U.S. fans to descend on tiny Quyon, Que. for ‘trippy’ music festival. Locals to stay home.

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“Quyon is a very small, old-school country music kind of town,” says Cain. “When we book a country music band, that’s when we draw the hyperlocal community.”

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Then there is Dubue’s programming and its occasional focus on the experimental — events like Canadian composer, instrument designer and sound artist Gayle Young’s scheduled performance featuring the electronic sackbut, the synthesizer invented in Ottawa that will be on loan to Fantôme from the Ingenium group of museums, including the Canada Science and Technology Museum.

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Not exactly Ron “The Silver Fox” McMunn, the Ottawa Valley country singer who led the house band at Gavan’s for nearly a decade. “Years ago, it was country — just country,” says Carmen Marcotte from behind the counter at her sister’s gas station and convenience store, Dépanneur Marcotte, one of the few businesses remaining on Quyon’s main street. Like others here, Marcotte is a fan of Dubue’s and holds out hope the locals will connect with his brand of entertainment. “This village, you have to promote stuff and encourage them — because it’s a pretty old community.”

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Mike Dubue is photographed at The Manx pub, a co-sponsor of the festival and where buses to the festival will leave from over the weekend. Photo by JULIE OLIVER /POSTMEDIA

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Cain calls Dubue “a genius,” and sees the neighbouring music studio as a positive when buying Gavan’s. “As far as how the town perceives it, everybody likes to be part of a success story, but this is a big evolution,” says Cain. “There are no baby steps in towing that line between pushing for growth and being respectful of tradition.”

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Many in the village are more interested in another business under new ownership, just up the road from Gavan’s and Studio Cimetière: the Egan Mill. It’s an artisanal whole wheat flour mill, local produce market and soon-to-be cafe built into the historic mill on the Quyon River once owned by Ottawa Valley lumber baron John Egan.

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The business has more in common with Studio Cimetière and Gavan’s than you might suspect.

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That old mill, once a hub of activity in Quyon, had been abandoned for 15 years before Isabelle Lajoie and Marc Bergeron, a married couple who own a hobby farm nearby, bought three years ago. “People were excited to finally see something happening with the mill,” says Lajoie, an architectural technologist who will also run the Egan Mill

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The idea initially was to produce the grain the couple needed to feed their own livestock. But soon the project evolved: Lajoie and Bergeron invested in Danish milling equipment that Bergeron, an electromechanical technician by trade, assembled in an outbuilding alongside the historic structure, with a focus on automating the process.

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Visitors to a farmers’ market can see the results through an interior window: a gleaming lab-like space that looks like where Stanley Kubrick might source his flour.

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Lajoie coined a slogan for their newfangled mill — “when history meets the present” — that could describe exactly what’s taking place down the hill at Gavan’s and Studio Cimetière: old venues and a “new type of music,” as Elizabeth Kluke, Gavan’s business manager, likes to put it.

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The electronic sackbut, meanwhile, will be set up at Studio Cimetière, which seats 80 and is organized around the studio’s live-tracking room in the nave and chancel and below the structure’s 19th-century stained glass windows. Dubue calls the church “my main instrument.”