Author Archives: Jesse Eckerlin

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Vapours & Spectre: notes on Les Vespérales de l’orgue du Sacré-Cœur

The first things Adrian Foster draws my attention to as he welcomes me into the Église Sacré-Cœur-de-Jésus in Montreal’s Centre-Sud on a late summer evening are the bells.

When the church’s bell tower renovations were deemed unfeasible in 2021, its five bells were lowered. But choir director André Pappathomas had them installed on wooden plinths on either side of the church’s pews.

While the appearance of the bells is striking, they’re not here just for looks. The bells, which vary in size and pitch, and the heaviest of which weighs several tons, have begun a new life as concert instruments for Les Vespérales de l’orgue du Sacré-Cœur, the experimental and ambient concert series Foster launched in Summer 2024.

“Performers have found their own ways to play them and to bring out their textures,” Foster tells me as we approach the largest bell.

He strikes it in various spots to produce different sounds. “When you have all five of these bells going, you can even make melodies,” he says.

“You can also use the clapper.” I’m intrigued.

Foster gets under the bell and lightly taps the uvula-like sphere hanging within against the bell’s inner lip. “Sometimes after a concert someone will start swinging it, and I have to run over and try to stop them,” he laughs. “They would instantly regret it. It probably risks shattering the windows, it’s so loud.”

“How can we keep this space alive?” Brandon Patitucci for Les Vespérales.

The bells are emblematic of what makes Les Vespérales so special. While they couldn’t retain their sacred function of calling the faithful to prayer, the bells have been repurposed by artists who love them to serve a new, largely non-religious audience drawn to their ethereal resonance.

Les Vespérales excels at creating aesthetic experiences that blur the line between the secular and the sacred. Even its pay-what-you-can philosophy seems like a nod to the Sunday mass donation plate, albeit via the inclusive ethic of grassroots concert organizing.

For Foster, reimagining the sacred is not just abstract but a question of preservation.

“There are fewer people going to church, and there are churches all over Montreal closing all the time, and this would typically be a church that would be at a high risk of being closed,” he says. “So, it’s important in this kind of case to ask: what value can we bring to this building that has been an important part of the community here in the Centre-Sud that maybe its religious vocation no longer can do alone? How can we keep this space alive?”

Les Vespérales is one answer to this question, and central to its offering is its unique marriage of sound and space. “What we’re developing here is not just a space to hold any kind of music events, which many churches already offer,” Foster emphasizes. “What we’re really focusing on is new musical creation by artists who are creating new music in this space, for this space.”

A case-in-point is Esther-Ruth Teel, who arrives partway through our conversation to rehearse for Sirens, an audio-visual collaboration with composer Gavin Fraser. Sirens revisits Greek mythology and reimagines the creatures as survivors rather than as agents of sexual violence.

“I’m a little nervous,” admits Teel. In addition to performing the organ and vocal parts live, Teel’s poetry and performance work feature heavily in the piece’s visual component.

“In some of the footage I’m standing on rocks draped in a cloth, but not modest, and so the alarm bells in my head are going off,” they tell me. “But I think there’s something exciting about portraying and reclaiming your body within a church where female-associated bodies especially haven’t been celebrated.”

Like most Vespérales de l’orgue du Sacré-Cœur concerts, Sirens showcases the series’ titular organ, a 1928 electro-pneumatic Casavant Frères whose pipes take up the better half of the gallery above the church’s main entrance.

If the bells are the heart of a church, then the organ is its lungs.

“One of my favourite things about the organ is this kind of acousmatic listening experience.” Brandon Patitucci for Les Vespérales.

Teel tells me that what initially drew them to the organ was its powerful ritualistic purpose. “Like, at a funeral, if you’re playing something beautiful that’s meaningful to the family, then you’re integrating with their lives in a way that classical concert music doesn’t do in the same way. You’re guiding an experience,” Teel says. “And I feel like this series is really doing that. You’re actually doing something important for people, bringing them on a journey.”

Once we make our way up to the organ loft, Foster admits that he’s never heard a recording that really does the organ justice. “There are some instruments where you can listen to a recording and feel like you’re hearing the instrument pretty well and getting a good re-creation,” he says. “But I find organ recordings are almost always disappointing compared to hearing it in the room. I think it’s because there’s so much about the way that it interacts with the space that speakers can’t capture.”

Sound registers differently throughout a church. Individuals make their own choices about how to make use of these spatial dynamics.

For example, Vespérales’ yearly Winter-Solstice Ambient Night seats listeners directly in the organ loft to create a more direct and intimate experience of the organist. Speakers are also mounted on either side of the gallery, and performers can live-treat sounds from the pipes through effects if they so choose.

“One of my favourite things about the organ is this kind of acousmatic listening experience where you don’t see the music being played but hear this disembodied sound which is coming from this massive instrument that is part of this massive space,” Foster says.

His interest in acousmatic sound transformation and non-traditional use of the organ has also led him to commission the creation of a new experimental organ that will eventually become a fixture of Les Vespérales.

“Les Vespérales sounds cool. It evokes night and mystery and the religious element without being overtly religious.” Brandon Patitucci for Les Vespérales.

Created by the organist Alexander Ross, the LIMINARE, as it is known, is a unique hyper-organ whose pipes can be directly manipulated by performers as they play. While traditional pipe organs are built with a particular wind pressure in mind so their pipes produce stable tones at intended pitches, the LIMINARE organ is microtonal, and its wind pressure can be dynamically adjusted live.

“As you increase the wind pressure more than the pipe is voiced for, it starts to overblow, and when it’s overblowing it will jump to different harmonics and the timbre will change.” Foster demonstrates as LIMINARE’s reeds squawk something like a mad duck.

“This is an instrument that I commissioned that I want to make music with, but it’s here in this space and will be an integral part of this series with other artists coming to explore it on their own and find their own way of making music with it.”

As the sun sets and twilight enters the dimly lit church, a hush descends upon the space.

I think that it would be a good moment to ask Foster about the name of the series. He says that Pappathomas suggested it.

“Les Vespérales sounds cool. It evokes night and mystery and the religious element without being overtly religious, because this isn’t a religious series. André says that when we’re doing these organ and electronics performances there’s this kind of cloud of sound around here, and he feels like the sound is like little prayers floating around in the vault of this space.”

I tell Foster and Teel that even the English word “vespers” sounds to me like a portmanteau of “vapours” and “spectre.” It recalls midnight mass when I was a kid, the excitement associated with church at night — smoke, incense, fog.

“I like that,” says Foster. “It makes me think of the ghostly traces of everyone who has filled this space.”◼︎

Cover image: Brandon Patitucci for Les Vespérales.

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All Dressed

Black Bough, Green Shoots: in conversation with Mark Molnar

“In composing, I am trying to express something that I remember but does not yet exist,” the contemporary composer Mark Molnar tells me.

Although he is a classically trained multi-instrumentalist, Molnar has spent most of his life outside the incentive structures and institutional norms of neo-classical chamber music.

When he began working on the musical triptych that would make up EXO, his 2025 debut with Constellation Records, he says, “I had no funding, no ensembles awaiting my work, no creative directors or conductors programming these pieces.”

Instead of lamenting these conditions or waiting for an invitation that might never come, Molnar decided to play and record everything himself — piano, percussion, synthesizers, and half a dozen stringed instruments. Growing up in the 1990s punk and post-hardcore scenes, Molnar has stayed true to one of its central tenets. “Whenever possible, do-it-yourself.”

DIY comes naturally to Molnar. Though he has collaborated with dozens of artists ranging from metalcore heavyweights Buried Inside to kaleidoscopic psych-supergroup Land of Kush, Molnar largely works independently when it comes to his own compositions. With methods akin to a one-man musical nose-to-tail, Molnar writes, plays, and records the pieces, mixes them, and often self-releases them through his own Black Bough label.

“Almost all of the things I have written start with a pencil, an eraser, a ruler, and a blank page,” he explains. “When writing music, I don’t work up the melodies or parts on an instrument until after they are written. I don’t want my conception of them to be limited to my meagre ability on any instrument, or the common keys or positions my hands may casually be most comfortable in.”

Playing each part himself gives Molnar the ability to craft and control every element of his desired sonic tapestry, he says, “from body and frequency, vibrato across instruments, bowing, timbre, phrasing, volume, distortion, and resonance in a space.” He describes the process as a combination of “problem solving, merciless editing, erasure, and a honing or carving down to the essential elements.”

This meticulous and hermetic process has been a feature of Molnar’s solo artistic practice since at least 2007, when under the moniker “Kingdom Shore” he released …And all the Dogs to Shark as Black Bough’s inaugural record. Launched at a time when indie rock was becoming big business and affected ennui and ironic detachment were giving way to hyperbolic, performative sentimentality, …And all the Dogs to Shark was a middle finger to it all: a searing work of uncompromising, discordant string music that owed as much to Drive Like Jehu as it did to Stockhausen.

In 2007, a bygone era of iPod battles and New Atheism debates, there was nothing quite like it. The ars poetica Molnar included in the album’s liner notes firmly established his commitment to the musical margins and his refusal to chase fashion or climb the cultural ladder.

This is not a bid for relevance. This is not modern.

In the nearly 20 years since …And all the Dogs to Shark, time marked in a wider context by the normalization of global forever wars and the subjugation of all facets of aesthetic life to algorithmic whims, Molnar has quietly and steadfastly released a number of solo and ensemble works — with Horseman, Pass By with Bennett Bedoukian, and 1/4 Tonne Overdrive with Montrealers Eric Craven and Nick Kuepfer.

Although he resides in Ottawa, Molnar is something of an honourary Montrealer due to his longstanding ties to the city’s experimental music community. He played at Constellation Records’ legendary Musique Fragile series in the late ‘90s and has performed and recorded with fixtures of the city’s out-music scene such as Thierry Amar, Sam Shalabi, and Vicky Mettler. His previous records have garnered Molnar a modest yet devoted following, and the release of EXO with Constellation brings him overdue national and international visibility.

“I don’t tend to look to art for escape.” Mark Molnar photographed by the artist.

For EXO, Molnar tells me that he wrote, learned, and recorded the three pieces that make up the album over the course of three weeks. He began with harp tracks, then reinforced them with piano, and subsequently added parts for nearly a dozen instruments. From there, Molnar mixed EXO in such a way that, “the patina of it became its own body of sound.” What results is a singular suite of dense, elegiac, and immersive electroacoustic chamber music with shades of drone, holy minimalism, doom, ambient, and musique concrete that ultimately transcends these genre prescriptions.

EXO, which comes from the Greek prefix ἔξω meaning “outside” or “external,” nods toward Molnar’s kinship with that which falls outside of and resists normative culture and processes.

The album’s opening track, “Sub Luna,” begins with a musical calm after the storm such as might traditionally be found in the repose of a classical piece. Only here, it is as if the traditional structure is reversed, and we quickly descend into more disquieting and discordant territory.

Resonating piano chords, down-tuned double-bass, and sustained tones from an MS-20 usher in a cradling envelope of sound. Syncopated harp notes and strings shimmer like filigree within the sonic undertow. Between what Molnar describes as the opposing shorelines of the piece, tidal currents of low-end drift and interweave with melodic tendrils in the higher registers before eventually returning to the opening motif.

There is an elemental heft to EXO, a disquieting sublime immensity, reinforced by Edd Allan’s stark ocean photography that accompanies the record. “My true realm of passionate experience of sound is in the sonic oblivion of low-end and its resonance, always,” Molnar says.

Nowhere is this passion for sonic oblivion clearer than on “Terre Sacer,” a ghostly dirge in which ominous melodic figures move in and out of focus in slow motion, ebbing and flowing, brooding and resisting until settling into a repeating three-chord structure; within this maelstrom, a processed human voice mournfully cries out like a siren going under.   

Music critic Harry Sword, author of Monolith Undertow, proposes that low-end drone, “exists outside of us, an aural expression of a universal hum we can only hope to fleetingly channel.” Accessing this universal hum as a listener can cradle and console, but Molnar is skeptical when I suggest that music is an escape. He suggests that the tendency to look for escapism in art is ultimately misguided. “I prefer Yeats’s contention that there is another world,” he says, “but within our world.”

It is hard to disagree with this rationale. Escape implies fantasy, which in turn suggests the spell cast by entertainment. Entertainment, a variation of well-established aesthetic territory, might provide a reassuring distraction from the hardships of life, but when the distraction is over, “the suffering is waiting,” Molnar warns, “blood-thirsty and merciless.” Only by transforming suffering into a vector for connection can music exceed escapism and become art. “I don’t tend to look to art for escape,” he suggests. “I find it brings me closer to reality and lessens my removal from it.”

Molnar may be an outsider. But his vision is grounded and decidedly anti-utopian. He stoically strives to maintain grace in the face of applause and derision, both of which he claims are distractions from self-knowledge and craftsmanship. Whatever is nascent within him, Molnar finds a way to attune to its cryptic hum.◼︎

EXO is out now via Constellation Records.

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