Toronto Aime Sebastien

They're casual fans, but only because they do everything casually: sip, exhale, shake hips, make unprintable kinds of eye contact. You can tell these girls learned about Sebastien Tellier by falling in love with the Lost in Translation soundtrack, and then remembered the French multi-instrumentalist when Daft Punk (or at least, half of Daft Punk: the one with the overly hyphenated name) got involved, producing the remarkable new full-length, Sexuality.

"It's not as jammed in here as I thought it would be," says the brunette. "I guess cause it's a Monday."

"On a long weekend," adds the blonde.

"People are probably tired."

"Or normal."

"Normal," it's true, wouldn't be anyone's word of choice to describe the crowd at Sebastien Tellier's A.D/D-presented show at the Mod Club. There were overweight relics of another club scene swaying right up next to barely legal boys squeezed into near-parodies of skinny jeans. Freshly shaved former jocks leered, in ways they hoped were vaguely Gallic, at pretty scene stars from Montreal.

When an American Appareled Tellier introduced songs en Francais, some of them booed, demanding their own tongue, and some yelled back, "Je t'aime."

He tried English. And we're not one hundred per cent sure, and we'd hate to be libelous, but we'd swear on our highest heels that Tellier told a glistening audience he was seriously substance-addled.

"Someone put this thing in my mouth, and I went 'ahhhh!' but... it was too late," he confided, standing askew, wine glass tilted in one hand.

"So. I am high on LSD."

At which point, Tellier proceeded to either trip, or rock, out. We're still not sure. The songs from Sexuality tend to culminate in messy crescendos, like orgasms not quite aligning at an orgy. Not everyone gets off on it. Certainly, some shuffled their metallic kicks, shrugged, complained that it was too soft or weird or that there wasn't enough of that Daft Punk synthesizer. But in the crowd huddled nearest the stage, there were ecstatic gasps followed by breathless spaces aplenty. Especially when Tellier sat down at the piano and plunged into the heartstoppingly gorgeous "La Ritournelle." Nobody was complaining then. Nobody said anything at all, just listened, absorbing every measured or slurred syllable of a universal language.

Photo by Tobias Visualbass.