Author Archives: Ryan Alexander Diduck

999 Words

Une année sans lumière: notes on a new dark age at Quebec universities

Many inside and out of academia were deeply troubled recently when Donald Trump’s White House decided to withhold U.S. $400 million in grants and contracts at Columbia University over what the administration described as the school’s “failure to address on-campus antisemitism.”

The U.S. President in April also terminated $2.2 billion in funding for Harvard and announced in May that an additional $450 million would be frozen because, according to a joint statement from the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Education, and the General Services Administration, the university had become “a breeding ground for virtue signalling and discrimination.”

An overwhelming majority of international scholars have voiced their concerns that targeting these institutions’ budgets (which fund broad and unrelated research activities like cancer treatments and viral outbreak prevention) as a reaction to ideological disagreements between Trump and university administrators, amounts to an unprecedented act of political coercion, and may be unconstitutional.

Both Harvard and Columbia have filed lawsuits in Federal Court against Trump’s moves. Doubtless it will only hurt the White House that their lawyers were educated at Harvard and Columbia.

Trump’s cuts have manifested immediately in staff reductions. Columbia is set to eliminate 180 jobs, while Harvard President Alan Garber took a voluntary 25 percent pay cut. However, neither of these measures will be enough to offset the cumulative multibillion-dollar shortfalls these universities face.

Academics have roundly denounced the Trump administration’s decisions by various means, writing damning op-eds in sympathetic publications, or, more dramatically, leaving the U.S. altogether.

Jason Stanley, who authored a book entitled Erasing History, how fascists rewrite the past to control the future and until March was Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale, has since relocated to Toronto as an academic refugee. Stanley, who is Jewish, claims that the United States is “tilting toward authoritarian dictatorship.” As one of the west’s leading authorities on political philosophy, he should know.

To Canadians, it appears appalling that American centres for higher learning might be punished, or purged, because of their political leanings. But it is obviously happening domestically, too. And it is happening specifically in Quebec for even less rational reasons. It is not political ideology that is being penalized here, but rather native language and regional origin.

Last year, the media widely reported staggering tuition increases implemented by the CAQ government to be levied against international and out-of-province students starting in the 2024-’25 academic year. Ostensibly, the plan was to correct a supposed imbalance in funding between the province’s French and English universities. The increased tuition would serve a two-fold purpose: the surplus revenue from foreign Anglophone students would be transferred to Francophone universities to fund French-language education for Francophone Quebecers, thus resisting the supposed decline of French in Quebec, as well as limiting the share of public capital escaping the province from foreign students who often leave after graduation.

Resulting from Quebec’s policy shift, enrollment is down across the board — applications from international students to all universities have declined by an average of 43 percent — and McGill this week announced the elimination of 60 staff positions. Ironically, it is Francophone universities that have experienced the steepest drop-offs, with UQTR at around 60 percent. Who knew, few from the international Francophonie want to move to Trois-Rivières.

This is why the CAQ’s policies are so ill-conceived — because in attempting to injure English-speaking students and immigrants, Quebec is hurting everyone, native Francophone Quebecers included. If fewer international students are paying the hiked tuition prices at McGill and Concordia, then UdeM and UQÀM are receiving less than hoped for in financial transfers from these schools.

Not to mention the secondary and tertiary damage. If Quebec universities are facing a projected $200 million deficit this year, guesstimate all the additional currency these foreign students will not be spending in the province — on food, rent, bills, clothes, Opus cards, nightlife, and all the other things students typically spend their money on. Imagine the losses for the SAQ and the SQDC alone.

It should go without saying that French-speakers are also landlords, grocery clerks, employees of Hydro Quebec and Videotron, Uniqlo and H&M, food servers, bartenders, delivery, bus, and Uber drivers. Students, whatever their language and nationality, animate an immeasurable proportion of Quebec’s economy. Kneecapping them hurts Quebec first — and most.

Then, there is the damage to Quebec’s reputation as a destination for advanced education. Clearly, foreign students this year have already reconsidered coming to this province to attend university. Even if the CAQ quickly reverses its policies and resets tuition fees to precedent rates, international students have already been given the impression that they are less welcome here than in other Canadian provinces.

Quebec risks further exacerbating its stereotypical “Brain Drain,” a phenomenon observed for at least the last quarter century as talented graduates evacuate elsewhere. No doubt, fewer academic rock stars will choose to work in Quebec in the future because they will have the privilege of teaching fewer high-quality students. Perhaps this is why Jason Stanley chose UofT over McGill.

Students move to Quebec to train as doctors, professors, legislators. They start businesses, become community leaders, and thicken the soup of Quebecois society. They make celebrated movies, write insightful novels, and establish important literary journals. They launch legendary record labels, found defining festivals, establish iconic recording studios, and form bands of distinction that go on to produce albums that define entire generations. Some of them start magazines to write about it all. Especially students deepen the profundity of the culture of a place.

The CAQ’s strategy is a ridiculous equation that anyone with intelligence can see is straight-up bad math. It is anti-immigrant and xenophobic at best, and intolerant and flat-out racist at worst. And its impact in practice is so arbitrary that it actually makes American policy look nuanced for at least naming a target. Trump despises the woke. Whereas Legault abhors everyone who isn’t a mirror image of him.

Education is not an affront to politics, nationality, or language. Rather, it enriches them all.◼︎

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100% In It: in conversation with Radwan Ghazi Moumneh

The power is out at Thee Mighty Hotel2Tango.

The legendary Montreal recording studio on Van Horne Avenue that has produced some of this city’s most iconic recordings over the past two decades, by the likes of Arcade Fire, The Dears, The Barr Brothers, and Godspeed You! Black Emperor, among many others, a building that is normally positively buzzing, both literally and figuratively, stands eerily quiet on a recent Wednesday.

In a whirlwind of apologies for the lack of electricity, its co-founder, the composer and recording engineer Radwan Ghazi Moumneh arrives right on time, to the minute. Hydro Quebec had months ago scheduled an outage to accommodate routine maintenance work, Moumneh tells me. But he had forgotten, and on this afternoon, we would have to proceed under natural light. In the studio’s main room, fortunately, the sun streams in as if from some divine source.

Moumneh wears dark glasses, his head covered by a bright pink hoodie and a pair of signature leather loafers over bare feet. He speaks rapidly and affably and philosophically and curiously self-deprecatingly, entirely void of any sense of rock star ego, even if it might be warranted by the sheer volume of celebrated albums in which he has participated. Recordings by Thee Silver Mt. Zion, Jessica Moss, and Land of Kush, just to name a few.

“The other day,” he confides, laughing, “we were at the PA, and my son turns to me and asks, ‘Dad, are you famous?’ And the clerk looks at me like maybe I am. And I’m just standing there like someone who’s trying not to be recognized, with a potato and an onion in my basket. And I say, ‘no — and we’re not getting any chocolate or chips, either. We’re getting an onion and a potato for dinner.’”

Moumneh and his business partners Efrim Menuck, Howard Bilerman, and Thierry Amar purchased the unassuming white complex that houses Hotel2Tango nearly 20 years ago. Constellation Records has its offices upstairs, and Grey Market Mastering rounds out the edifice as a one-stop record workshop. This is our Abbey Road, our Brill Building, our Sound City all rolled into one — in a city with its own undoubtedly signature sound.

“When people make their records here, it’s such a precious thing,” Moumneh muses. “So, I make sure my heart’s 100% in it. Each one is such a unique experience and a very important piece of the puzzle. And each one has really annoying things that make me get fucking upset at the artist because I’m like, ‘God fucking damn it, this sucks. This is a silly way to work. This is a silly thing that you’re doing.’ But I’m also very conscious that that is a very important part of making something. Nothing can be wholly perfect. The perfection is the bad and the good.”

Moumneh, 49, is an Orson Welles-level Renaissance man who has worked as a musician with Jerusalem in My Heart, in partnership with Edmontonian expat Erin Weisgerber, a producer, a filmmaker, a composer for cinema, dance, and theatre, an actor, and a sound designer for public art installations. He was responsible for the audio of 21 Balançoires, the musical swings created in 2011 in the Quartier des spectacles and exported to various cities around the world as a work of living urban sculpture.

The swings, a collaboration with the design team Daily Tous Les Jours, rewarded users’ cooperation with more complex melodies as they swung in unison. 21 Balançoires won numerous international awards and caught the attention of the talk show host and global tastemaker Oprah Winfrey. “I do so many different things,” Moumneh says, “but I still feel like I have no idea what I’m doing half the time. I’m still such a student of everything.”

I caught Moumneh last year at Hotel2Tango performing an improvised electronics set with the Parisian musician Frédéric D. Oberland, with whom he has just completed recording a long player to be released in 2026.

“What we do is dangerous and fun,” Moumneh explains. “Just experimentation in the truest sense. Knowing that this could be not amazing and that’s okay. That’s the spirit. Let’s do something singular and unique and we’re never going to do it again.”

Moumneh also freshly wrapped sessions with the Lebanese post-rock band SANAM, with which he will perform a handful of live dates at Suoni per il Popolo, the 25th iteration of the storied Montreal music festival, in June 2025.

“I’m going to do a duo with the synth player of SANAM,” Moumneh tells me. “And Jessica Moss will do a trio with the bassist and the drummer, who is a phenomenal musician. I’m really lucky to have these people as dear friends.”

Born in Lebanon and raised in Oman, Moumneh’s family fled to Canada in the mid-1990s while he was still in his mid-teens, as part of a government initiative to resettle at-risk migrants. “My parents had no idea where Canada was,” Moumneh divulges. “But it was this or go back to Lebanon. They were just trying to offer these crazy deals to people with young children and nowhere to go.”

Moumneh remained in Montreal while his family returned to Lebanon fewer than five years later. “My parents spoke no English and no French. They hated it here,” he says, elongating the operative word. “I was like, ‘I really need to have my own thing, away from you guys.’”

Soon, Moumneh found his footing attending engineering school and teaching himself to play a variety of musical instruments. “I just started playing music because I met a couple of weirdos in class and they were like, ‘hey, do you want to try and learn how to play music?’” He relocated momentarily to Lebanon but moved back to Montreal in the early 2000s and was among the cohort that founded Hotel2Tango. “I was working on stuff before that, too,” he says, “but this is where things really got serious.”

Moumneh travels to Beirut twice a year, he tells me, to visit family and close friends, recounting how the city was bombed twice on his last sojourn. “It was typical, stupid shit,” he deadpans. “3:30 in the morning jumping out of bed because the whole fucking neighbourhood is bombed and you’re like, ‘fuck you guys.’”

It is striking how nonchalantly he speaks of the routine violence that Lebanon has endured historically, escalating again with the most recent war in neighbouring Israel. “It’s not as dramatic as it sounds,” Moumneh says. “It is dramatic, but people deal with it on a whole different level. Our idea of danger is a different thing. People like my parents can’t leave, but people who are young can’t live there. All the youth leave because it’s so dead-end.”

“I absolutely worship challenges. I live for them.” Radwan Ghazi Moumneh photographed for NicheMTL.

We talk at length about the disparities between the West and Middle East. “Two people can go to the same area and have completely different experiences of what they understand Lebanon is,” he describes. “It’s very un-understandable. That’s our sectarian system. If you want to see the extremes of all aspects of life, you go to Lebanon. It’s just extremes in every direction. It’s a really spectacular place. There is obnoxious wealth, of course. Beyond obnoxious wealth. And beyond insane poverty. And beyond insane beauty. And beyond insane ugliness. There is more beauty than there is ugliness. And even in the ugliness there is beauty.”

I ask him to contrast Montreal and its unique brand of ugly beauty.

“If someone was to come from abroad and only visit Montreal and that to them is what represents Canada, how distorted of a fucking idea would they have of what Canada is? This is a crazy place. It’s so absurd that this whole place,” he says, spanning out his arms, “is an arbitrary country. You can fit three Montreals into Lebanon. It’s so tiny. It’s like from here to Ottawa. And yet we have a million different populations that are so drastically different. There are so many dialects, so many accents, culinary differences, cultural differences, within one tiny little blob. Imagine. It’s all beautiful. But it’s sad, also, the destructive side of it.”

Finding beauty in despair, or creating it when none seems readily available, is the responsibility of the socially conscious artist, someone like Moumneh with that superpower that produces spontaneous voltage, especially when the electricity is out, either metaphorically or actually.

“I love throwing myself into hoops of fire,” admits Moumneh, speaking now more broadly about his general approach to life. “I love it. I love the challenge. I absolutely worship challenges. I live for them. I think it’s what keeps you mentally a child. It feels like you have so much to learn.”◼︎

Radwan Ghazi Moumneh performs as part of Suoni per il popolo with SANAM 21 June 2025 at La Sala Rossa, 4848 Boulevard St. Laurent.

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999 Words

The Last Detail: notes on nano-factions in culture, music, and Montreal

“Markets, machines, and monsters might inspire us. Rulers of any kind? Not so much.”
—Nick Land, “Flavors of Reaction.”

A paradoxically growing micro-trend has emerged in Montreal and worldwide, gaining momentum in post-pandemic cultural production: the tendency toward the micro.

Focus on smallness or outsize scale, hybridity, and detail has lately characterized an increasingly large body of work, and it is interesting and important to note for a number of reasons.

Generally, inclinations in various creative pursuits tend to reflect broader sociocultural shifts. In America, for instance, jazz emerged at a time when urbanism began to dominate the modern experience. Psychedelic rock was born out of the student protest movement and burgeoning drug culture fermenting in a chaotic anti-war context.

In Europe, Dadaism arose against the violently irrational backdrop of World War I. And Futurism foreshadowed fascist technocracy.

Today in the west, wars neither hot nor cold simmer and threaten the tenuous global neoliberal order. The traumatic event is always mere moments away from puncturing the smooth veneer of the social interface. Meanwhile surveillance society overwatches it all.

There is little by way of a shared, common understanding that we can identify between cultures and nations, save for precarity itself. As such, monoculture has become and apparently will remain polymorphous.

Gallery view, Myriam Dion, Frieze (detail), 2024, Drawing with wooden pencils on Japanese paper, 936 cm x 156 cm. Video by NicheMTL.

Extreme economic uncertainty, the constant threat of the State alternately deploying physical force internally, or preventing it externally, and the cracked foundation of the Real itself owing to deepfakes, artificial intelligence, and the virtual digital veil — all of these conditions simultaneously lurk beneath niche nano-factions in culture, music, and art. Dissensus, not consensus, unites us, a contradiction of the hyphenated micro-moment.

The 45th Canadian election may be predictive for the divisive and fragmented structure of antagonism to come, and the fractious zeitgeist that has been brewing in liberal democracies since the pell-mell pandemic protocols beset each individual against each other. Faced with uncertainty, voters across the country turned away from marginal third parties and towards the poles.

Still, sectarian regionalism complicates a strictly polar explanation, as the western provinces leaned right, the east leaned left, urban centers voted liberal, rural districts and the suburbs chose conservatives, and Quebec, perhaps predictably, voted for itself.

The result is the proliferation of separatist sentiment beyond its most anticipated territories, ostensibly pitting province against province, city against town, and French against English, in a time when national unity in the face of Trumpist (or worse, Putinist) neocolonialism is imperative. The divided are most easily conquered.

So, whither art?

The pointillistic precision of visual artists like Nico Williams, who meticulously beads together unlikely quotidian objects, and Myriam Dion, whose painstakingly exhaustive tapestries defy reasonable size and scale, require deepening distance from their subjects to recognize.

The detail of David Bellemare’s “Dark Painting for Dark Times” series, exhibited in a new group show at Galerie C in the Belgo Building, is reminiscent of Magic Eye images for which viewers are required to relax their eyes to discern objects. Only through parallax view does form emerge.

Nico Williams, NDN Hustle (2024-?) 11/0 Japanese Glass Cylinder Beads, thermally-fused/braided polyethylene thread. Wood. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Further down the deconstructed-music rabbit hole that defined the last decade, Tim Hecker’s microtonal glissando in recent works like “Heaven Will Come,” the galloping-horses of Big|Brave’s “innominate no. vii,” and NO HAY BANDA’s staccato exponential rhythms that animate “Life on an Incline or Clean Geometry,” all point to swelling multiplicity and the instability of an assortment of conventional systems. The only thing that is assured in these forward-facing artists’ compositions is that the future is uncertain.

The prevalence of the “post-” prefix affixed to assorted musical genres, like post-club and post-rock — and especially post-classical, a spiralling vector of competing temporalities — indicates a sense of accelerative chronological energy at work. But the inability or unwillingness to construct or constitute harmony and rhythm in any traditional sense is a stronger signal of our collective struggle to “get it together,” so to speak, and as such, leaves us where we were. All the while, time, power, and capital march on.

The modern is increasingly difficult to capture as moments themselves subdivide. This problem, though, possesses as much peril as promise. For The Invisible Committee, the anonymous French intellectual collective which in 2017 published their third manifesto entitled Now, “opening ourselves to the world is opening ourselves to its presence here and now. Each fragment,” they claim, “carries its own possibility of perfection.” In the particular the universal, kind of thing. Perhaps there is optimism in trusting that now is all there ever was, and all there ever will be.

And yet, the devil is in the details.

Democracy means that each citizen is an equal part of a larger portrait of a republic. But there is nothing more dangerous than an ill-informed citizenry, or one that has become unmoored from a moral responsibility to history. Crises are manufactured specifically to generate the impression of the big picture’s unmanageability. In normal times, the political left might have relied on solidarity to intervene in blatant hypocrisy. But what happens when there is no normal, or more accurately, when everyone experiences their own bespoke version of it, when artists make and remake it anew?

Montreal might be the Canadian city best oriented to weather this new and permanent state of flux, because it was never-not myriad things existing across simultaneous nows. The concept of purity is as obsolete as a return to greatness. It presupposes a totality that never really existed.

“Multi-” is Montreal’s proper operative prefix and as such, we are uniquely positioned to come together over a lack of social cohesion. If nobody has a shared experience, then everyone does, and its vacuum unites us and poises us to lead in a leaderless world.

Montreal culture is really post-culture, a network of self-organizational relations that have the potential to transcend the monstrous descent into evermore disintegrated factions.

The question is, do we believe it? If artists are at the vanguard of cultural progress, it is clear that Montreal reserves a regiment on detail.◼︎

Cover image: Gallery view, David Bellemare’s “Dark Painting for Dark Times”, Galerie C. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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The Dark Canuck

Nico Williams, Bingo, Fondation PHI, 23 April — 14 September 2025

Nico Williams at the Bingo vernissage, Fondation PHI, 23 April 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Americans say no to drugs. Canadians say no thank you.”
—Susan Musgrave, You’re in Canada Now, Motherfucker.

I flew in July 2006 from Montreal to Victoria and drove from there in a rented Toyota about 25 kilometers south to a small municipality called Metchosin. The purpose of this trip was to interview one of the most famous incarcerated Canadians, the bank robber-turned-author Stephen Reid.

Reid at the time was a ward of the William Head Institution, known colloquially as Club Fed, a minimum-security correctional facility constructed at the lonely end of Vancouver Island’s southernmost tip.

Originally built as a 19th century immigration quarantine station, William Head might have been among the most picturesque sites for a prison, a remote and rugged stretch of oceanfront property perfumed with Douglas Fir and the saline breeze.

Reid was imprisoned, this time around, for the brazen robbery of a Victoria bank in 1999. But he had already earned a storied reputation as a member of The Stopwatch Gang, a crew of Canadian career criminals who had in the 1970s and ‘80s successfully pulled heists throughout the United States, making off with millions.

The gang earned their nickname in the newspapers because they carried stopwatches instead of guns, completing their jobs in under 90 seconds and escaping gracefully before law enforcement could respond to the 211.

What could be more Canadian than non-violent larceny? Reid told me they never failed to say ‘thank you’ to the guards as they strode out the door carrying Yankee Doodle’s hard-earned dough.

Catch Step HYA remix featuring Lunice (with EENO T and Magnanimous), La Chapelle | Scénes Contemporaines, 22 April 2025

EENO T and Magnanimous. Clémence Clara Faure for La Chapelle | Scénes Contemporaines

“By walking I found out
Where I was going.”
—Irving Layton, “There Were No Signs.”

Over the past several months, and intensifying during the Federal Election campaign, Canadians of all political stripes have been engaged in some deep soul-searching to define specifically what characterizes Canada as a sovereign nation.

“Not American” is of course the most obvious answer. But we can’t simply identify ourselves by what we are not. We must, rather, assert Canadian-ness as a series of distinct and affirmative characteristics.

It may be a surprise to learn that the Scottish have a version of poutine appropriately called “chips and cheese and gravy.” The British are also known for being polite. So, what makes Canadian poutine — or politeness — any different?

African-American Sound Recordings with SlowPitchSound and Dumb Chamber, Société des arts technologiques, 27 April 2025

Dumb Chamber performs at the SAT, 25 April 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“A Canadian is someone who drinks Brazilian coffee from an English teacup, and munches a French pastry while sitting on his Danish furniture, having just come from an Italian movie in his German car. He picks up his Japanese pen and writes to his Member of Parliament to complain about the American takeover of the Canadian publishing business.”
—Campbell Hughes, 1973.

Canadians pride ourselves on our inclusivity and the doctrine of multiculturalism enshrined in social policy since the first Trudeau’s term in office. We congratulate ourselves with the fact that slavery was never legally practiced in Canada, that ours was and continues to be a safe-haven nation for people escaping bondage and other forms of systemic oppression.

As opposed to the American melting pot, Canada is a mosaic, a puzzle that doesn’t just scramble disparate identities into one uniform nationality but instead incorporates each of them into a rich and panoramic tapestry.

Still, just because Canada never practiced slavery doesn’t mean that racism and discrimination didn’t exist here. They did — and continue today as we strive to shake the legacy of colonialism and reconcile historical injustices perpetrated on Indigenous land.

And yet, the present condition requires evermore nuance because Canada is not only composed of colonizers and the colonized.

My ancestors, for instance, were displaced in the late 1920s when Russia was actively colonizing the Indigenous people of Ukraine. First-person accounts by the first wave of Ukrainian immigrants, collected in a book called Land of Pain, Land of Promise, are filled with stories of gratitude for Indigenous peoples’ assistance adjusting to life in Canada.

An underlying monstrosity remains, however. The American writer William S. Burroughs described this irrepressible abomination as “The Ugly Spirit.” Righteous retribution for genocidal expansion from coast to coast to coast.

The Ugly Spirit is a stateless entity, unrestrained by borders, floating northward like a ghost or a virus, the immigrant to end all immigrants. Thinly veiled beneath the respectable surface of unblemished bureaucracy, white linens and starched shirts and sunny ways, peace, order, and good governance, savagery lurks.

Oscillating Spaces launch with curator Anneke Abhelakh, Canadian Centre for Architecture, 24 April 2025

Gallery view of Oscillating Spaces, CCA. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Canadian history could be a drug-free alternative to anaesthesia.”
—Mike Myers, Canada.

One of the most frequent adjectives used to describe Canadians internationally is “nice.” Nice isn’t boring, although we are known as that, too. Nice isn’t kind, although kindness could be considered a constituent component of being nice.

What nice really means in practice is milquetoast. When threatened, we tend to back down. When attacked, we prefer to concede defeat than to offend our aggressors with a fight.

There’s nice and there’s naïve. The most extreme example of the perversion of niceness is the departed Canadian author Alice Munro’s apologetic acceptance of her daughter’s sexual abuse. Munro would rather have overlooked horrible transgressions against her kith and kin than to upset the larger family order in protest. In her own mind, was she just being nice?

Tolerance is one of Canada’s most admirable virtues. But when we tolerate violence against us, we should discard our national reputation for being nice and adopt a tough and just disposition. In significant ways, the Orange Cheeto’s 51st state rhetoric is forcing Canada to grow a backbone, to stand our ground, even if it means abandoning some of our soft-touch image.

Così fan tutte, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, Maison Symphonique, 23 April 2025

The cast of Così fan tutte performing with the OSM, Maison Symphonique, 23 April 2025. Antoine Saito for the OSM.

“‘Cause in the forget-yer-skates dream
You can hang your head in woe
And this diverse-as-ever scene
Know which way to go.”
—Gord Downie, “It’s a Good Life If You Don’t Weaken.”

It is appropriate that the “Elbow’s Up” rallying cry galvanizing Canadians originates from hockey, Canada’s undisputed national pastime.

There was no question which country I was in when, during the intermission at an opera, the woman seated next to me leaned over and asked if I knew the score in the Habs game. On the ice, playing arguably the most brutal organized sport, is where Canadians exchange our mannerly habits for altogether snottier, bloodier, and more dangerous conduct.

Unlike baseball, which participants can play overweight and drunk, hockey demands strength, skill, speed, guts, grit. Like revenge, hockey is best served cold. The rink is the site of inspiring Canadian victories over both doppelgänger superpowers Russia and the United States.

Interviewing Stephen Reid in jail in 2006 was like playing in the Stanley Cup final for a writer and lover of good stories. Reid was simultaneously terrifying and charismatic, cunning and cultured, a formidable conversationalist and true Canadian captain on our proverbial national team.

Goal-scoring could be considered analogous to bank-robbing in the sense of slipping one past the authorities, armed with little more than will and determination, and grace, too.◼︎

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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.

Cover image: Nico Williams, Uncle, 2023, 10/0 Japanese glass cylinder beads and 11/0 seed beads on thermally-fused/braided polyethylene thread, mother-of-pearl buttons, 124,5 x 73.7 cm. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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All The Rage

Joni Void & Quinton Barnes, La Lumière Collective, 21 April 2025

Quinton Barnes performs 20 April 2025 at La Lumière Collective. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Your time has come your second skin
The cost so high the gain so low
Walk through the valley
The written word is a lie.”
—Public Image Ltd., “Rise.”

The customary media scrum following the Canadian pre-election English-language leaders’ debate was abruptly cancelled on Wednesday 16 April because the Debates Commission could not “guarantee a proper environment for this activity,” it announced in a brief and vague statement.

The Commission’s executive director Michael Cormier didn’t elaborate on the reasons behind the decision. But most media observers pointed to the right-wing Rebel News group’s domination of the scrum the previous evening following the French-language debate at Maison Radio-Canada in Montreal. Rebel News was able to secure five questions while traditional outlets like La Presse and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation were each granted only one.

In a post-debate analysis with news anchors Adrienne Arsenault and Rosemarie Barton, David Cochrane, host of CBC’s Power and Politics, characterized the media group’s tactics as “rage-farming.”

Rebel News appears to be merging the strategies of American outlets like Fox and Breitbart with the MO of social media. Indeed, the “new” digital media have now capitalized for decades on inciting extreme moral outrage.

“The mission of Facebook is to connect people around the world,” stated former Facebook employee Frances Haugen in an interview with the CBS News programme 60 Minutes. “When you have a system that you know can be hacked with anger, it’s easier to provoke anger in people. Users say to themselves, ‘If I make more angry, polarizing, dividing content, I get more money.’ Facebook has created a system of incentives that divides people.”

Anger is an energy. But is it the right energy in a time when unity is more urgently necessary?

Pulse Mag Issue #1 Launch, Le Système, 17 April 2025

Ryan Diduck, left, and Pulse Mag editor-in-chief Jen Lynch at Le Système. Eva Rizk for NicheMTL.

It logically follows that if digital media arouse outrage, analogue media might offer an antidote. One reason for this may be the quantifiable time that users invest in media engagement.

The speed with which we access and discard online content encourages a general sense of agitation. When we slow down to read printed words, say, in a magazine, we cultivate a more deliberative mindset, one which stimulates empathy and understanding. These virtues are the building blocks of community.

Magazines inspire readers to read, share, and re-read. On the internet, never are any two given people literally “on the same page.”

Payare Conducts Mozart’s Moving Requiem, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, Maison Symphonique, 16 April 2025

Organist-in-residence Jean-Willy Kunz performs with the OSM, 16 April 2025. Antoine Saito for the OSM.

“If America (like ‘Vietnam’) was primarily the name of a war, we would understand its historical function far better.”
—Nick Land, “2014,” Outsideness.

Obsession with war is implicitly obsession with death. Regardless of whether a war is military or economic, hot or cold, the only product that war consistently generates is casualty. More than the axiom that war has no winners, war also renders life itself, even for those only peripherally involved, null and void.

Blood, contrary to popular belief, is not a form of fertilizer.

Persons with Cabral Jacobs and Bob Tape, Atlas Building, 18 April 2025

Persons perform at the Atlas Building, 18 April 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“A man complains of being hungry. All the time. Dogs, it seems, are never hungry. So the man decides to become a dog.”
—Brian Massumi, “normality is the degree zero of MONSTROSITY,” A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

Modernity is inextricably linked to capitalism because no other form of socio-economic organization demands perpetual novelty.

Yet, newness has no truth value because of its inherent arbitrariness. How long does a cultural text hold its currency? How long is a McDonald’s hamburger allowed to sit on the counter before it gets tossed in the bin?

A society that prizes youth culture, in so doing, sacrifices what is true for what is new. The acceleration of so-called innovation in truth is simply the hastened refresh rate of desire. Novelty correlates with functional dissatisfaction. Capitalism thrives on habitual frustration.

Normalcy exists antagonistically against novelty because as soon as normalcy is achieved, it is no longer by definition new. Therefore, hyper-capitalism requires hyper-normalization.

Furthermore, modernity exists in opposition to pragmatism because it is pragmatic to repair and preserve and it is modern to discard and reinvent. Therefore, there is no true conservatism under capitalism. In its place, we are provoked with austerity.

Plural Contemporary Art Fair, Grand Quai, Port of Montreal, 11-13 April 2025

Gallery views at the Plural Art Fair, Grand Quai, Port of Montreal. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“The greatest disorder that those who order an army for battle make is to give it only one front and obligate it to one thrust and one fortune.”
—Niccolò Machiavelli, Art of War.

Cities are modern sites for alternating periods of movement and stasis, speed, slowness, and rest. They are naturally contested and potentially violent terrains that frequently mimic fields of battle. Think of vying for space on the metro, or how quickly a queue tightens up when one of its members leaves.

The Romans routinely broke their armies up into three speed-dependent battalions. The first, the hastati, struck the quickest. If and when they failed, their ranks fell back into the second, the principes, which attacked more slowly. If and when they, too, were expended, they all absorbed into the triarii, who lumbered behind in the lengthiest regiments.

Their enemy would have to conquer three separate meta-armies operating in three unique temporal intervals in order to prevail. First there’s the tweet, then the retweet, then the legacy media story that rounds up the tweets.

Donald Trump’s shadow strategist Steve Bannon famously said in 2018 that political rivalry paled in importance to conflicts in information. Democrats were not the enemy, Bannon believed. The media were.

“Flood the zone with shit” was Bannon’s solution. In other words, advance as many competing viewpoints across as many media platforms as quickly and consistently as possible to destroy wholesale the concept of credibility itself.

A healthy republic depends not only on information but access and intelligence to discern its accuracy.

If democracy dies in darkness, fuck with the lights on.◼︎

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: Rafael Payare conducts the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, 16 April 2025. Antoine Saito for the OSM.

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Play Recent

Disintegration

Comedié regrettée, Racine, Comedia (Haunter Records)

“Capital is at every level an eerie entity: conjured out of nothing, capital nevertheless exerts more influence than any allegedly substantial entity.” —Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie.

Casio Manufacturing Corporation, the US-based subsidiary of Japanese consumer electronics company Casio Computer, announced the construction of its first North American factory complex in Tijuana, Mexico, in December 1988.

Casio set up operations on a sprawling 14-acre property, nestled next to its new neighbours, Sony, Sanyo, and Maxell, constructing a 162,000 square-foot plant in the Mesa de Otay section of Tijuana, right next to the Otay Mesa US border crossing.

The facility would be responsible for making the Casiotone line of electronic musical instruments, cheap and portable synthesizers intended to compete with products from other companies like Yamaha and Roland.

Casio chose Tijuana because of its proximity to Southern California, the world’s largest electronics market at the time, and the location of the National Association of Music Merchants, North America’s trade association representing the entire musical instrument industry.

Of course, being able to pay its staff of 200 workers $1.25 per hour, a full $4 less than the concurrent minimum wage in California, likely factored into Casio’s decision.

Nümonia with DJ CPR Annie, Le Cheval Blanc, 5 April 2025

Nümonia perform at Le Cheval Blanc for the launch of their LP, The Age of Nümonia. Photographed for NicheMTL.

America’s desire for cheap consumer goods fuelled a more than 20-year exodus of manufacturing from the United States, and from the west more broadly, beginning in earnest during the 1980s and reaching its peak around the turn of the 2000s.

General Motors laid off tens of thousands of factory workers in Flint, Michigan, leading to the economic devastation of the once vibrant auto manufacturing town about 100 kilometers west of the Canadian border, an era chronicled in the filmmaker Michael Moore’s 1989 debut documentary, Roger and Me.

GM was just one of hundreds of companies to move manufacturing facilities to countries with no minimum wage, lax labour laws, zero tolerance for union organization, lower corporate tax rates, nonexistent tariffs, and other financial incentives for business.

It became cheaper to ship products to America across long distances than to pay workers the salaries they began to demand — in order to afford the consumer goods that came to characterize modern middle-class Western life.

The Mivos Quartet presents Steve Reich’s complete string quartets, Bourgie Hall, 1 April 2025

The Mivos Quartet performs at Bourgie Hall. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Did prices follow wages, or vice versa? Did demand stimulate supply, or was demand artificially produced to justify excess?

Certainly, in the case of electronic musical instruments, there was no existential necessity for synthesizers and samplers, drum machines or computer sequencers. Musicians had made melodies just fine for thousands of years using acoustic instruments that were crafted by artisans and luthiers rather than mass-produced in low-wage factories.

Electronic music became fashionable in part because of the media that consumer electronics — namely radio, recordings, and television — facilitated. “I want my MTV” was the rallying cry of a new generation. This equation is represented by a simple formula: media + technology = desire ♾️.

The problem is that earthly production cannot increase infinitely. Eventually, we run out of things.

Greetings, Mary Garden, Espace Maurice, 29 March 2025

Christopher Gambino, “Louise quietly takes her exit” (2025). Photographed for NicheMTL.

“A base-level futurism is simply unavoidable. Radical scepticism — irrespective of its intellectual merits — does not offer a practical alternative.” —Nick Land, “Eternal Return, and After.”

Naomi Klein’s 2000 book No Logo was a manifesto that became the new millennium’s anti-globalist scripture. Suddenly, it was fashionable to reject fast fashion, disdaining name brands like The Gap and Old Navy whilst quoting low salary figures from regions like Southeast Asia and India, where many of their products were made.

Nike, Reebok, Adidas, Ralph Lauren, and Esprit were among the companies reportedly paying workers as low as 13 US cents per hour in China, where a living wage was only around 10 dollars a day. By contrast, garment factory workers in Germany in the late 1990s were earning an average of $18.50 an hour, according to Klein.

In the west, capitalism’s malaise manifested as melancholy exemplified by Radiohead’s weeping minotaur avatar, lost in a labyrinth that its own insatiable desires designed for and by itself. Buying or not buying Nike trainers produced equivalent but opposing measures of dissatisfaction. The libidinal pleasure derived from having dissolved because consuming assumed that others couldn’t.

However, instead of bowing to domestic pressure, multinational corporations simply doubled down on exploitative labour practices sensing that, like every trend, rejection of capitalism’s darkest impulses would melt away. And it did.

LEYA with Kee Avil and Deli Girls, Cabaret Foufounes Electriques, 9 April 2025

Left: Kee Avil; Right: LEYA perform at Cabaret Foufounes Electriques. Photographed for NicheMTL.

A recent New York Times op-ed written by the author Patrick McGee estimates that an American-made iPhone could cost upwards of $3,500. Nonetheless, a worse problem presents itself in the dearth of highly skilled technical labour in America that would be necessary to manufacture something as complex as an iPhone. To coin a phrase, the Rust Belt is a little rusty.

It took at least two or three decades to offshore manufacturing to unscrupulous and hungry nations. So, it may take decades more for America to starve itself back to the bottom. Globalization, once vilified on the political left, neoliberals now view as necessary to an integrated and interdependent economic ecosystem, in spite of its exploitative tendencies.

The hard right has filled the vacuum that Michael Moore once occupied. Although there is more than a rhetorical difference between cultivating local markets and punishing foreign ones. Is it possible that cutthroat exploitation is better than actually having your throat cut?

lie down with holograms, David Armstrong Six, Bradley Ertaskiran, 13 March — 3 May 2025

Gallery view, lie down with holograms, David Armstrong Six, Bradley Ertaskiran. Photographed for NicheMTL.

On 17 January 2025, the rapper Snoop Dogg DJed the first-ever Crypto Ball planned as a simultaneous inauguration party at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium, just a few blocks away from the White House. The President-elect was notably absent, concurrently taking to his own social network to announce the $Trump coin’s launch, a cryptocurrency that would net the new president $350 million in fees.

Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Trump, not a musician, detunes markets.◼︎

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: Gallery view, lie down with holograms, David Armstrong Six, Bradley Ertaskiran. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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All Dressed

Our Lover’s Story: in conversation with HRT

“Enya rocks so hard,” proclaims Anastasia Westcott who, along with vocalist Kirby Lees, comprises the legendary Montreal-based Rave-Punk duo HRT.

The three of us are riffing in the living room of Westcott’s McGill-ghetto flat, which serves simultaneously as HRT HQ, on the music that we listened to as kids, delighting in many of our similarities: Free Jazz; Death Metal; Classic Rock; Hole.

Somehow it doesn’t altogether come as a surprise that Westcott, in addition to edgier artists, from Metallica to Coil, might count Enya among her influences — considering that Enya, too, is known for crafting tightly composed and densely layered electronic music.

Hailing originally from Atlantic Canada, Westcott from Newfoundland and Lees a Haligonian, there is something of a maritime work ethic and misty spirit that Enya and HRT share. And while HRT might aesthetically be as confrontational as Enya is calm, there exists an undeniable throughline.

Still, HRT is impossible to pin down, generically speaking, spanning Hardcore, Breakbeat, Electro, Post-Punk, and Darkwave. The result is a melange of infectious, industrial, danceable bangers specifically unique to this twosome, and indicative of Montreal’s appreciation for music’s most experimental margins, more broadly. Theirs is a decidedly niche brand of no-nonsense knees-up business.

For the uninitiated, HRT does indeed stand for Hormone Replacement Therapy, a not-so-subtle possession of their identity as Transgender artists.

“We kind of threw people a curveball not putting periods between the letters, I guess,” Westcott laughs. “We were initially going to start an anonymous hyperpop group called HRT because we thought, ‘what’s the most Trans-coded name we could think of?’”

“But then we were just like, ‘fuck it, go for it,’ and called ourselves HRT,” Lees elaborates. “I haven’t really thought about our music in relation to identity. We don’t write anything specifically with Trans identity in mind. We’re just Trans girls making music. I think the two just inherently happen.”

While music and identity can be mutually exclusive, every act is arguably political. And HRT are as radical as contemporary performance gets. They attract a core community of like minded devotees with volatile and cathartic live shows, one of which I attended at La Sotterenea on 7 February as part of the Taverne Tour. Standing at the edge of the stage, I suddenly realized, like a volcanologist poised on the threshold of an active lava lake, that I was precariously close to being sucked into the vortex of the mosh pit.

Their audiences “come to party,” as Westcott describes.

The crowd at La Sotterenea reacts as HRT’s Kirby Lees jumps into the audience. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“That night felt particularly insane,” Lees remembers. “It was very packed. We weren’t really expecting it either, considering Taverne Tour had eight other shows happening on that block that night. Especially lately, it’s been that kind of energy pretty consistently.”

Westcott echoes: “Often when we play shows, I have to be like, ‘how was it?’ Because I don’t see. I don’t think. I’m nothing. Which feels amazing.”

The indomitable vibe that Lees and Westcott conjure together is vital, and it seems that the pair have their division of labour down pat. HRT formed in 2018 and, like everyone, was compelled into a two-and-a-half-year hiatus during the coronavirus crisis. “We had to take a forcible stop where we tried to write stuff together over Zoom,” says Lees. “I learned a lot about how to use gear, but it was kind of a nightmare.”

“The original songs were like Kirby making janky beats over a vocal sample and me turning them into songs on actual gear,” Westcott explains. “We’ve written in so many different ways at this point.”

“I learned how to play bass during the pandemic,” Lees professes. “And I did a lot of gear stuff. But my comfortable space is handling lyrics, largely.”

Both Lees and Westcott are self-taught musicians with no formal training. “I’ve been playing shows since I was 14 or 15,” Westcott tells me. “I did some Jazz guitar lessons in my early 20s. But most of my experience comes from just playing music.”

Lees fronted a band called The Dolly Partners after she moved in 2014 to Montreal from Halifax. “It was a Punk Dolly Parton cover band,” Lees deadpans. “But this has been my longest-standing project.”

Westcott decamped from St. John’s in 2012. “Originally I was going to go to Concordia for Jazz studies and didn’t get in,” Westcott confesses. “I’ve been part of a lot of different scenes, made a lot of different types of music. I’ve been in, like, way too many bands.”

Lees explains that HRT’s modus operandi is, “just doing it because we like it. The sound of it keeps changing, too,” she says, “between each thing we record. We’re not sticking necessarily to any one particular genre. We’re just doing what we want to do, when we want to do it.”

That liberatory ethos has served the band from their first release under the name Dregqueen, Connective, in 2019, to a live EP recorded at Café Cleopatra just before the lockdowns and launched on Bandcamp in 2021, and ultimately, to their most recent LP, entitled warm wet stroke of luck, released in late 2024.

If there were a band motto, Westcott says, it would simply be, “making people feel like they have a place to dance.”

“Our main goal is to keep doing it until it’s not fun, honestly.” Ana Westcott and Kirby Lees photographed for NicheMTL.

Providing that safe space is central to HRT’s endearing appeal. Unfortunately, however, North America, and expressly our neighbours to the south, seems dead set upon making public spaces less safe for Trans people. The U.S. under Donald J. Trump has just passed an executive order banning travellers whose passport documents don’t conform to their birth-assigned genders.

“We would love to do a good tour,” Lees says. “But it doesn’t really look like the states is the place to do that right now. So maybe a European tour at some point. We’re literally living in a hellscape. But our main goal is to keep doing it until it’s not fun, honestly.”

For the moment, Westcott and Lees are content to hunker down in Montreal and explore the possibilities afforded by incremental technological innovations.

“I got a computer,” Westcott boasts. “I didn’t have one that could run Ableton before. So, I’m making music on the computer instead of hardware. It feels pretty good so far. But it’s weird to have everything because I am really used to working within limitations and having limitation act as a creative tool.”

As a cultural observer, I am tempted to suggest that social limitations to a large degree encouraged Westcott and Lees to pursue creative fields rather than, say, careers in finance. Some artists are made while others are born. Nonetheless, Montreal has nurtured HRT to an extent that few other metropolises would. How long this continues, though, is unknown.

“It’s changed a lot, but this city does offer you space and time and access to work on passion projects,” says Lees.

“Up until recently, there’s always been a lot of DIY venues,” Westcott recalls. “But housing is so fucked in Montreal right now that that’s having an impact. When I moved here, I was paying $170 in rent. That’s not the situation anymore. Community is what makes bands. And the more that Montreal becomes like other cities, the less it will be like Montreal.”

Lees concurs. “If you make it harder to live here, you’re going to lose everything that made this city what it is: its art scenes; its music scenes; the actual culture that makes up this city. And for what? Don’t wreck your city. It’s the last one we have in Canada where you can actually make something happen if you want to because you have that access. We’re losing it really quickly. Make living affordable. That’s the baseline.”◼︎

HRT perform 9 May 2025 at the D4E Rave, Location TBA.

Cover image: Anastasia Westcott and Kirby Lees photographed for NicheMTL.

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