People are forever complaining about the lack of original music. And yes, you are absolutely right, it all sounds the same. But provocative weirdness does abound at the peripheries of pop, it’s just that a lot of us don’t listen to it. We spend our time trying to find middling examples of inspiration rather than flying to the corners where the real experiments happen.

You don’t have to dislike Franz Ferdinand or The Strokes to twig that they’re not blurring any musical lines – that’s straight-ahead top ‘o’ the pops, not innovation. But somewhere, just beyond the glare of the MTV/Clear Channel/RIAA searchlight, folks are shattering standards and indulging the oddity that will define tomorrow’s pop. Question is, are you ready to listen? Pop Montreal is betting you are.

It doesn’t take a genius to glean that "outside" music is the festival’s not-so-hidden hidden agenda. As part of the crew (you should know) who put the Pop Montreal catalogue together, I can direct you to page 3, where the festival’s creative director, Dan Seligman, lets the cat out of the bag ("So fuck Franz Ferdinand, Poorfolk is playing at the Miami"). Sure, Poorfolk aren’t exactly outside, but the festival roster is stacked with the stuff, and in the same paragraph Seligman plugs Michael Yonkers – it just doesn’t get more outside than that.

At age 56, Yonkers should be an icon, a legendary innovator of noise rock, sitting in the pantheon of pop-noodlers like Zappa, Captain Beefheart and Can. And he would’ve been if Microminiature Love, his first album, had been released on Sire Records in 1968 when it was slated to be. But it wasn’t. In fact, the album didn’t see the light of day until De Stijl Records’ Clint Simonson finally tracked down Yonkers and pressed the sucker to vinyl 35 years later. Sub Pop released it on compact disc in 2003.

Why exactly the Sire deal foundered has always been unclear – until now.

"The truth is I’m not sure who to blame exactly," Yonkers admits, his voice distinctly humoured. "It was either the label, my manager or me. The album was done and the label was enthusiastic but they had reservations. They wanted me to move to New York and rework the songs with a studio band, bubble-gum it up. Bubble gum!

"But maybe that was just what my manager wanted me to think," he adds. "I probably shouldn’t have been so trusting. In the end, though, it was me that called it off. I remember saying that I’d rather sit on the album for the rest of my life than have this music be treated like that."

He laughs heartily and at length. "Which, I almost did."

Oddly, in all that time, Yonkers never stopped playing, never stopped composing, recording or screwing around with sounds. A serious spinal injury in the ’90s did put him off performing for several years, but his imperturbable ingenuity worked around the problem: He built a brace to displace the weight of his guitars to his legs. Microminiature Love, far from being the definitive statement of his career, is merely one hour among a thousand hours of unreleased recordings, some of which he hopes to release in coming years.

Yonkers’ attitude to sound has always been that of a pioneer and explorer. When musical technology hasn’t kept up with his aural eccentricity, he’s built his own. He was one of the early users of the Fuzztone pedal and, after a brief viewing of the earliest Moog, he even built his own synth – out of a toy.

"Yeah that’s true," he says. "I was inspired to do it because of this one thing about the Moog that utterly changed my understanding of music – beat and pitch were the same knob! I don’t know if most people will get that, but it’s phenomenal. So, I modified this Sketch-a-tone toy that I bought at Woolworth’s with a potentiometer so that it could produce beats anywhere from one beat per second to 20,000 beats per second."

"It’s funny," he admits. "The timing for the release is somehow more appropriate now. With the Internet and the way music is transmitted these days, it’s easier to find an audience for music that’s outside the normal tastes. We used to get thrown out of clubs. They’d turn out the lights, turn off the sound and tell us to get out. Now people tell me that what I’m doing with noise is inspiring."

"Even the themes are on target," he adds. "In ’68, we were in the middle of Vietnam and the album was addressing that. Now we’re in a totally similar mess."

Michael Yonkers

With The World Famous Riflemen and The Besnard Lakes

La Sala Rossa (4848 St-Laurent), Oct. 1, 10 p.m.