Mathieu Sénéchal, aka Noche, has had quite an impressive year in 2025. Two decades after launching his career as a bassist, the producer has emerged as one of the most vital new voices in Québec’s electronic scene.
In just a few months, Noche’s socials have exploded – especially Instagram, where his follower count jumped from 5,000 to 60,000. It’s even better on TikTok: his follower count is nearing 70,000, and his videos have racked up more than four million likes. Behind this breakout success is a video series he calls YouTube Sampling, where Noche films himself using just his laptop keyboard to sample the music of a well-known artist. From the sugary pop of Sabrina Carpenter (“Tears”) to Bad Bunny’s Puerto Rican house (“El Clúb”), everything instantly morphs into an electro-fied banger with shades of UK Garage or French Touch – two signature sounds the Montréal-based artist holds above all others.
“There are tons of videos like that in the hip-hop world, but most producers use an MPC (Editor’s note: a sampler developed by Akai),” says Noche. “To me, it made more sense to use YouTube, since my goal wasn’t just to document my creative process, but also to make an impact on social media. People are drawn to a punchy visual where they can recognize the face or video of an artist they love,” explains the producer, who’s also racking up hundreds of thousands plays on streaming platforms.
This fairly methodical approach to digital marketing is just about the only calculated part of Mathieu Sénéchal’s rather unconventional journey. It began in the late 1980s in Saint-Basile-le-Grand, a small town in Montérégie. “I was born in a little mobile home neighbourhood. I’m officially a trailer park boy!” says the producer with a laugh. “As a teen, I was really into punk rock. I was obsessed with music, but I only started playing later on. Actually, a friend of mine from high school was looking for a bassist for his band. I said I could play bass, but honestly, I didn’t even know what a bass was! He showed me some bass videos, and I started taking lessons so I could play with them.”
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The story continues just a few kilometres away, at the Drummondville CEGEP where he enrolled in the music program. “I was still pretty bad, but they saw I was motivated,” says Noche. “My teacher was Guy Boisvert [an acoustic bassist known for his work with the legendary François Bourassa], and he taught me so much. He could tell I wasn’t the best, but that I practised a lot. For three years, I was practising 12 hours a day; I barely slept.”
Around the early 2010s, Sénéchal began performing live, immersing himself in Montréal’s Latin jazz scene. “I started playing with Colombian and Cuban musicians. Every Sunday, among other gigs, I’d play at L’Escalier [a now-closed bar and live music venue on Sainte-Catherine Street in Montréal]. That eventually led me to perform in Havana several times. I went five or six times; I was all-in.”
It was around that same time that he fell in love with electronic music, drawn in by French electro icons like Daft Punk, Justice and Busy P, as well as UK dubstep pioneers Rusko, Skream and Benga. “I started producing shortly after that – mostly for myself – as a kind of reaction to the jazz world, which puts a lot of emphasis on ephemerality,” he says. “I was getting a bit tired of practising eight hours a day just to improvise live, in a moment that would never exist again. I found it de-motivating. And I have to say, there was a lot of ego in jazz jam sessions, and that got tiresome, too. Producing gave me something more tangible, not just a bunch of, ‘Hey, that was fun tonight!’”
Gateway to Pop
To help pay the bills, Sénéchal joined the band Lendemain de veille in the mid-2010s, a group that regularly lit up the stage at the legendary “chansonnier” bar Les 2 Pierrots, in Old Montréal. “That was my big entry into the world of pop!” declares the artist, with unrestrained enthusiasm, and just a hint of irony.
It was actually through one of his bandmates in that raucous country-trad outfit that Sénéchal crossed paths with Jason Brando, founder of the Cult Nation label, who had just signed a then-up-and-coming Charlotte Cardin. For nearly a decade, Noche was part of the Québécois singer’s inner circle, serving as her musical director and composer, making him instrumental in Cardin’s meteoric rise to the upper ranks of Canadian pop.
“Charlotte showed me the ropes of the business side of music,” says Noche. “Thanks to that whole adventure, I met musicians from all over the world. I learned how touring works, how visas and paperwork work. Like getting turned away at the border, for example… I’ve done a million things, but always with the goal of learning everything there is to learn. I never stuck just to the stage; I was genuinely curious about the people I met.”
Among the great connections he’s made is with the Toronto classical music collective Strings from Paris, who were invited by Cardin to perform at a few shows on her 99 Nights tour. It was with members of the collective that Noche recorded his first project, When it all ends (part 01), nearly two years ago. “I really hit it off with them, and one of the guys suggested I stay in Toronto to write and record,” he recalls. “I crashed in his parents’ basement for nine nights… but I barely saw his parents! Let’s just say I didn’t get a whole lot of sleep. We were doing sessions from dawn ’til dusk. And we found our sound pretty quickly; something super-emotional, kind of like Fred again.. but with strings.”
While fans wait for the second part of the project to drop, Noche will be heading out on tour with bbno$, another Canadian pop star making waves around the globe. The producer will, of course, keep releasing original tracks and remixes, all while staying open to offers from the many record labels now knocking at his door – ever since the release of his official remix of a song by Amber Mark, the popular American R&B singer and, incidentally, a close friend of Sabrina Carpenter.
“My DMs are full of labels,” says Noche. “I’ve already met with quite a few, but honestly, I want to take it slow. Given my age, I can’t afford to sign anything that could kill my motivation. I don’t have the luxury of making the kind of mistake you might get away with in your early twenties. For me, a bad 10-year deal takes me to 50. I don’t have time for a bad deal.”