Monika Ouellet fills her days in unexpected ways. During the workday, she’s a funeral director and embalmer at a funeral home in Saint John. A job she describes as “fun’ but when she’s off the clock, she goes by a different name entirely: Lazermortis.
Ouellet has assembled her own music studio in the basement of her home in Quispamsis. There she creates 80s/90s-inspired synthwave music. And she is as passionate about her music artistry as she is the mortuary arts.
“They don’t meet normally in real life,” says Ouellet, “but it’s kind of my shtick.”
She describes caring for deceased persons with the same delicacy and finesse as selecting an instrument for a song she’s working on.
“We really look at them as this is somebody’s loved one,” she says. “I would treat my grandmother this way. I would treat my grandfather this way. I would not want somebody, you know, to treat my loved one poorly. So I would never do that to someone else’s loved one poorly.”
Ouellet says both passions arose around the same time. Reading her mom’s pathology textbooks and joining her dad in his passion for music as she grew up in Sussex. She was actually on an entirely different path before she made death her day-job.
“When I was 20, I’d just come back from doing pastry arts and I was like…I really don’t want to be a baker,” says Ouellet with a laugh. “I even told my teacher, ‘Just let me finish the year. I don’t want to do this for a living. I want to go back and be a funeral director.'”
She interned at a nearby funeral home to make sure the path was right for her before going to the Nova Scotia Community College to get her funeral director’s and embalmer’s licenses. She hasn’t looked back since.
“It’s fun, we just do it all,” says Ouellet.
“We do everything from meeting a family, doing paperwork, calling venues, clergy, all those things to organize a service for someone. And then at the same time, we could be called to the back and have to do embalming.”
She says, once you get over the shock of caring for someone who has died, it becomes a position of caring.
Musically, Ouellet put out her first electronic music album in 2020, Backseat Demons. She put together and mastered 10 tracks entirely by herself on an album that she assembled and marketed herself. It has amassed more than 88,000 streams on Spotify alone.
Ouellet says that album – and her music as a whole – is influenced more from her funeral home work than one might expect.
“I think the themes of death and dying and thoughts of afterlife just kind of naturally make their way into my music because my day job takes up such a big portion of like my life that my brain just kind of automatically is wired to go that way,” she says.
Her latest project, a five-song E.P. released in August 2021, tells the story of how artificial intelligence might perceive death. That project, funded by a Music New Brunswick grant and mastered by another local musician, Nick Fowler. Entitled Autonetic Afterlife, it’s nominated for an East Coast Music Award for Electronic Recording of the Year.
“I’m like, blown away,” Ouellet says. “It’s a big deal for me.”
The ECMAs will be in Fredericton this year, about an hour’s drive from Ouellet’s home. She’ll find out if she wins on Sunday, but even a nomination has surpassed anything she ever expected.
Lazermortis is playing a show in Fredericton the night before with fellow nominee Den Mother. After the weekend of excitement for her alter ego, she’ll head back to work at the funeral home Monday morning.
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