind instruments. 

It turns out that while the wine bottles are somewhat expendable, that particular Stella has become something of a Mek’dr’dr veteran. 

“The wine bottles have smashed on stage before when I’ve been too enthusiastic, or when they’ve fallen on the floor,” Sara says. “In those situations, the public have always managed to provide us with a new one – but the Stella bottle has been the same one we’ve always used. I think we found it in Mien’s house years ago.” 

“I’m not sure it was in the room! It might have been somewhere in my house,” Mien interjects, laughing as she distances herself from the suggestion that her bedroom is some kind of graveyard for empty beer bottles. 

For their first venture across the Atlantic as Mek’dr’dr, the pair have found a particularly receptive audience in Rouyn-Noranda. 

“People are so ready here at FME,” says Mien. “They’re really open and into this alternative, experimental thing that we’re bringing, which has been really nice for us. When we play in Belgium, especially outside of the big cities, we often get the feeling that people aren’t ready for what we’re bringing, or it takes them a lot longer to adjust to whatever the fuck this is.” 

“Our music is influenced by a lot of 70s post-punk bands,” Sara adds. “A lot of older crowds who listened to that in their youth are always very receptive to it. Younger generations aren’t always sure about us, but here they’ve been so into it, which has been great.” 

Whatever the fuck it is, it works. And if the people of Rouyn-Noranda can embrace two Belgians unapologetically showing up with a bass, a shovel and a decade-old bottle of Stella, perhaps the rest of us should too. 

‘No Safer Place Than a Toilet Seat’ is out now via EXAG’ Records.