Author Archives: Ryan Alexander Diduck

Massive Lectures

Reattach to Love: notes on interdependence

“On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone.”
—John Perry Barlow, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, 8 February 1996

In a recent New York Times op-ed, the columnist David Brooks notes with concern the widening happiness gap between those who feel love and those who don’t. Throughout the past 50 years, lots of us living in the West have progressively chosen personal autonomy over partnerships, preferring the independence that social detachment brings to the interdependence that accompanies, say, a spouse or children.

Since the 1960s, family ties have gradually come to represent an outdated and unfashionable lifestyle, as the more implicitly contemporary values of career advancement, financial stability, and self-determination increasingly replaced traditional life goals.

Nevertheless, our modern autonomy has led to alarming levels of disparity in self-reported happiness, Brooks finds. The University of Virginia sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox wrote in an email to Brooks claiming that those who were married with children were 30 percent more likely than unmarried and childless people to report that life was enjoyable most of the time — a significant and remarkable difference.

This statistical inconsistency is counterintuitive to many of us for whom the term ‘family values’ was synonymous with oppressive conformity. Shouldn’t liberated people be happier? What once might have been considered a trap paradoxically sets us free, believes Brooks.

Attachments signify interdependence. And yet, forging loving attachments is not the example that major world powers are setting for us on a daily basis. Russia, for example, is not pursuing loving attachments with its neighbours by colonizing Ukraine. The United States is deliberately destroying loving attachments by instigating trade wars with its closest allies and illegally attacking its perceived adversaries.

Therefore, the message that we receive at the quotidian level is that attachments, loving or otherwise, are a luxury to be selected or rejected for the already comfortably independent. Love doesn’t motivate the cultivation or annihilation of attachments today. Power does. And power is based upon dependence, not interdependence.

As an observer of technology, I find metaphors in our technological interfaces and the actual physical connections between our devices. In my research into the history of MIDI, aka the Musical Instrument Digital Interface, I discovered an anomaly in the world of digital connectivity in which a standard protocol for literal attachment amongst digital devices defied obsolescence for more than 40 years. Was this because MIDI was the best interface? No. Was it more likely because a consortium of musical instrument manufacturers convinced an industry to accept a compromise that benefited all of them? Yes.

The Glenn Miller Orchestra performs at Maison Symphonique 21 December 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

MIDI provides one model that might correspond to Brooks’ pragmatic argument about loving attachments. That is, stick with the traditional convention, flawed as it may be.

The other more common model is the planned, rapid, and frequently accelerated obsolescence of connective ports. For nearly a century, RCA cables have remained the standard for wiring hi-fi equipment. In the digital world, though, it is rare that any cable survives the obsolescence cycle for more than a few years. How many dead old dongles do we have in our junk drawers, these intermittent connectors that we buy and just as quickly discard when their periods of usefulness expire? The narrowing window of compatibility for technical standards must on some level reflect the deteriorating criteria for compatibility between people.

Is it any wonder that we tend to treat human relationships, so-called loving attachments, just as disposably? There will always be a new connection with the promise of enhanced compatibility and the sheen of novelty just around the corner.

Of course, the logical conclusion of the interconnectivity wars is to have no physical connections, to be networked wirelessly to everything all the time. Ultimately, this type of connectivity is exclusively vulnerable to control. It is just as easy to connect as it is to disconnect digital devices and thus disenfranchise the people who use them from this vast web if we don’t submit to the protocols of attachment. No love lost.

Again, this kind of model indicates dependence and not interdependence. If you want to attach headphones with your new iPhone, but there is no more headphone jack, then you have to submit to another form of loving attachment.

The internet was conceived as a space independent of traditional governance just as post-modern social space was conceived as independent of traditional family constraints. “Our identities have no bodies,” John Perry Barlow announced in his 1996 Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. “Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.”

We now understand, however, that matter alone undergirds the virtual world — think of the 1.46 square kilometre Apple Park in Cupertino, California, or the vast water-cooled A.I. server farms that are hastening the demise of the world’s most precious natural resource. We would do well to attend less to the myth of immateriality and more to the attachments that matter — those between us.

Over the holidays, I experienced the most meaningful connections not through technology but at two consecutive live events that required no technological connectivity whatsoever.

The first was the OSM’s presentation of Le traditionnel conte des Fêtes with the Quebec raconteur Fred Pellerin. In this performance, Pellerin quixotically unfurls his signature yarn about the fantastic history of his hometown, Saint-Élie-de-Caxton. The story is recounted in dialogue with romantic Classical interludes that underscore the vitality of storytelling as a musical form, and music as a form of storytelling. And although there were technical aspects to the spectacle — lighting and scenography cues that likely require constellations of technologies — the show relied solely upon the human connections between performers and audience.

I was even more heartened the following evening by the Glenn Miller Orchestra’s performance at Maison Symphonique. Comprised entirely of wind, brass, strings, percussion, and voice, this orchestra has performed together in some configuration since 1938 — no amplification required, no obsolete cables necessary. Just the loving attachments of the musicians onstage who clearly enjoy their jobs and each other’s company enough to perform upwards of 200 concerts per year.

Likely I attend that many shows annually in my capacity as a journalist and was not expecting to be so astonished by this one. But I had not felt as present or connected all year as I did that night. These events were about cherishing relationships, appreciating family, and enduring attachments.

Despite their potential for connection across space and time, nothing makes me feel more isolated than digital interfaces. If you aim to create distance between us sitting in the same room, just insert a screen. Should you desire to destroy a sense of unity and community, nothing works better than some device that is predestined to become obsolete. Cyberspace was, is, and always will be the space that divides.

“If you want to lead a fulfilling life,” David Brooks argues, “fill it with loving attachments.” These emotional ecosystems indeed constitute the necessary path forward toward more rewarding lives. But our attachments must be independent of the power dynamics that technology under capital impose.

To reconnect, unplug. To love, reattach.◼︎

Cover image: Fred Pellerin and the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal conducted by Kent Nagano perform at Maison Symphonique, 20 December 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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Massive Lectures

Rolling In the Deep: notes on the immersive turn

“We are thrilled to present the next listening series,” reads a recent press release from Centre PHI, “featuring ambient music legend Brian Eno and conceptual artist Beatie Wolfe in our immersive listening room.”

“Kosmos Klub is about deep listening without boundaries,” trumpets another promotional email for a Bandcamp subscription service. “Each month, curator Ajay Saggar selects an immersive album from the outer edges of sound.”

Lorna Bauer, the Montreal-based artist and 2021 Sobey Award finalist, “transforms space into a contemplative, poetic, and immersive place,” according to a bio from Fonderie Darling.

The nehiyaw interdisciplinary artist Tyler Houseman’s work, touts a PR briefing from La Chapelle | Scènes Contemporains, “embraces ephemerality, ranging from immersive interactive installations to multimedia live video performance events.”

Without a hint of irony, the website for a 3D Virtual Reality exhibition currently on offer at Place Bonaventure reads, “Titanic: An Immersive Voyage tells the story of the RMS Titanic like never before.” It must have been immersive to strike an iceberg and descend the depths of the sea.

Doubtless, 2025 was the year we drowned in immersion.

From curated playlists to culinary experiences to all-encompassing and participative journeys, ‘immersive’ was the inescapable contemporary buzzword that characterized the packaging and promotion of everything intended to captivate our attention and convey a sense of currency in the local arts and cultural scenes.

Which got me thinking: why now is the term ‘immersive’ so pervasive? What about this moment makes us want to be purposefully inundated? Do you ever get that sinking feeling?

‘Immerse,’ according to my 1987 print edition of the Oxford English Dictionary — published before there was such a thing as V.R., U.X., A.I., or other such hyperbolic tech-dystopian acronyms — means: “plunge, (in liquid); cause (person) to be entirely below surface of water, esp. baptize thus; bury, embed, (in); involve deeply, absorb, (in debt, difficulties, thought, etc.)” The term originates from the Latin, mergere; mers- meaning ‘to dip.’

Consequently, the only accurate use of its traditional adjective form from the above-noted examples is the ill-fated 1912 Titanic expedition — a truly immersive experience if ever there was one. However, the new meaning of ‘immersive’ that Google wants us to use is, “virtual reality technology that gives the user the impression of being fully enclosed and involved in the simulated environment.” Although the two definitions are not far off.

One of the most glaring parallel virtual realities with real-world consequences exists south of the border. When Donald Trump reassumed the White House in January and rocked the proverbial boat by announcing a spate of crippling tariffs on Canadian goods, our consumer price index spiked from 1.9% to 2.6%, a marked escalation from the chaos Trump instigated during his first term. Just the announcement of tariffs, never mind their implementation, resulted immediately in rising costs for food, clothing, transport, and shelter — the most basic necessities which none of us can afford to forgo, yet none of us can seem to afford.

Increased costs under capitalism translate into increased borrowing. And incremental decreases in Canada’s lending rate only partially offset the soaring demand for credit. The money that we borrow is virtual. The interest we pay back is real. Predictably, by year’s end, Canada’s six biggest banks posted record profits that far surpassed financial experts’ estimates, immersing us deeper in economic uncertainty, while financial institutions immersed themselves in liquid cash.

With everyone drowning in debt, mired in financial difficulties, and deep in thought about how to keep our heads above water while the obscenely rich got even richer, 2025 might have been the most overwhelmingly lean year for most of us since the Coronavirus crisis. And yet, entertainment expenditures and the experience economy outpaced all other categories of consumer spending, rising more than ten percent in 11 months.

No wonder immersion in virtual and simulated environments appeared to throw us a lifesaver. Going deep seemed to be the subconscious reaction to being spread too thin. Still, how deep down the rabbit hole have we gone?

A generation ago, the common indictment of the early internet was that all this scrolling and vapid search-engining would make us shallow. Easy access to a broad field of information meant that each of us could boast a superficial knowledge about a wide variety of subjects. However, “to remain vital,” said the American historian of technology Nicholas Carr in his 2010 book The Shallows, “culture must be renewed in the minds of the members of every generation.”

Knowledge for Carr encompassed more than what the horizontally distributed internet could possibly contain. There are deeper forms of memory irreducible to encoding and digital storage. Muscle memory, for example, is not the sort that we can download or stream. It has to be exercised and cultivated over deep time. Durability implies durational ability.

Today’s internet, which we nowadays access evermore on mobile devices, in a state of constant distraction, encourages the opposite of sustained attention. If we don’t immediately recognize whatever appears on our screens, we swipe it away to move onto something more engaging, ostensibly to save precious time. And yet, over the course of a year — or two, or ten — we discover that we’ve spent a significant amount of time immersed in identifying insignificance, the antithesis of depth.

By HyacintheLuynes – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33551991

Twenty years ago, the burgeoning constellations of digital connective technologies sought to capture our attention through immersive sensory stimuli like simultaneous sound and vision, innovations that seem quaint in comparison to today’s drive for wholistic engagement. The video game Second Life, released in 2003, promised an alternate physical existence inside a virtual playing field. The conundrum of this contract was that total freedom in the virtual world entailed total immersion in an adjacent reality. It is noteworthy that the conversation at that time centered on whether or not playing games like Second Life contributed to a fragmentary experience of reality.

“What such video games and design programs lack,” wrote the anthropologist Tom Boellstorff in his 2008 book, Coming of Age in Second Life, “is social immersion. At the intersection of place and time, social immersion comes into being as the constitutional ground for homo cyber.”

An important difference exists between being immersed in a media environment at home, playing a video game whilst sat alone on the couch, or being saturated in immersive experiences out in the world, in the company of other people. We might have assumed previously that domestic immersion fragmented us and being together didn’t. But social immersion may fragment us even more. We construct our digital selves relationally, with digital others, with reckless abandon for the physical implications.

No doubt, looking back, platforms like Second Life were cultural preparation for the kinds of immersive environments that are increasingly intruding upon the shared social experience today. In the confines of Centre PHI’s immersive listening room, or the immersive Titanic voyage at Place Bonaventure, it has never been simpler to spend time both alone and together, to isolate amidst a lonely crowd. “It is easy to become so immersed in technology,” said the American sociologist Sherry Turkle, “that we ignore what we know about life.”

“Separations cut away from continuity,” wrote the philosopher Brian Massumi in his 2001 essay entitled Tell Me Where Your Pain Is, “into separations from it.” The destabilizing potential for immersive separation via technical means has terrifying implications for collective experience, continuous thought, and co-operative action. In 2025, we experienced a durational state of disintegration and deconstruction. We became social subjects immersed everywhere in media and separated from unmediated sociality.

Why did we not heed the warnings of thinkers like Massumi, Carr, and Turkle two decades ago? The short answer is that descending into immersion became more comfortable than rising to the challenges of navigating quotidian reality. And developing the technologies to keep us perpetually immersed became too profitable for the prospectors of the digital age to refuse. We prefer the confines of our little hideaways beneath the waves rather than risk venturing out into the desert of the real.

The terror of confronting real problems might seem too overwhelming to attempt. So instead, we immerse ourselves in artificial worlds, diving deeper into virtual dreams that distract and delight us. Are we all just marinating in immersive experience? And if so, how do we climb out of the soup? A word of warning: a drowning person will instinctually drown everyone around them. Some of them want to immerse you. Some of them want to be immersed by you.◼︎

Cover image: Persistent Worlds, Alice Bucknell, Kunsthalle Praha. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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Play Recent

Vibe Code: NicheMTL’s top eleven albums of 2025

Since launching NicheMTL in 2022, a number of people have asked why we don’t publish straight-up album reviews. The simple answer is that in the age of digital reproduction, when anyone can access any record at any time, there is no reason to spill ink (itself an anachronistic phrase because who actually spills ink?) describing the obvious, locating the ubiquitous.

NicheMTL functions more like an awards show in which it is an honour just to be nominated. If it is included on our website or in print, you can assume and rest assured that it is worth investigating. Like everyone, we have our favourites. But to rank them would be crass.

Tastes are unscientific. There may be aesthetic or formal criteria that inform them. But ultimately, you either like something or you don’t. Suffice to say, there is more likeable — lovable, even — made-in-Montreal culture than we have the time or resources to showcase.

Nonetheless, we try our best to create a niche to highlight some of the outstanding work that Montreal’s artists produce, a space to shed light on the underrepresented and the underground.

NicheMTL’s in-house criteria loosely fall into two categories: what is interesting and what is important. Interesting is an aesthetic, qualitative judgement, and important is a formal, ideological, and quantitative one. We love artists who make art that engages in some ongoing conversation while standing apart from it. We additionally love artists who have some kind of vital statement to make. It doesn’t have to be grand. The personal is always political.

With this in mind, we are pleased to present NicheMTL’s second annual unranked list of our favourite albums produced in Montreal over the past 12 months. And rather than the customary top ten, this year, as an obvious nod, the list goes up to 11.

Alicia Clara, Nothing Dazzled (Self-Released)

As delicate as a fawn on ice or a new love, Clara’s voice set against soft distorted guitars and dreamy acoustic shoegaze is an antidote for contemporary life’s often uncompromising cruelty.

Alicia Clara features on the NicheMTL Compilation CD that accompanies our 2025 yearbook.

Fine Food Market, I’m afraid to be in love with someone who crashes their car that much (Arbutus Records)

The effervescent weightlessness of a melancholy pedal steel haunts this album of sonic still-life pop portraits and propels Sophie Perras’s youthful compositions to stratospheric heights.

Fine Food Market is spotlighted in the August 4th, 2024, edition of Play Recent.

Nikolas L.B., Tales from the Balance Wheel (Self-Released)

The skilful songwriting and familiar harmonic vernacular of Nikolas L.B.’s recordings are modern and timeless simultaneously, both startlingly fresh and reminiscent of some distant history.

Nikolas L.B. features on the NicheMTL Compilation CD that accompanies our 2025 yearbook.

Boutique Feelings, Shwaya, Shwaya (Mothland)

Recombinant plunderphonic textures characterize Karim Lakhdar’s debut solo album and revise an ambitiously progressive new musical form of hybrid Hip Hop, Funk, and Northern Touch Soul.

Read the NicheMTL interview with Karim Lakhdar.

Quinton Barnes, Black Noise (Watch that Ends the Night Records)

Barnes possesses the ability to assemble the community’s best and brightest, weaving together a tapestry of Montreal’s most innovative musicians while casting himself as the throughline.

Read the NicheMTL interview with Quinton Barnes, who performs at Système x NicheMTL 26 March 2026.

Egyptian Cotton Arkestra, Time & Place (Watch that Ends the Night Records)

Attempts to face up to our colonial history too often manifest in hollow gestures and over-planned tokenism when an improvisatory approach might prove more apropos and effective.

Egyptian Cotton Arkestra features on the NicheMTL Compilation CD that accompanies our 2025 yearbook.

Jessica Moss, Unfolding (Constellation Records)

Jessica Moss trades in uneasy anticipation and mourning future loss with beautiful and troubled results that at once agitate and assuage the gnawing responsibilities of witnessing this moment.

Read the NicheMTL interview with Jessica Moss.

Nadah El Shazly, Laini Tani (Backward Music)

Encounters with strangers engender fascination and fear, neither warranted nor rational, until the exotic experience is naturalized and intwined with domesticity and accepted custom.

Nadah El Shazly is spotlighted in the March 24th, 2024, edition of Play Recent.

Esse Ran, Off Program (Humidex Records)

The trancelike state of ecstatic dance to miniscule modulations in rhythmic repetition has long been known to insulate human subjects from corporeal corruption and vibrational decay.

Read the NicheMTL interview with Félix Gourd.

Corporation, Tableaux du doute (Danse Noir)

Directional movement animates societal change and prompts the rejection of nostalgia and hyper-static inertia, coaxing evolution into novel and unanticipated cultural territories.

Corporation features on the NicheMTL Compilation CD that accompanies our 2025 yearbook.

Orchestroll, Corrosiv (29 Speedway)

Acerbic wit is an effective strategy and has not until now been persuasively deployed to counter Leviathan control society and the Artificial Intelligence dystopia that our tech overlords proffer.

Choose life.

Read the NicheMTL interview with Orchestroll.◼︎

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NicheMTL is Montreal’s independent not-for-profit source for this city’s most niche arts and culture. If you love what you’re reading, please consider buying a yearbook and subscribing.

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Massive Lectures

Soldiering On: notes on nostalgia versus tradition

“It is because nothing is equal, because everything bathes in its difference, its dissimilarity and its inequality, even with itself, that everything returns.”
—Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition

“I don’t have any recollection of that at all.”
—Delbert Grady, The Shining

At this time of year, many of us are likely consumed with traditions.

For instance, hosting holiday parties and baking cutout cookies and sipping rum-spiked eggnog whilst wearing ugly sweaters and spinning Phil Spector’s Christmas album on vinyl have outlasted the ultrahip disdainful stance once held against these perennially problematic traditions.

Old-fashioned entertaining is hot again. So hot that an original shrink-wrapped copy of Martha Stewart’s 1982 debut book, Entertaining, was recently listed on eBay for $1,784.99. It seems as if the traditional decorating of yuletide evergreens is, well, evergreen.

Young people today appear more willing than previous generations to overlook, say, tree-hugging, or the Christian church’s misgivings, or Martha Stewart’s stint in prison for felony conspiracy, for the sake of revelling blissfully in the comfort of seasonal traditions.

And I’m here for it. I, too, have succumbed in 2025 to a host of holiday traditions that I once considered a tad naff.

What is it about traditions that are so ambivalently repellant and attractive? Why now is there a marked turn back toward them? And what is the difference between tradition and nostalgia?

Rafael Payare conducts the OSM in a performance of Handel’s Messiah. Antoine Saito for the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal.

Nostalgia to me is a misguided strategy for enduring the unendurable. A challenging present is apparently rendered tolerable by escaping into a mythologized past.

Retromania and poptimism characterized the first two and a half decades of 21st century cultural production in which the relative safety of reconfiguring historical fashions was preferable to the risk of devising new ones. The nostalgic compulsion at once mourns the loss of a better future and replaces the utopian imagination. “Those who can’t remember the past,” writes Mark Fisher in Ghosts of My Life, “are condemned to have it resold to them forever.”

Close to home, we are seeing the resurgence of separatist sentiments in Quebec and Alberta, a local franchise of nostalgia’s troubling recurrences.

On the global stage, we have recently witnessed the acceptance of poisonous nostalgia writ large in the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where the nostalgic embrace of Soviet-era imperialism is proposed as the solution to the sprawling 35-year disarray surrounding the union’s dissolution.

Similarly, the “again” that punctuates the campaign slogan that the despot-in-chief south of the border adopted is evidence that a return to some idealized nationalistic standard is preferable to facing an unpredictable, unrecognizable future.

These political specimens invoke the most terrifying precedents in modern memory. Germany in the early 1930s was gripped by nostalgic hysteria that enabled unspeakable horrors. And fuelled by cultural nostalgia, Stalin concurrently engineered a famine-genocide that decimated Ukraine.

It is tempting to conflate nostalgia with tradition. Trump, like Joseph Stalin and Adolph Hitler, veils his reactionary ideologies in a mock defence of the latter.

Culturally speaking, the popularity in 2025 of, for example, the band Geese — a sevenfold throwback to The Strokes, and Television before them, and Iggy and the Stooges before that — could be considered an affirmation of traditional Rock & Roll when it is really more like skipping stones over lake nostalgia.

The recurrent subject of authenticity is moot as a marker of value, too: there is no doubt that both Rock and Roll and genocide are authentic. Tradition relies equally upon authenticity to produce its legitimacy. Still, nostalgia and tradition for me represent the opposition between security and freedom, the tension between control society versus genuine liberation.

Here, we must pronounce a distinction between nostalgia and tradition.

Consider these two polarities against the fight-or-flight instinct, the classic responses to stress triggers. Doubtless, the uncertainty of contemporary life is a source of significant stress. Yet, where nostalgia is analogous to flight, a retreat from the frontlines of progressive momentum, tradition represents the fight for some nonetheless forward-facing stance through social cohesion and historical continuity. Nostalgia withdraws, while tradition soldiers on.

The Nutcracker in performance at Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier. Sasha Onyshchenko for Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal.

Personally, I have three Christmas traditions that are less an expression of nostalgia for me, and more an articulation of stubborn perseverance.

The first involves attending a performance of Handel’s Messiah. This year, I accomplished this tradition twice, once at Maison Symphonique with the OSM conducted by Rafael Payare, and again the very next day with the Orchestre Classique de Montréal’s annual rendition in the crypt of St. Joseph’s Oratory. Although I have heard this Oratorio dozens of times, the tradition of it ironically immunizes me against menacing forces that lie beyond my control, insulating me from the interminable doomscroll.

My second holiday tradition is to see The Nutcracker, the ballet choreographed to Tchaikovsky’s renowned suite. I ticked this one off my holiday list on opening night thanks to a luxurious performance by Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal at Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier.

This tradition has its origins in early childhood, when my parents took me and I would inevitably fall asleep during the first half, the kaleidoscopic visual aesthetics and hypnotic sonic rhythms lulling me in my comfortable auditorium seat with abundant winter heating into near-narcotic repose. Now, it is a new Christmas tradition to watch other people’s children slumbering through the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy.

Third and likely counterintuitive is my annual screening of The Shining. More than It’s a Wonderful Life, Kubrick’s masterpiece is a Christmas movie par excellence. Don’t @ me.

Plus, this particular holiday tradition I realized just now speaks most directly to the concept itself of nostalgia versus tradition. “The nostalgia of The Shining,” writes Fredric Jameson in a 1981 essay, “takes the peculiar form of an obsession with the last period in which class consciousness is out in the open.” Jack Torrance is an avatar embodying the return of the repressed, now manifesting in the MAGA movement’s nostalgic preoccupation that in effect has underpinned capitalism’s violence in every one of its miserable iterations.

Through the exercise of tradition, I identify three important impulses: chemistry, preservation, and ritual. Chemistry precipitates a reaction and must be performed in a similar way every time to produce the desired result. Something like baking Christmas cookies. Preservation — words in print or music on vinyl — ensures the recognition of vital forms of sociocultural memory and the immediacy of material presence. And ritual, like decorating trees, is the irrational incantation of magic that serves to reorder chaos, just as the moon’s gravity reorders the ocean’s turbulence here on earth.

While pragmatic in function, these three impulses supersede logic and transcend analysis. And yet we analyse. Because it is tradition.

Instead of viewing nostalgia as a net negative, I prefer to interpret it as a harbinger of revolution. Nostalgia always precedes the triumph of the impossible. Traditionally, we tend to go back just before breaking through. Tradition is immanence anticipated. It resists melancholia, decline, failure. The antidote for simulation is reality, if even reality relived.

This is why I routinely revisit The Messiah, The Nutcracker, and The Shining — and Christmas baking and holiday entertaining and Martha Stewart. Not out of sentimentality for some bygone past, but rather, with a hope that the future, unshackled through chemistry, preservation, and ritual from the past, will once again achieve its traditional greatness.◼︎

Cover image: Bernardo Betancor photographed by Sasha Onyshchenko for Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal.

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The Immediate Data of Consciousness

Solitary Dancer, “Mi Sueño,” SDIII (Y-3000)

“The parts of our duration are one with the successive moments of the act which divides it; if we distinguish in it so many instants, so many parts it indeed possesses; and if our consciousness can only distinguish in a given interval a definite number of elementary acts, if it terminates the division at a given point, there also terminates the divisibility.”
—Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory.

What is ‘now?’

The question more accurately formed might be, ‘when is now?’ Or, even more precisely, ‘how long is now?’ When does the present turn into the past? At what point does the future become ‘now?’ And how long does ‘now’ last?

Can ‘now’ change history?

These might seem like merely speculative questions. But the implications of contemplating them and the partiality of their possible answers reveal profound consequences. It is not just semantic.

Quantifying ‘now’ is the genesis of our notion of time. Duration is what defines movement. Time is what determines value. And value is how we measure what is important.

Yuki Isami, Rives, Maison de la culture du Plateau-Mont-Royal, 29 November 2025

Yuki Isami performs at Maison de la culture du Plateau-Mont-Royal, 29 November 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“The things of this world, that seem so transitory to philosophers, are not continuous. They are composed of discrete atoms, no doubt Boscovichian points. The really continuous things, Space, and Time, and Law, are eternal.”
—C.S. Peirce, Reasoning and the Logic of Things.

Sigmund Freud in 1925 penned an essay on a newfangled contraption called the Mystic Writing Pad — essentially a rudimentary Etch A Sketch-like surface which could be written upon and erased ad infinitum. He found this device interesting for a few reasons.

The Mystic Writing Pad consists of a slab of wax resin with two sheets covering it: one made of celluloid, and the second of wax paper. The writer uses a stylus to imprint script onto the surface of the two sheets, leaving an impression in the resin rather than a trace on its surface. The two sheets can be detached from the resin slab whenever the writer wants to erase the Pad’s contents.

Freud notes that writing on paper in ink exhausts the capacity of the writing surface. Before long, as the writer takes more and more notes, pages and books and volumes are filled, and the writer needs to acquire new pages, books, volumes upon which nothing has yet been written.

The Mystic Writing Pad, however, offers Freud an “unlimited receptive capacity” for the extension of memory into the present. If the note you took is no longer of use, or you desire to discard it, you can simply wipe it away and start anew.

Freud uses the Mystic Writing Pad as a metaphor for perception consciousness.

“The unconscious,” writes Freud, “stretches out feelers … towards the external world and hastily withdraws them as soon as they have sampled the excitations coming from it.” The frequency with which our conscious mind erases experience, just as the writer detaches and thus erases the Mystic Writing Pad’s pages, is, for Freud, “the origin of the concept of time.”

However, Freud notes that even when the two surface sheets are raised, the wax resin layer retains a permanent trace of the writing. The more the writer writes on the pad, the deeper and more chaotic and palimpsestic these inscriptions become.

Traces & Returns, Galerie JANO, 3 December 2025

Pascale Jean, “If I Could Hear Your Texts.” 2024. Oil on Canvas. 30 x 40″. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Fact and past are not interchangeable, nor is their relationship primarily one that points from the writer’s present into the object’s past.”
—Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other.

We all have both subjective and objective experiences of time. Sometimes time appears to drag. At other times, time leaps ahead as if some unseen force spurs it on.

Time when we are young seems comparatively slow because we have lived less time against which to compare new time. As we age, time seems to fly by as the experience of time and our familiarity with its passing accumulate.

The clock empirically measures out time, apparently reminding us of our faulty perceptive faculties when set against mechanical and digital rhythms. And while time may go on forever, we are all aware that we do not. And so, time as it passes becomes more valuable in its increasing scarcity.

Quatuor Molinari, Rhythmes canadiens, Conservatoire de musique de Montréal, 5 December 2025

Quatuor Molinari perform at the Conservatoir de musique de Montréal, 5 December 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“…the smallest unit of matter is the fold, not the point. Each fold, being connected to the entire plane, has a point of view on the whole…”
—Laura Marks, Enfoldment and Infinity.

Time is the operating system upon which our lives unfold.

The hyper-capitalist obsession with time management and leisure time indicates that time is no longer money; time is far more valuable than any monetary currency. We cannot reliably exchange our labour time for money anymore since the work bubble has burst rendering labour practically worthless.

Time has subdivided into such infinitesimal units as to give the illusion of continuity.

Corporation, “Sa dent douce à la mort,” Tableaux du doute (Danse Noir)

“…the method of intuition owes everything it is to duration.”
—Valentine Moulard-Leonard, Bergson-Deleuze Encounters.

Two polarities of temporal progression exist in tension: one based upon the concept of causality, and the other upon free will. At one end of the spectrum, events occur in succession because of an arbitrary but causative link. This and then that.

At the other end, some form of conscious agency acts as the causal force encouraging progress and fashioning outcomes according to intelligence and design. That because of this.

Intelligence deploys a number of strategies. Natural selection implies that the most successful of these strategies become standard.

Rationality as a strategy seems to have worn out its usefulness, though, given that ostensibly rational will brought us to this moment. Intuition succeeds rationality as a radical alternative, cleaving causality and free agency into arrays of chance.

Only time will tell. But given more time, time inevitably tells another story.◼︎

Thank you for inviting NicheMTL to your thing. Please get in touch at the about page.

NicheMTL is Montreal’s independent not-for-profit source for this city’s most niche arts and culture. If you love what you’re reading, please consider buying a yearbook and subscribing.

Cover image: The McGill Islamic Studies Library. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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All Dressed

Tool For Love: in conversation with Alain Lefèvre

The function of an object varies depending upon the intention of its user.

Love letters and hate mail are written on the same brand of laptop. We can harness a nuclear reaction to generate abundant electricity or destroy an entire city.

Pianos are complex devices designed to resound delightfully, to produce harmonies that please their listeners. Still, it takes the right kind of skill — enlightened hands — to accomplish this. A piano without a player is like a lightbulb without a socket. It can’t shine on its own.

Pianos belong to a special category of machine. Neither tools nor toys, pianos simultaneously exhibit characteristics of both. When a piano key is played, a hammer strikes a string. And hammers are certainly considered tools. But we do not say that a pianist works the piano. Rather, we say that musicians play their instruments. Hammering out a tune suggests the jouissance of amusement.

Great artists tend to give the impression of effortlessness. Concealing the immense labour necessary to create outstanding works of art is part of the artist’s job. Nonetheless, it is obvious that the Montreal-based pianist Alain Lefèvre enjoys his work — and takes playing very seriously.

“I need to create because it helps me to go through all I see,” Lefèvre tells me.

Lefèvre has called from Greece where he has just completed a tour and will remain throughout the winter to map out a new recording. A gifted raconteur as well as a virtuoso musician, he cycles through stories that always suggest some moral lesson, some higher meaning to be learned. “I believe,” he insists, “that consolation is something that we all need.”

Lefèvre is referring at once to music as a conciliatory force and to the title of his most recent album, Consolation, his eighth collection of original compositions released earlier in the year via the Warner Classics imprint. Arriving amidst a resurgence of interest in Post-Classical pianists, fuelled locally by the likes of Alexandra Stréliski and Jean-Michel Blais, and in a moment of unprecedented political and economic uncertainty, it couldn’t have come at a better time. “I feel like I need to be consoled myself,” Lefèvre laughs.

Yet, every joke contains a kernel of truth. This album of melancholy and widescreen cinematic solo piano pieces reveals a musician offering a gift to his audience that he secretly needs himself.

“After the pandemic, all of us thought that the nightmare was finished,” Lefèvre explains. “But we woke up and saw all this war, all this hatred. And one day, I came back from Quebec City, and I saw all those tents along Notre-Dame and all the homelessness. I imagined the suffering. I do remember, this was an inspiration. Consolation was born out of that.”

Lefèvre is one of Montreal’s most accomplished musicians, having worked with prestigious labels like Koch, Analekta, and now Warner Classics. He is the recipient of numerous honours including the Order of Canada, the Order of Quebec, a Juno, an Opus, and ten Felix awards recognizing his immense contribution to performing arts in the province. But he exhibits a humility that betrays an artist only now becoming comfortable with his successes.

“When you spend your entire life working back to Chopin, to Brahms, to Rameau, the vision you have of your own composition, unless you’re a megalomaniac, is very cruel because you cannot say to yourself, ‘wow, I’m a great composer.’ I never gave myself an inch,” he discloses.

Lefévre’s family immigrated to Montreal from Poitiers in 1967. “My parents were dreamers,” he says. “They were French people who thought Quebec was something very new, very fantastic.”

His first piano recital was at the age of five, where he won the top prize that included a recording of Glenn Gould playing Beethoven’s 3rd piano concerto. “I would say that after listening to this recording, I was even more sure that this is what I wanted to do, to become a pianist,” Lefèvre explains. “I think that when I listened to this concerto, I was starting to have music in my head that was not Beethoven, that was my own composition. So, I was starting to compose already at seven or eight years old.”

Lefèvre has lived in Montreal ever since, touring in more than 50 countries and playing concerts in hundreds of cities worldwide. “To be honest, I don’t like winter. But I do not like Florida either. So, I spend a couple of months every winter in Greece. But I am a proud taxpayer in Quebec.”

I became aware of Lefèvre’s work by way of his classic 1999 album entitled Cadenza, a litany of Romantic piano hits including Claude Debussy’s “Clair de lune,” Erik Satie’s “Première Gymnopédie,” and Beethoven’s “Sonata no 8, opus 13,” which has become the definitive Canadian recording of these pieces.

However, as Lefèvre tells me, the album almost didn’t happen.

“Cadenza was done with a lot of respect,” he recalls, “for the compositions, for the tempi. I didn’t want to do a corny recording. So, the deal was, you find someone to produce you. And the CBC produced the Cadenza recording. And after, you send the master tape to your label, which was Koch, and Koch prints it. That was the deal. And I sent the master tape to Koch and got no news from them. So finally, I called and I said, ‘hello, how are you? Did you receive the master tape?’ And then I hear this bonk. And the artistic director said to me, ‘you know what that noise is?’ And I said, ‘no.’ And she said, ‘it’s me putting your master tape in the garbage.’ And to be honest, I hung up the phone and I started to cry. Because I’m stupid. I’m too sensitive. And I thought and I thought, and I came back to CBC and told them that Koch doesn’t want to put out the CD, and they immediately said, ‘we’ll take it, we’ll make it.’ And since, Cadenza has become quite a big success. But Koch disappeared. We always believe that the drama is what we’re going through at the moment. We never see the big picture.”

“Artists have a voice. But our voice needs to be a tool for love.” © Simon Fowler / Warner Classics

Lefèvre possesses a strong sense of social responsibility and understands the inherent affective power of music. “It’s about humanity. It’s about love. It’s about forgiveness. It’s about tolerance. All of those things are the most important,” he claims. “We saw before the last U.S. election all those artists coming against the president. This is not the way for me. In our society today, the disease is hatred. Artists have a voice. But our voice needs to be a tool for love.”

Nevertheless, Lefèvre has strong words for what he sees is the deplorable state of this city. Specifically, the Old Brewery Mission in Old Montreal, for which he is planning a Gala benefit concert in 2027, is a cause near and dear to Lefèvre’s heart.

“I’m not pessimistic,” he tells me. “But I’m not optimistic. There’s something wrong somewhere. There is no way I could accept to see the poverty I see in Montreal. There is no excuse. This is not the Montreal I know. This is not the Montreal we fought for. This is not the dream we had. When you are in the street, and I saw what I saw. I’ve worked in prisons. I know misery. But what I’ve seen for the last few years, it’s disgusting. Finally, the administration of Montreal, the government, they don’t care. They say they have programmes. They say they have solutions. But where is the result? This is why I put my energy into music. In a city like ours, to see what we see, it doesn’t make sense. We should do better. Especially us Canadians, we have been raised thinking that democracy is forever, that we will never lose it. And it’s a false conception. Democracy is very fragile and we can lose it easily.”

Despite these harsh indictments, Lefèvre seems to have faith in the resilient potential of this city, itself a complex machine capable of darkness and light.

“I’m still in love with Montreal,” he admits.

“I still believe that this city could be a major light. Montreal has a conception of tolerance that is quite amazing. But politicians are so afraid of making decisions. And I hope that we will have people who love Montreal who make decisions. Something is special about Montreal for me.”◼︎

Consolation is out now via Warner Classics.

Cover image: © Caroline Bergeron

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Galaxy Brain

Grand Concert Anniversaire UdeM x SMCQ, Salle Claude-Champagne, 15 November 2025

Artist Véronique Girard and the composer Maxime Daigneault. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Is not Rome still Rome
Is not Los Angeles still Los Angeles
Are these really the last days of the Roman Empire
Is not beauty still beauty
And truth still truth
Are there not still poets
Are there not still lovers
—Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Time of Useful Consciousness

In advance of the publication of my first book, Mad Skills, my publisher Repeater Books and I devised a promotional campaign of publicity, ads, and memes to be deployed across social media. To that end, we designed a take on the popular “Galaxy Brain” meme, in which text captions accompany four image panels depicting increasingly illuminated human craniums.

The first caption read, “Discussing People;” the second one, “Discussing Events;” the third, “Discussing Ideas;” and the final galaxy-brain panel declared, “Discussing MIDI.”

2001: A Space Odyssey, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, Maison Symphonique, 19 November 2025

Ben Palmer conducts the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal in performance of the score for 2001: A Space Odyssey, 19 November 2025. Antoine Saito for the OSM.

According to film historians Robert P. Kolker and Nathan Abrams, an earlier and much more explicitly absurd treatment for Stanley Kubrick’s black comedy masterpiece Dr. Strangelove set the movie’s beginning in outer space, recounting the story from the perspective of an alien species that discovers Planet Earth shortly after a nuclear holocaust has exterminated all human life. Had this version of the picture been made, the first title card to scroll onscreen would have read: “Nardac Blefescu Presents … A MACRO-GALAXY-METEOR PICTURE,” a nod to Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.

Kubrick had originally titled the film The Delicate Balance of Terror, pilfered, apparently, from a paper of the same name that the American political scientist Albert Wohlstetter wrote in 1958 for the RAND Corporation. Kolker and Abrams note that Kubrick, regarded widely as a genius, had doodled a number of alternate titles for the film before registering Dr. Strangelove with Paramount Pictures — foremost among them, The Secret Uses of Uranus. Kubrick would incorporate these Sci-Fi Easter eggs into not only 2001, but also the ending of the 2001 film A.I. Artificial Intelligence, a story which Kubrick gifted to his friend and protégé Steven Spielberg.

Pulse Mag Issue #2 Launch, Cardinal Tea Room, 20 November 2025

NicheMTL publisher Ryan Diduck and Pulse Mag co-editor-in-chief Eva Rizk reading each other’s magazines. Photographed for NicheMTL.

The zombie apocalypse is not to be taken literally, as if the world should end up like a scene from some George A. Romero film, with the resurrected roaming the earth eating brains and defying death. Rather, the zombie apocalypse is a metaphor for capitalism, in which a non-living entity — capital — feeds on the planet’s life force, growing ever more powerful with the lives that it devours. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Anti-Oedipus refer to this as a “post-mortem despotism,” where an entity that has long-since died continues to exert authoritarian force over the living.

However, capital is not so much undead as it is never-having-lived and therefor can never be killed. Capital, like one of the all-time great cyber-zombie movie villains, on the order of the T-1000 in Terminator 2: Judgement Day, or the HAL-9000 in Kubrick’s 2001, has to be unplugged from its networks of command and control, neutralized. To execute capital, humanity will have to invent and implement radical economies of alternate value and exchange and slowly replace capital as our global operating system. Furthermore, we need to do this without capital reading our lips.

Impedance of the hyper-capitalist economy requires relentless activity in absence of a product, not destruction but non-production.

Hannah Claus, tsi iotnekahtentiónhatie (Tiohtià:ke), Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery, 19 November 2025 – 7 February 2026

Hannah Claus, Watersong (2025). Photographed for NicheMTL.

Outsmarting A.I. is a fruitless strategy because we created Artificial Intelligence to mimic the human mind. The fact that there is an inherent competition between us and our progeny is indicative of the fundamental conflict present in the human dramatic narrative.

We are born to fathers and mothers whom we will replace, and neither side is entirely comfortable with the arrangement. We self-organize in the form of states and immediately rebel against authority. The authoritarian ruler is not free either, because he is condemned to subdue his subjects. Though capital is not alive in any biological sense, neither is it free. It is, in effect, a slave to its own slaves.

To prevail in the conflict against an artificially intelligent adversary requires becoming-beast, a return to an unsentimental, irrational, and savage, operative mode. The antidote to Artificial Intelligence is not human intelligence, but rather, animal instinct.

M For Mothland with Brainwasher, Boutique Feelings, Mulch, Yoo Doo Right, and Annie-Claude Deschênes, 21 November 2025, La Sala Rossa

Boutique Feelings performs as part of M for Mothland at La Sala Rossa, 21 November 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

There is a brief scene early on in Kubrick’s 2001, a seemingly throwaway shot in which a cougar attacks one of the apes. The simian is unsuspectingly drinking at a shallow pond when, out of the blue, the wildcat jumps from an elevated cliff and assaults the hominid, provoking it into mortal combat. Kubrick cuts the scene before the audience sees an outcome to this battle. But it must be assumed that the ape loses.

Ostensibly, this might be Kubrick’s way of reminding the film’s viewers that humans were not always, and may not be again, at the top of the food chain, without natural predators, safe in our domination over the animal kingdom. On a deeper level, it may signify the order of chaos and possibility that the monolithic object directly opposes in its geometric and determinate perfection. The monolith for Kubrick is undoubtedly no less violent than the wildcat, cast down from above onto its innocent victims.

The monolith of 2001 is not a screen. It is not an antenna. It is not a tablet. It is not a commandment. It is not a repository. It is not an archive. It is not a mirror. It is not a machine. It is not a product.

The monolith is pure machine, pure repository, pure product. It represents order over chaos, the ultimate, the infinite, the real structure of violence. That is why it fascinates and terrifies the apes.

It is not the work of an alien. It is a symbol of alienation, alienness.◼︎

Thank you for inviting NicheMTL to your thing. Please get in touch at the about page.

NicheMTL is Montreal’s independent not-for-profit source for this city’s most niche arts and culture. If you love what you’re reading, please consider buying a yearbook and subscribing.

Cover image: Antoine Saito for Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal.

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