“A pact to fight tyranny to the death.”
—Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse

Recently, a friend and I discovered a part of the city I had never seen before. Across from a parking lot on the way down from Mount Royal mountain is a small park surrounded with bright orange tape, beyond which is a large emptied pool covered in graffiti and gated with barbed wire.

As we sat secluded watching teenagers sneak through a hole in the fence, drinking from their cans of beer, we talked for hours and played songs on the pocket stylophone I got last Christmas from my sister. After being unceremoniously kicked out by a couple of security guards, we began walking home under a waning and bruised sky. Descending the steps to the street I noticed some artwork. On the stairs in bold green and black paint were plastered the words: “Stuck In Doom U 2?”

Like a jigsaw falling into place, this phrase echoed a recent desire of mine for some sort of city-wide pulse check, to quantify the general anxiety of the people around.

It has become background buzz in local news that several well-known cultural establishments in Montreal have for years been the targets of deeply asinine noise complaints. And it is not insignificant that these issues have been focused particularly in milieus considered frequent spots for a densely trans and queer demographic.

The flattening of the tectonic nightlife of this city by landlords for the sustainability of their assets is a poison in the well of our drinking water. Bars and venues like Champs Bar and Turbo Haüs should not have to be forced to complete countless expensive soundproofing renovations to pacify a landlord’s every whim. But to allow the contractual demands of private ownership and its associated feelings of moral elevation to be overlooked in popular opinion would be devastating indeed for capital. This is theatre in its lowest form: a handful of actors loudly orating in front of a reluctant audience strong-armed into paying simply to end the show.

There is an implied hierarchy of noise in cases like these — a sense that the stifling and exhausting atmosphere of commercial expansion will continue to be valued by city council boards over the existential necessity for places devoted to assembly.

As a young queer and non-binary adult, I understand how significant a space dedicated to community is to the well-being of individuals like us. These rulings to destabilize the local ecosystem (including the nutty “permit to dance” issued to Champs a few months ago) feel less like punishments for violating the social contract and more the first move in an unraveling series to thin the already marginal canvas of queer voices in culture. To redesign a city dedicated to art, to the purposelessness of craft — to use Oscar Wilde’s words, all art is quite useless — into a much less risky residential one (note what happened to Cabaret La Tulipe and you’ll understand my point) is the expected outcome of a well-known bottom line: silence can always be purchased.

I’m reminded of a lyric from “Change The Channel,” taken from experimental Hip-Hop group clipping.’s latest LP Dead Channel Sky: “Asbestos is best before breakfast.” These words ring out with a deadening lilt when recognizing the ubiquity of mold around us. Cracked foundations, peeling paint, rent increases, surprise evictions, a groaning and wheezing industrial cacophony.

The satire of invoking a toxic and absurd diet here is chillingly uncomedic when adapted to the modern global regression. Is there any evidence that capitalism births genuine technological progress? Are we not trudging through the debris of innumerable industrial “successes” already?

New computers which cost a fortune but never last, self-driving cars that murder pedestrians, endless cheap plastic tchotchkes overflowing from retail shelves that will outlive us all. A worse version of something that already exists, the overcrowding of matter. We are pushing through the radioactive blast of a nuclear event horizon with a cancer blooming in our skin, or in clipping.’s words: “Gum bleed for the lead in the air”.

There is an outcry for resistance at the nucleus of this noise-policing epidemic, a lust for an unshakeable moral outrage against administrative complacency to conservative reactionary appeals. The problem is that this righteous indignation is narrowed against the eldritch horror of bureaucracy. There is a currency applied to particular noise which is never applied in equal measure: the cry of the spurned bourgeoisie versus that of the city it feeds on, which at its current rate will continue to terraform cultural identity.

What happened to La Tulipe, Divan Orange, and Diving Bell Social Club may likely suffocate Turbo Haüs and Champs Bar just like it did the rest. The loss of these spaces will have an immeasurable impact on our landscape. But I am enough of an optimist to conclude on a lighter note.

There is a useful ethos espoused by musician and avant garde composer Annea Lockwood. If you simply pay attention to the thrum of the natural world, you can begin to hear its music. The babble of water, the shock of branches in dance, the eternal ebb and flow of nature eroding its concrete framework. An immutable harmony carried by the air. This is life bursting in a counter-hegemonic inflexibility.

My mind drifts back to the memory of that day on the mountain with my friend. The small pocket of anonymity we had found by accident. The crooked slope of the fractured sidewalk shaded by overgrown grass and the bench we sat on with its several slates of missing wood. The silhouette of it bending to our weight, its blueprint accommodating our shapes. How much of its essential beauty would be lost were it to be repossessed, power-washed and spackled, re-evaluated?

The questions for now however are as follows: how much do community relationships rely on particular architectures, and when will it be too late to learn definitively that they do?◼︎

_{Ozzy Delacroix is a writer from Montreal who spends the majority of their days working full time in a record store. “Ranking The Noise: notes on excess and harmony” marks their first publication.}