multidisciplinary artist - music & poetry
Marie-Gold, also known as Chloé Pilon Vaillancourt, is a musician whose academic background in physics has shaped a versatile, proactive and original approach.
After becoming the first woman to break into the StepUp! top-tier league of WordUp! Battles, and founding the Bad Nylon collective, she released the introspective EP “Goal : Une Mélodie” in 2018 - self-produced with saxophonist Francis Leduc-Bélanger. Following a particularly prolific stay in Belgium, that first record earned her the GAMIQ award for Rap EP of the Year. Between engineering physics classes at Polytechnique Montréal, she performed at the OUMF festival, Osheaga Block Party and Les Francos de Montréal.
From 2020 the projects came one after another: the album “Règle d’or” that year, and the bonus EP “Règle deux” in 2021. The single “Impatiente”, produced with her Novengitum collaborators in Paris, brought her to a wider audience. In 2022 came the concept album “Bienvenue à Baveuse City”. That musical journey through the imaginary city of Baveuse City took her across Québec and France, alongside a role as Canadian ambassador for Red Bull Music and a performance at the Artistic Studio Palace in Paris for Greenroom Media, in collaboration with Maison Foule. Drawing on Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus as much as on commedia dell’arte, the record hides its sensitive, over-considered intentions under sweet and playful trappings. The mixtape “Retour à Baveuse City” arrived in summer 2023 to complete this absurdist universe, capping a tour of more than 50 dates and performances at La Noce, the FEQ, Les Francos and Le Festif!. The end of that universe - and of the five years in which Marie-Gold both shone and came undone behind a flamboyant persona - is accompanied by the short film “La Déconstruction de Baveuse City”, a black-and-white work currently touring international festivals (RIDM, Rendez-vous du cinéma québécois, and others).
Between albums, she travels the world by bicycle - India, Canada, the United States. Above all she questions the absurdity of existence and the sensitivity of art, in an open-ended search swinging between the rationalism of science and the reason of music.
She started her career in engineering in France and California. She took a break from the music industry to come back with poetry, guitar, and upcoming music projects.