Author Archives: Ryan Alexander Diduck

999 Words

Feelings Sans Frontières: in conversation with Karim Lakhdar

‘Progressive’ has become a slippery adjective.

At one time, it possessed an unambiguously positive connotation. The idea of progress was associated with forward momentum. Progressive characterized clusters of artists who expanded upon musical generic conventions. Scientific and industrial progress carried with them the promise of better living through technology. Progressive described groups of people who embraced inclusive and diverse political values.

Today, though, in the wake of the post-truth age and a regressive undercurrent in politics and art more broadly, reactionary thought sullies progress. Retromaniacal threads mingle through music as cycles of commemoration and nostalgia suck up evermore cultural oxygen. A general mistrust of technology now fuels an impetus to return to some idealized atavistic era. And conservative politics have accrued a caché and co-opted principles that once were considered exclusively progressive.

These are emotional as much as rational debates. How do we feel about the notion of purity? Is it an accumulative or subtractive process? Is purity achieved through permutation or reduction?

Karim Lakhdar, also known as Boutique Feelings, embodies this opposition. His music is at once progressive and traditional. And his multicultural identity — half-Tunisian, half-Italian, raised bilingually in Montreal’s St. Leonard neighbourhood — informs his ideology and worldview.

“There is definitely a history in Montreal of bands on the precipice,” Lakhdar, 37, says. “I’ve always felt that growing up here, there’s lots of scenes, but there’s a lot of bands going outside the box. That’s Montreal’s trademark — this kind of melding of so many styles.”

Lakhdar has recently released an album entitled Shwaya, Shwaya (Arabic for ‘Slowly, Slowly,’) via the Mothland label. It deftly melds a melange of styles including Hip-Hop, Jazz, Psych, and Funk into something that he describes as “progressive.” Progress for Lakhdar evidently represents the freedom to experiment and combine rather than to reduce and return.

“There’s a lot of really interesting music happening here,” he says. “I think there’s this special thing about Montreal. It really has this flair to it. There is this camaraderie happening amongst musicians. There’s this really nice energy and specificity to it. I’m very pro-Montreal. I’ve always loved being here. It’s a giant melting pot.”

A self-taught musician and graduate of Concordia’s Electroacoustics programme, Lakhdar grew up listening to an unlikely combination of Arabic music, 1970s Soul, Classic Rock, and Rock that has since become classic. “I was influenced by my older cousins who lived on the same street. Whether it was The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, The Temptations, or Oasis,” he says. “That was a big one when we were kids. Music has always been peppered throughout my life.”

Lakhdar is a founder member of Atsuko Chiba, a more straight-ahead Prog-oriented outfit, and one of the first bands to land in Mothland’s stable.

“We started jamming with no intention,” he recalls. “We were always tired of waiting for people who really didn’t want to be there. So, we just started and it snowballed from there. Mothland approached us after that and asked us if we wanted to be a part of the label. Obviously we agreed. That’s something we’ve always wanted. And they’re great. We’ve always enjoyed working with them. They really give you the freedom to do what you do.”

In the past few years, Lakhdar has branched off as a solo artist with a unique voice and a more explicitly genre-agnostic operative mode.

“I’ve been creating my stuff all the time on the side without ever giving it a name,” he tells me. He released an eponymous EP in February and has now followed that up with his first full-length album, which launches 21 November at the M For Mothland showcase at La Sala Rossa.

“I recorded it mostly at my house, in my little office,” Lahkdar explains. “We have a studio with the band, but when it comes to working on my own stuff, it’s super spur-of-the-moment. That was the idea of the project, too, to keep things super simple. And really just to capture moments and feelings. We live in an age where you can make things sound incredibly good. You can move things to be perfectly in time. But I think we’re in a moment now where people are a bit annoyed with that. I didn’t focus on making things too crisp or too perfect.”

The relentless pursuit of technical perfection is creativity’s enemy. Either nothing is perfect, or everything is. It’s something that Lakhdar understands intuitively. “I don’t know if it was timing or tone or whatever it was I was after,” he says. “But a lot of the verses are not things that I did a hundred times. I’d write them, perform them, and that was it. Every time I would go back, it would always feel different. So, I ended up leaving a lot of things alone and doing things as they came. Really just leaving them there.”

“I have a duty to talk about politics.” Karim Lakhdar photographed by Aabid Youssef.

Quebec is one year away from a provincial election and seems torn between two competing paths: one reactionary, and the other more explicitly comprehensive and progressive. Montreal has just elected a new mayor, and New York has chosen the city’s first self-described Democratic Socialist.

“In any government,” Lakhdar suggests, “you should come to some kind of an understanding of what actually happens on the ground. Dialogue has to take place in order for things to work properly. You have to hear both sides. And the most important thing is to speak with people involved in that community — whether it be noise, or homelessness, or buildings that nobody rents — the people actually living the reality.”

We spend time talking about why it is that artists appear to feel a more profound sense of political responsibility than those in other professions — even politicians themselves.

“I have a duty to talk about politics,” asserts Lakhdar. “To me, it’s really important. Even if it’s not directly or specifically political, it’s always embedded in what I’m saying, or the music I’m creating. I can’t do one without the other.”◼︎

Boutique Feelings performs as part of M For Mothland, 21 November 2025 at La Sala Rossa, 4848 Boul. Saint-Laurent.

Shwaya, Shwaya is out now via Mothland.

Cover image: Karim Lakhdar photographed by Aabid Youssef.

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Dead Cities

Poolgirl with Shunk, G String, and Niivi, Bâtiment 7, 1 November 2025

Poolgirl performs at Bâtiment 7, 1 November 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

In December 2006, Ben’s De Luxe Delicatessen, a landmark restaurant serving Smoked Meat sandwiches and French Fries in an historic Art Deco building at the corner of Metcalfe and de Maisonneuve, permanently closed its doors.

Ben’s had been a Montreal staple for 98 years. Scenes from the classic 1965 National Film Board documentary Ladies Gentlemen…Mr. Leonard Cohen were filmed there. Celebrities like Liberace and Bette Midler had been welcomed as guests. Pierre Trudeau was a regular, as was Jacques Parizeau. It was a place where federalism and separatism fell away, where the two solitudes could put aside their differences and come together over a Cherry Coke.

The staff at Ben’s, many of whom had worked at the deli for over 50 years, joined the CSN union federation in 1995, and went on strike for what would be the last time in the summer of 2006, demanding higher wages and better working conditions. The strike drew on through autumn, and as winter fell, the restaurant’s owner and manager, Jean Kravitz, took the decision to sell the building to SIDEV Realty Corporation.

Following a number of efforts to declare it an historic edifice, Ben’s was demolished in November 2008, and the developer constructed a 16-storey hotel on the site. The restaurant in Le St-Martin Hotel Particulier has been closed for more than a decade.

A Musical Journey with Tawadros and Beethoven, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, Maison Symphonique, 5 November 2025

Joseph Tawadros performs with the OSM, 5 November 2025. Gabriel Fournier for the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal.

Strikes are effective only when they affect everyone equally. If nurses strike, access to healthcare is restricted for all. If teachers strike, education across the board is denied.

When public transportation employees strike, however, it is only those reliant upon public transportation who suffer. Moreover, those who take public transportation are not in any position to deliver on striking workers’ demands. Rather, through direct and indirect means, Opus cards and taxes, we are the ones who pay the costs for public transportation — costs that have been steadily increasing for services that are in rapid decline.

Metros are constantly delayed or go out of service altogether. Refuse and graffiti litter stations. And at most of them, security seems nonexistent. Violent crime in the Montreal metro system increased 80 per cent between 2022 and 2023. Three men this week were charged in the stabbing death of a 42-year-old victim at Place St. Henri. And a woman was allegedly assaulted inside a metro car in October.

STM Board Chairman Éric Alan Caldwell earlier this year lamented the lack of provincial funding for Montreal’s public transit authority, sentiments echoed by then-mayor Valérie Plante. The STM received $258 million less than expected in the CAQ’s most recent budget.

However, Quebec Transport Minister, Geneviève Guilbault, doesn’t rely upon — and consequently isn’t required to care about — Montreal’s public transportation system. If anything, Quebec City politicians privately rejoice when Montreal’s bus and metro-riding population is distressed.

Quebec conceives of Montreal as its economic engine. Perhaps that’s why the province is more intent upon building highways out of it than maintaining trains within it.

If the unions representing bus drivers and maintenance workers want their job actions to be effective, they should interfere with policymakers’ ability to do theirs.

Quatuor Molinari, Musique à voir, Fondation Guido Molinari, 2 November 2025

Quatuor Molinari performs at Fondation Guido Molinari, 2 November 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

If there is one silver lining to the transit strike — or of an event like the wave of flight reductions at U.S. airports — it is that it necessarily enforces a slower pace upon modern life.

Traffic is the impeding power to the futurist ideal of speed, the unrestrained id. Cities are regulated by a circulatory rhythm that accelerates, slows down, and fluctuates at various intervals, depending upon the flows of traffic — on foot, in cars, in transit, in flight.

The transfer of one form of traffic into another upsets the metropolitan temporal equilibrium and imposes a different timetable upon urban space. Time thickens when we are forced to throttle our maximum velocity.

Angela Grauerholz, La femme 100 têtes, Blouin|Division, 8 November 2025

Patrons gather for the launch of La Femme 100 têtes by Angela Grauerholz, 8 November 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Labour unions so far have failed to anticipate or reorient themselves towards the real threat to workers: automation. It cannot be long before city bus and metro drivers will become entirely unnecessary, as driverless alternatives exceed human beings in efficiency and reliability.

Waymo, the autonomous driving technology company that Google developed, has doubled in size in the past year, and delivered more than 200,000 paid rides per week in 2025 in Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Austin, according to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai.

Autonomous taxis have other advantages. You don’t have to tip or make small talk with the driver. They are not prone to road rage and will never harass a passenger. And robots don’t go on strike. The degeneration of human behaviour is the biggest argument for the embrace of artificial intelligence.

David Altmejd, Agora, Galerie de l’UQAM, 6 November 2025 – 17 January 2026

Gallery view of David Altmejd, Agora, Galerie de l’UQAM. Photographed for NicheMTL.

It is possible that human beings, in our arrogance, will drastically reduce our own usefulness, if not strike ourselves out of existence. We have operated, for the past century at least, under the assumption that the future, benefited by the acceleration of technological advancement, would be indisputably better, and have been disappointed and despondent when it hasn’t. The question, however, is, for whom should the future improve?

If it is for human beings, then me might do well to recalibrate our expectations and ameliorate some of our manners, towards ourselves and one another. This could mean resisting the capitalist impulse to maximize exploitation; to accept less-than-peak profit and speed; to reallocate and share rather than colonize and contest our limited spaces.

The seemingly likelier and more deserving beneficiary of a better future, though, is non-human. Flora and fauna warrant superior living conditions far more than unionized workers of any occupation. Organic matter merits the right to prosperity in excess of the new class of corporate tech bros.

We will be judged by our treatment of wilder things.◼︎

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: Joseph Tawadros photographed by Gabriel Fournier for the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal.

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All Dressed

Last City Standing: in conversation with Natalia Yanchak

At times it appears unclear whether Montreal is under constant construction or endless demolition. Were an extraterrestrial to visit from some faraway galaxy, they might be forgiven for thinking that municipal powers are purposely hastening Montreal’s destruction, cobblestone by cobblestone. There are only three things to be sure of in this city: death, taxes, and orange cones.

As I speak over speakerphone with the musician and core member of The Dears, Natalia Yanchak, infernal beeping and pounding from some kind of heavy machinery resounds just outside my apartment window. I feel obliged to apologize for the noise.

“What? Construction in Montreal?” Yanchak exclaims, dripping with ironic wit.

It is immediately apparent that we are from the same planet.

13 months ago, I was fortunate enough to be in the audience at the Rialto Theatre on Avenue du Parc for a POP Montreal-affiliated double bill that The Dears played with fellow Indie Rock royalty, Stars.

Commemorating the double-digit anniversary of No Cities Left, Yanchak, life partner and songwriter Murray Lightburn, and the rest of the band in an extended form performed their most recognizable album in a way that transcended reminiscence and vaulted the gig into mythical territory. It was simultaneous haunting and exorcism.

Now, The Dears have returned with their ninth studio album, Life is Beautiful! Life is Beautiful! Life is Beautiful! — a title borrowed from a spontaneous moment onstage last September when Lightburn and company encouraged the crowd to chant those words along with them. Say it thrice and make it so.

I don’t generally go in for audience participation. But my voice was among the chorus that night, if only because it can’t possibly hurt to utter something true, in unison, when asked politely. It wasn’t compulsory. But it nonetheless felt necessary.

“It was really a beautiful moment,” Yanchak recalls. “For us, we were very grateful to do that, to be able to be there with our friends, and fans, and family, and it just became kind of a mantra: Life is beautiful, life is beautiful, life is beautiful.”

It is precisely this sort of earnestness that has over the years attracted listeners to The Dears and sparked some sneering criticism. The hipster taste-making website Pitchfork in 2003 called them “likeably pretentious;” The Guardian defined their vibe as a “pathological quest for drama;” and NME said they could be “wincingly sentimental.”

Today, though, with nothing left to prove, and having outlasted a generation of detractors, the band is finally allowed to own their endearing sensitivity — with song names like “Babe, We’ll Find a Way” and “This Is How We Make our Dreams Come True.” Emotional maturity simply doesn’t get more unabashed than that. Yanchak is acutely aware of the tropes.

“Everyone has ups and downs,” she muses. “Life is always changing. Everything is always changing. The people around you are changing. You are changing. You are getting older. The people around you are getting older. Or they’re passing away. Or they’re never talking to you again. Or there’s new people coming into your life. It never stops. I think there is a very strong theme on this album, definitely, of that. But also, of inviting people to acknowledge that, to look at their own lives. Great things are going to happen, and terrible things are going to happen. But at the end of the day, your life is valuable. It’s challenging, but that’s part of being a human in modern society.”

A band poses for a promotional photo, showcasing five members with diverse styles, sitting and standing in a brightly lit room with a blue door.
“It’s important to be grounded in the now.” The Dears photographed by Richmond Lam.

Born in Toronto, Yanchak relocated to Montreal in the mid-1990s to attend Concordia University, and to get serious about musicmaking. She played in bands in high school, she says, and “messed around” as a teenager. “I did take some piano lessons,” Yanchak concedes. “But I was never very good at anything. And I still feel very humbled when I’m onstage with my bandmates. I can play. But I’m probably the worst musician on the stage.”

Yanchak’s early musical tastes were steeped in disparate genres and reflect diverse influences. “My dad when we were in the car would either have the radio on the Country & Western station or the Oldies station. And my mom listened to this artist called Ottmar Liebert. He’s German, although it’s like Spanish-style acoustic guitar. Extremely ‘90s. That, and also that Enya album.”

We talk at some length about the 1990s as a high watermark when musical silos started to fall and scenes began to cross-pollinate. “At that time,” Yanchak remembers, “I really got into Björk. I was a Björk superfan. I needed to know everything about Björk. So, I bought that Sugarcubes album, Life’s Too Good. When she released her first solo album, there were a lot of dudes making music. And then Björk came on the scene. How could she not be this influential kind of goddess? That was so huge at that time.”

While Lightburn remains the band’s principal composer, all of these ingredients have filtered into Yanchak’s contribution constructing The Dears’ catalogue. “We’re influenced by a lot of super random things ranging from Neoclassical to Jazz to Soul to Glam Rock — so many things,” she says.

Life is Beautiful! Life is Beautiful! Life is Beautiful! captures shades of Shoegaze and Electro but remains reassuringly close to the melancholic Britpop DNA that defined the band throughout their career. It is not, however, overly saccharine or nostalgic.

“Philosophically, memory is important,” Yanchak explains, “but regret is not important. Oftentimes, nostalgia can be coupled with emotions of triumph or regret. ‘What if I had done things differently, or what if things had happened this way, or that way?’ For me, nostalgia is superfluous in a way. Nostalgia is just a point of reference. It’s important to be grounded in the now.”

A live performance featuring a band on stage, with a female musician playing a keyboard and two male musicians, one singing and playing tambourine while the other plays guitar, illuminated by blue stage lighting.
“Great things are going to happen, and terrible things are going to happen. But at the end of the day, your life is valuable.” The Dears photographed for NicheMTL.

On both micro and macro levels, the world is a very different place now than it was when Yanchak embarked upon her journey as an artist. North America is like another republic. Montreal is an alien metropolis that has caught up with the capitalistic impulses of other international cities.

“I don’t know if anywhere is a viable place to be an artist anymore. But I couldn’t see myself living anywhere else in Canada,” Yanchak concedes, as the jackhammers echo outside.

She and Lightburn, romantic as well as creative partners, have managed to navigate their relationship in a climate that seems to demand accelerated turnover, perpetual novelty, the archetypal rise-and-fall narrative. The Dears may have faltered, but they have resisted annihilation.

“I think artists do feel a responsibility to help and to guide people,” says Yanchak. “Art inspires people by its very nature. And it compels people to be emotionally connected. That emotional connection can mean so many different things. It’s not religious. It’s not organized religion. But it’s spiritual in its own way. And I think that that responsibility is just implied within creative people. Art, if it is successful, will speak to people in all kinds of different ways. It’s an inherent awareness. Especially after being an artist for 20-plus years, there’s an awareness that there is a power there — a power to communicate with people and connect with people.”

“What,” she asks rhetorically, “do you want to do with that power?”◼︎

Life is Beautiful! Life is Beautiful! Life is Beautiful! is released 7 November 2025 via Outside Music.

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Amethyst Deceivers

Esse Ran, “Mind Scanner,” Off Program (Humidex Records)

Félix Gourd aka Esse Ran performs at Parquette, 11 October 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Dreams are today’s answers to tomorrow’s questions.”
―Edgar Cayce

“Don’t let the little fuckers generation gap you.”
―William Gibson

Sooner or later, newer iterations will replace everyone.

The next generation has traditionally been understood as a de facto improvement upon its predecessors. But other than The Godfather Part II and Fletch Lives, what sequels have exceeded the quality of their originals? The film franchise of the American presidency is a case-in-point that 2.0 does not indicate a progression towards perfection.

The inevitability of replacement is cause for perennial concern as we fret over posterity. Fortunately, the future of techno, still the most forward-oriented musical form, seems to be in capable hands.

Irene F. Whittome, I am Here, Fondation Guido Molinari, 9 October – 10 December 2025

Irene F. Whittome « Histoire naturelle » (detail). Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Let your mercy spill
On all these burning hearts in hell
If it be your will
To make us well.”
—Leonard Cohen, “If It Be Your Will”

Recognizing patterns is a fundamental survival strategy. Remembering, for example, where food is found, or what the air smells like before a storm, can guide and protect us. All of life fits some pattern; there is no such thing as a random event. Zoom out far enough and you will see that what we perceive as chaos or chance is in fact divine design.

Daniel Lanois, Théâtre Maisonneuve, 5 October 2025

Daniel Lanois performs at Théâtre Maisonneuve, 5 October 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Flesh is the surface interface of a complex and messy machine known as the body. It at once conceals and reveals what lies beneath it. Being our largest organ, skin is the site upon which corporeal operation is located.

We conceive of and make our machines accordingly, knobs and buttons functioning as smooth superficial control panels for intricate and impenetrable devices. Who knows what goes on beneath an iPhone screen?

The only time carnal and machinic background processes rupture the exterior is when they malfunction. The glitch is a confrontation with restless activity and existential agitation.

Brahms & Dvořák: The Splendour of Romanticism, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal with violinist James Ehnes, Maison Symphonique, 25 September 2025

James Ehnes performs with the OSM at Maison Symphonique, 25 September 2025. Antoine Saito for the OSM.

And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes;
And there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying,
Neither shall there be any more pain:
For the former things are passed away.
—Revelation 21:4

On a recent trip to Prague, I had the opportunity to visit the tomb of Antonin Dvořák. It is located at Vyšehrad Cemetary, a short walk from the Basilica of St. Peter and St. Paul, an impressive neo-gothic edifice constructed in the late 19th century, which the Bohemian King Vratislaus II founded 800 years earlier. The grounds of Vyšehrad are immaculately manicured, evidence of attention to detail over the course of millennia.

In North America, we simply don’t have that kind of history. Ours is really Indigenous history, which Europeans sought to obliterate when they arrived on this continent roughly 400 years ago.

Indigenous history was never intended for preservation. Native Americans were largely nomadic and their monuments, like Totem poles, for instance, were deliberately imagined to fall back into the earth. Eternity is a European concept, whereas Indigenous people favoured infinity.

Observing Dvořák’s grave inspired me to theorize why we commemorate the dead, especially those whom we revered in life. Vyšehrad Cemetery contains a large population of notable Czech interments. Somehow, even though I failed to recognize most of the names on the list, this knowledge filled me with an extra sense of reverence.

In the Christian tradition, the conception of Purgatory defines the intermediate state between the death of the physical body and the soul’s salvation. Purgo, the Latin verb, means to cleanse. Purging is a form of purification, and also, when taken to extremes, a compulsive disorder.

Prayer for the dead implies a belief in resurrection, or at least in some kind of afterlife. Almost every culture in the world implicitly assumes that death is not the end. It follows, then, that our universal understanding of time is cyclical. How life after death might occur is a matter for the imagination.

We might rise from the grave like some cheesy zombie movie. Or we might live on in other organic forms, transubstantiating into another kind of matter: flesh decaying into soil; soil nourishing a flower; nectar feeding bees; and honey sweetening someone else’s imminent cup of tea.

Pay your respects to the vultures for they are your future.

Autechre with Nixtrove and Mark Broom, Société des arts technologiques, 24 October 2025

Autechre performs at the SAT, 24 October 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“During the paleotechnic period,” wrote the American historian of technology Lewis Mumford in his foundational book Technics and Civilization, “the increase of power and the acceleration of movement became ends in themselves: ends that justified themselves apart from their human consequences.”

What human consequences could Mumford have imagined from generalized acceleration?

The clock measured time and thus transformed it into an arbitrary unit of exchange.

The railroad enabled movement through space in a condensed period of time, quickening a passenger’s arrival in a new place, thus altering the natural experience and rhythms of travel.

Automated factories sped up the pace of production of consumer goods like cotton and sugar, bronze and steel, oil and gas, regulating the inventory of these commodities in the modern marketplace, thus making their value subject to temporal manipulation.

In the 21st century, we don’t remember or even consider a time before the evaluation of time. We only experience hints of organic duration in the form of unignorable biological cycles. After a period without food, we grow hungry. After a term of pregnancy, new life appears. After a season, snow falls.

The rest of the time, the railway, the factory, and the clock standardize time with increasingly granular precision, producing power by time’s spontaneous creation, and call attention to what Mumford described as the “maladjustment of function.”

More than autumn leaves or breaking glass, nothing makes you aware of the passage of time quite like a ticking metronome.◼︎

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: Félix Gourd photographed for NicheMTL.

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Massive Lectures

The Underground City

“The underground press serves as the only effective counter to a growing power, and more sophisticated techniques used by establishment mass media to falsify, misrepresent, misquote, rule out of consideration as a priori ridiculous, or simply ignore and blot out of existence: data, books, discoveries that they consider prejudicial to establishment interest.”
—William S. Burroughs, 1979.

In 1995, a critic and academic called Paul Mann published an essay entitled “Stupid Undergrounds” in the May issue of the journal Postmodern Culture.

In it, Mann takes a caustic and distant view toward his objects of inquiry: scenes like “renegade churches, dwarf communities, no-risk survivalist enclaves, unfunded quasi-scientific research units, paranoid think tanks, unregistered political parties, sub-employed workers councils, endo-exile colonies, glossolaliac fanclubs, acned anorexic primal hordes.”

Mann’s list goes on. He proceeds with remarkable contradiction to at once lampoon and champion these subcultural epiphenomena, simultaneously attacking and defending the high-minded critical-theoretical fascination with them. “Why,” Mann asks sarcastically, would we “wade through these piles of nano-shit?”

An unkind but fair question.

The underground is a generic designation that we habitually take for granted to denote everything in contrast to popular culture. Underground to the majority of us characterizes minorities of us. Unpopular or underrated or misunderstood or underrepresented or deliberately unfashionable pursuits come under the aegis of the underground. The term goes back thematically a long way.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky in 1864 publishes the novella Notes from Underground which begins with the line, “I am a sick man…” The underground for Dostoyevsky symbolizes refuge, an oppositional and often dark place positioned in comparison to the bright, clean, and implicitly artificial superficial world.

Jules Verne’s novel of the same year, Journey to the Center of the Earth, chronicles Professor Otto Lidenbrock and his nephew, Axel, who embark upon an odyssey into a subterranean Icelandic world full of prehistoric creatures and perilous adventures. The underground for Verne is a fantastic and limitless expanse that stimulates and challenges the imagination.

Roughly a century later, Bob Dylan’s 1965 album Bringing it all Back Home features the song “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” which contains the lyric, “Better jump down a manhole / Light yourself a candle.” The underground for Dylan is a line of flight from the melancholy that begins to exemplify the 1960s counterculture’s response to modernity.

30 years on, The Prodigy’s 1994 album Music for the Jilted Generation opens with a sample from the 1992 film The Lawnmower Man, in which Dr. Lawrence Angelo, the mad scientist character whom Pierce Brosnan portrays, says, “So, I’ve decided to take my work back underground — to stop it falling into the wrong hands.” The underground for Angelo, and by extension for Liam Howlett, represents a site of resistance, a secretive space in which one can hone experimental pursuits without enemy infiltration and interference.

The contemporaneous science fiction film 12 Monkeys depicts a dystopian near future in which a deadly virus forces earth’s survivors to retreat underground. For Terry Gilliam, the filmmaker, the underground is a location that offers escape from peril and certain death.

For the past three decades, the underground has thrived in a zombie-like state, percolating while never boiling over as it did during the 1970s with punk, or the 1990s with rave — or the 1960s with psychedelia, or the 1860s with fantastic literature.

The task today of some artists is to grow up from the underground as seedlings flourish from the dirt. Others purposefully embed themselves underground to attain some ideal of legitimacy, rejecting conventional earmarks of success such as revenue and reputation. Ascension from the underground for the latter ostensibly requires an intolerable wager that sacrifices certain inalienable ideals like artistic freedom and authenticity, compelling corporate and political compromises, otherwise known as selling out.

To those corporate and political interests, the underground is most frequently viewed as a field to mine for surplus cultural and capital value. Enthusiasts of underground music and art tend to be more passionate and vocal than mainstream fans, becoming loyal advocates and lifelong supporters of their favourite musicians and artists. There is cultural significance to being an early adopter, just as there is financial advantage in purchasing stock in a fledgling company before it gains marketplace dominance. Treasure is buried underground, and one must only unearth it to extract and maximize its worth.

We must think beyond the underground’s traditional dichotomies of high and low, centre and margin, power and defiance to power. The antagonistic impulse that once chose to venture further out, and then further back, is now choosing to go further downward.

The question arises of whether a truly revolutionary underground can exist in the internet age when social media idealizes ever-increasing impressions, followers, likes, shares. Algorithms cannot understand nor correct for intentional niche-ness. It is counterintuitive for the underground press — a publication like NicheMTL — to attempt to shed light on underground artists as well as itself via these technical means while remaining underground.

A revaluation of value becomes necessary to perform the underground. In a post-capitalist framework, we must be careful not to reimpose the binary coordinates of success and failure, popularity and unpopularity, profitability and worthlessness. The measure of value in the underground is contradictory to its shallow analogue. Less is more.

The ultimate limit of the underground is, of course, the burial ground, the graveyard, not where life springs forth but where dead things are laid to rest. Underground is where we repress, discard, and recycle that which has outlived its welcome at surface level. As such, the underground is also where haunting originates. Perhaps this spectre subconsciously prompted Paul Mann’s scorn, preferring to reject undergrounds as stupid rather than accept them as sacred.

The underground is anti-mid. It is concerned only with life at its most nascent and very latest stages. Shoots emerge to break new ground. They inevitably wither and die and fall back into the soil and the cycle begins again. We wade through these gardens of nano-shit with delight.

Underground is a mode to embrace the fertile, the fundamental, the infinite.◼︎

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All Dressed

This Continuous Spectrum: in conversation with Jessica Moss

On 20 July 2024, the violinist Jessica Moss was set to perform an intimate gig at Hotel2Tango, the storied recording studio in Montreal’s Mile End district. It was a glorious summer’s day as I walked westward from the Rosemont Metro station. A short burst of afternoon rain gave way to an evening sunset which bathed the iconic 1 Van Horne building in a brilliant golden light.

I was early, so I stopped at the public gardens installed along the south side of the Van Horne overpass. Busy bees pollinated the wildflowers and a gentle stream of traffic flowed over the bridge. I turned around and was suddenly struck by a vivid double rainbow that spanned the entire horizon.

The rainbow, in addition to adorning flags symbolizing diversity and inclusivity, is also a symbol of God’s promise to mankind to never again attempt to destroy us.

“I do set my bow in the cloud,” it is written in Genesis 9:13, “and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth.” What an auspicious sign, I thought, to observe in advance of a musician whose instrument resounds, literally, by drawing a bow against its strings.

“In my mind, I don’t play an acoustic instrument,” Moss informs me 15 months later as we chat over the phone one recent morning. “I play violin and pedals. The combination is the instrument.” Behold, to adapt a phrase from R. Murray Schafer, the new orchestra.

Moss has called me from her studio in the Atlas Building on Jean Talon, a collaborative loft called Error 403 which she shares with a community of artists and musicians. Her portion of the space is crammed to the rafters with trinkets and collected curios: plastic horses and ceramic birds and doll heads and kitschy dioramas. A Mason jar-full of piano tuning pegs. A heavy glass ashtray with an array of lambs lying on their sides. Everything in Moss’s environment possesses some double meaning, it seems, an overabundance of semiotic import.

“I don’t see another way to engage with the world than the one that I do,” Moss tells me, speaking characteristically cryptically. “It’s kind of like a raw wound. But that’s how I roll.”

“I realized how much I loved the technical process of working with recorded material in a collage-type way.” Photographed for NicheMTL.

I have requested an audience with Moss ostensibly to learn more about her newest LP, an album entitled Unfolding, released via Constellation Records in mid-October. But our conversation meanders organically in a patchwork manner that mimics Moss’s overlapping compositions, melodic and melancholic strands of interlaced string-and-electronics arrangements that glide through your ears until they weave themselves subtly into your soul.

Jessica Moss is one of Montreal’s great collaborators, playing with Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra and the Klezmer-influenced Black Ox Orkestar, and appearing as a guest player on albums by Arcade Fire, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and the late Vic Chesnutt, among many others. Yet, over the past decade, Moss has found her footing as an uncompromising solo performer, releasing six sturdy full-length records since 2015.

“The very first time I recorded solo,” Moss explains, “I went to New York and into the basement of Guy Picciotto, who is a dear friend, and we made the cassette, Under Plastic Island, which is technically my first release. I wanted to tour but I didn’t understand that you can’t tour without making a record. So, I said, ‘fine, I’ll just record the stuff that I’m doing.’ Even from that very first moment, I realized how much I loved the technical process of working with recorded material in a collage-type way. It’s a process that I’ve used all my life, making things. It’s the artistic mode that I operate in.”

Unfolding was recorded using Moss’s distinctive montage process, starting with demos captured on her iPhone and culminating in layered strata of sounds that the engineer Radwan Ghazi Moumneh mixed into its final form.

“For me, I have various grooves,” Moss tells me. “My album-making process, even though it has evolved over the years, has kind of remained the same from the very beginning. I only go into the jam space with the intention of recording once I know that I’m in the clear to work on music for the next while, that I have time to make a record. When that happens, I get very, very into it very quickly because usually by then the concept has been boiling in my head for a long time. So, my process is improvising with a theme in mind and slowly picking apart what I’ve done and slowly creating the skeleton of what will end up being the record. All of those feel like being extreme flow states for me. Once that is done and everything is in front of me in ProTools, the pulling things together is one of my favourite things in the world, even though it is also extremely difficult and takes so long. I feel very alive doing that.”

Appropriately, Unfolding is scheduled for a month long run at Habitat Sonore, the immersive Dolby Atmos-outfitted listening room in the basement of Centre PHI. “It’s pretty exciting, that place,” Moss beams. “I just spent a week doing the Dolby Atmos mix. It’s a very special thing for me.”

Moss was raised in Toronto before relocating permanently to Montreal in her late teens. “My grandparents lived here in Montreal and my parents grew up in Montreal,” she explains. “My mother decided even before I was born that I would be having music lessons and that they would be a serious part of my life. My dad played in bands in the Communist Jewish community. There was a lot of singing and a lot of music-sharing circles. We spent summers and winters in Montreal and I knew from an early age that when I could move here I would. And I’ve never looked back. The grown-up me grew up in Montreal.”

Childhood for Moss was filled with Classical music, Jazz, and old-school Blues, until she developed her own individual tastes. “The very first obsession with music that I had was the Grateful Dead. I fucking loved the Grateful Dead. That was my first real passion.”

The earliest album she remembers buying of her own volition was Appetite for Destruction by Guns N’ Roses. “I listened to it a few years ago,” Moss recalls, “and the lyrics are fucking heinously disgusting,” punctuating this disdainful appraisal by elongating her syllables. “It was one of the many eye-opening moments of realizing as a young girl-type person the kind of misogyny that was rampant in the stuff that I listened to. Musically, you can’t go wrong. Lyrically, it’s better to not listen to the words at all.”

Quickly, Moss discovered and was influenced by the more experimental side of Grunge Rock emerging in the early 1990s. “I was in high school when Kurt Cobain died,” she says. “I remember the very day. Sonic Youth was a gateway. The Pixies were a gateway. Fugazi. The classics.”

When she absconded to Montreal in the late ‘90s, Moss found herself on the ground floor of the nascent Constellation Records scene, a cornerstone of this city’s mythology as a nucleus for underground insurgent music.

“One of my first best friends in Montreal was Ian Ilavsky,” Moss remembers. “We played in bands together. We hung out all the time. He and his mystery friend Don Wilkie from Toronto, who was planning to move to Montreal, wanted to start a venue-slash-record label. They wanted it to be called The Constellation Room. So, Don moved here, and then they were confronted with the incredibly Kafkaesque bureaucracy in Montreal with doing anything dealing with the public. They couldn’t get a venue permit no matter what they did. So, they just rented a loft and started the label and started hosting a small concert series in Old Montreal in their first location. And that experience became Constellation Records. Their first release was Ian’s band Sofa, who I was a huge fan of at the time, and I had seen every show of. That was pre-history. I was around for the whole dawn — the Don dawn,” she laughs.

In the ensuing decades, Montreal has undergone seismic political and economic shifts which have translated into a fluctuating cultural landscape.

“For a long time, it felt like Montreal was immune to the global Western world shift towards gentrification,” says Moss. “But in the last few years, what I thought could never happen here has happened here. You’ve seen it. We’re experiencing what everyone else is experiencing of being priced out, if you aren’t lucky enough to have some kind of stable living conditions. Particularly because of the rapid rise of rents here which have not matched the rise in income, what’s happening here is very violent in that way.”

“Having transformative experiences along with people who are working towards making change is a real thing.” Photographed for NicheMTL.

Moss possesses a strong sense of social responsibility, leading by example in an abstract but tangible fashion. She is a founder member of the Montreal chapter of Musicians For Palestine and has co-organized a number of local fundraising events for the cause.

“I don’t think that I’m under any naïve illusions that there is any one thing that can affect change,” she admits. “Definitely music as a general term is too broad. But it’s one of the many tools that a community can have that can offer a space to bring like minded people together, or near-like minded people together, and have it be a situation where a group of people can leave more aligned than they entered. Or they can have this experience of sharing the energy of seeing music performed. To me, that can be a genuinely transformative experience. Having transformative experiences along with people who are working towards making change is a real thing. It’s not just entertainment. It’s a dedication to creating those spaces in the best possible way that I know, to facilitate that type of communion.”

There is an air of urgency, profundity, and gravitas to Moss’s life and work — from collecting obscure ornaments to condensing a multitude of tracks into glimmering sonic jewels that both trouble and delight. Watching Moss in her element is a masterclass in ritual reciprocity, an unforgettable experience for anyone fortunate enough to have encountered her delicate indomitability.

“I feel very committed to it being a reciprocal relationship,” she divulges. “It’s 100 percent the motivation that keeps me like a moth flying at the light.”◼︎

Jessica Moss performs 18 October 2025 at Centre PHI, 407 Rue Saint-Pierre.

Cover image by Audrey Cantwell.

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Play Recent

Monkey Warfare

No Hay Banda, BEAM SPLITTER with Anne-F Jacques & Ryoko Akama, La Sala Rossa, 29 September 2025

Anne-F Jacques & Ryoko Akama perform for No Hay Banda’s 10th season premiereat La Sala Rossa, 29 September 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

The 2006 Canadian film Monkey Warfare, starring the Torontonian writer-director Don McKellar and his late partner Tracy Wright, centres on an ageing couple of radical political militants who spend their days smoking pot, listening to The Fugs, foraging for antiques to peddle online, and ruminating over their heyday committing soft acts of left-wing domestic terrorism.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s most recent feature, One Battle After Another, displays remarkable similarities to McKellar’s film: handlebar-moustached male leads with flawed personalities and difficulties maintaining relationships; attempting to outrun previous misdeeds; the hope bestowed upon a new generation of notably female operatives.

Although their politics align, these films’ ultimate morals could not be further apart. The necessity of violence is the definitive subject at the heart of every revolution.

Don Giovanni, Opéra de Montréal, Salle Wilfrid Pelletier, 30 September 2025

The cast of Don Giovanni take a bow at Salle Wilfrid Pelletier, 30 September 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“…the more consciousness a man possesses the more he is separated from his instincts (which at least give him an inkling of the hidden wisdom of God) and the more prone he is to error. He is certainly not up to Satan’s wiles if even his creator is unable, or unwilling, to restrain this powerful spirit.” —Carl Jung, Answer to Job.

We are constantly at war — evidently with each other, but more frequently with ourselves. We fight to resist our base impulses. We struggle to transcend our animal instincts and become human. Foregoing indulgences and pleasures of the flesh is an archetypal fight. It is not only a moral but furthermore an existential conflict. We battle our inner demons which seek to lead us astray from the straight and narrow path.

Consciousness, then, is an archetypal paradox: consciousness is necessary to discern the difference between what is wrong and what is right; but it is also consciousness that sensibly represses nature’s divine intelligence.

POP Montreal presents Do Make Say Think with Kee Avil, Rialto Theatre, 28 September 2025

Patrons spill out onto the street to perform a “Cellphone Symphony” following Do Make Say Think at the Rialto Theatre, 28 September 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

The problem of why we repeat is a fundamental philosophical question. Once something is done, why bother to do it again?

There are a number of answers, including, but not limited to, compulsion, addiction, and inevitability.

I might be compelled, say, to have lunch even though I had lunch yesterday because food keeps me alive and I love life. I might drink a cup of coffee even though I drank a cup of coffee a few hours ago because caffeine is a habit-forming substance and I am a creature of habit. I might go out to see a beloved band perform again even though I have seen them perform before because I am opportunistic and cannot avoid exploiting any occasion to do so.

Our impulse to repeat is at odds, though, with the longing for novelty and the desire for freshness of experience. And so, we disguise our repetitions. We have a ham sandwich for lunch today because we had a tuna fish sandwich yesterday. We order an espresso in the morning and an allongé in the afternoon. And our favourite bands subtly alter our favourite songs in order to inject them with a sense of surprise, even though we know very well the verse and the chorus.

“We do not disguise because we repress,” writes Gilles Deleuze in Difference and Repetition, “we repress because we disguise, and we disguise by virtue of the determinant centre of repetition.”

Ensemble Urbain, Origines, La Sala Rossa, 21 September 2025

Ensemble Urbain perform at La Sala Rossa, 21 September 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

I have often wondered why, if there is so much vacant space in the world, people feel the need to occupy the same zone.

Humans congregate in cities like magnets draw metal shavings. Everyone wants to live in Paris or London or Berlin or Moscow or Montreal. Fewer people are drawn to Saint-Joseph-de-Sorel.

“New York City,” said the departed comedian Phil Hartman, “is a testament to man’s desire to be stacked on top of other men.”

Africa Fashion, McCord Steward Museum, 25 September 2025 – 1 February 2026

Dr. Christine Checinska introduces Africa Fashion at the McCord Stewart Museum, 24 September 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

A fool’s mouth is his destruction, and his lips are the snare of his soul. —Proverbs 19:7

Beauty, wisdom, virtue, justice, and truth seem to be the predominant preoccupations of the world’s religious doctrines.

About a decade ago, we entered into an historical era that the media dubbed “post-Truth,” in which objective facts took a supporting role to individual opinions and emotional appeals. This new epoch coincided with the first election of the Orange Cheeto in the United States and Britain’s exit from the European Union across the pond.

The universality of truth is implied by its most frequently used form, in the singular. We don’t instruct our children to tell multiple truths. Rather, we implore them to tell the truth. One.

Conversely, falsehoods are plural. Lies. Practically infinite iterations.

Monotheism is the creed that there is only one God. The concept developed in opposition to polytheism in which adherents worshiped multiple deities that governed various aspects of nature and reality. The term originates from the mid-1600s when Henry More, the English theologian, devised it to designate preferential religions and reject substance dualism.

In the 21st century, we tend to perceive and interpret reality through a series of interconnected actors, actants, and networks. This perception encourages an assumption of complexity that the understanding of a singular truth bypasses entirely. The austerity of one truth, one God, and one administration of justice has an inherent and minimal beauty to it. But it does not reflect the structure of the organic world around us, and particularly the world we have constructed.

Multiplicity characterizes technological postmodernity and diversity represents biological fortitude. Both of those assertions are observably true — and they seemingly contradict the world’s religious doctrines.

The notion of multiple truths presupposes that facts are a little different for everyone, like a universal version of Rashomon. Reality has apparently bifurcated exponentially since the turn of the millennium, and those divisions have accelerated following Trump, Covid, and Trump 2.0.

Are we never ever getting back together?◼︎

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Cover image: Gallery view of Elvis, part of Africa Fashion at the McCord Stewart Museum. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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