Author Archives: Ryan Alexander Diduck

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Flowers In the Dustbin

Maria Chávez, Victoria Shen, & Mariam Rezaei with Lori Freedman, No Hay Banda, La Sala Rossa, 25 March 2025

From left: Maria Chávez, Mariam Rezaei, and Victoria Shen perform at La Sala Rossa, 25 March 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Complexity is not difficulty, but mess, toxic waste, genre disorder.”
—Nick Land, No Future

Torus with Orchestroll, fdg., CMXE, & Musicfriend, Église Saint Denis, 22 March 2025

Jesse Osborne-Lanthier and Asaël Richard-Robitaille perform as Orchestroll at Église Saint Denis, 22 March 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“The monastery was the first place in history where time was measured. Benedict added a seventh period to the devotion of the day, and in the seventh century by a bull of Pope Sabinianus, it was decreed that the bells of the monastery be rung seven times in the twenty-four hours. These punctuation marks in the day were known as the canonical hours, and some means of keeping count of them and ensuring their regular repetition became necessary.”
—Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization

“The social and technical relations that uphold our current economic order are the same relations which structure our experience of time in periodisation of life, that is, length of the working day, or the time spent producing value for capital. Time — in the view of capital, the sense that dominates our reality — really is money, and so keeping track of the time in which one’s investments in the purchase of labour power play out is paramount.”
—Introduction to Mark Fisher’s Flatline Constructs

A minor uproar occurred online this week when the U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem on Wednesday donned a Rolex worth $50,000 for a photo op at El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Centre.

Known as CECOT, the prison, which has the capacity to house 40,000 inmates, is being used as a waystation for deportees under the new American administration’s initiative to crack down on illegal immigration. Noem’s choice to wear such an ostentatious symbol of conspicuous consumption some saw as in poor taste.

However, whether intentional or not, the watch was the perfect prop. The handcuffs on the prisoners’ wrists are the underbelly of Noem’s legitimate incarceration by the constructs of hypercapitalism and neofascism that Trump’s regime exemplify.

Time, not space, is prison.

Stimulant Vol II Launch Party, St. Kevin’s Parish, 22 March 2025

An unignorable throughline exists between U.S. Presidents Donald Trump and John F. Kennedy.

The two alleged assassination attempts on Trump in 2024, as well as his appointment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the Secretary of Health and Human Services, have fastened a link between the Trump and Kennedy brands. More recently, Trump’s release of thousands of declassified Kennedy assassination documents has renewed their association in the popular consciousness.

On the surface, Kennedy and Trump couldn’t be less alike: Kennedy was a Democrat, anti-war, anti-racist, resolutely left-of-centre on the American political spectrum.

Still, for fans of the author J.G. Ballard, for whom Kennedy’s death was an object of persistent fascination in works like Crash and The Atrocity Exhibition, Trump’s deliberate fixation with Kennedy is more easily decipherable. It is not so much ideological as it is libidinal.

Kennedy’s death was a moment charged with intense subconscious eroticism. Particularly, frame number 313 of the Zapruder film undeniably depicts a symbolic orgasm, the final bullet’s impact producing an eruption of biological matter exploding uncontrollably all over the First Lady’s double-breasted raspberry pink suit. It is pure snuff porn.

The fact that the Presidential limousine was already in a sense “decapitated,” and equipped with “suicide doors” — which swing both ways — deepens its auto- and homoerotic thematism. Not to mention that the car was a Lincoln, christened after another famously assassinated American figurehead. Surely, aside from automobiles, sex and death are the Western world’s most fundamental drives.

Nonetheless, Kennedy was the utopian President America would never get back. Whereas Trump is shaping up to be the dystopian leader they will never be rid of.

1985. Image-Worlds, Centre VOX, 28 March — 21 June 2025

Detail of the exhibition 1985. Image-Worlds at Centre VOX. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“You can’t be fond of living in the past
‘Cause if you are, then there’s no way that you’re gonna last.”
—Gordon Downie

Simon Chioini, “Rivière 4,” Montréal rivières, Myriam Boucher, Gabriel·le Caux, Simon Chioini & Antonin Gougeon-Moisan (Label formes – ondes)

I went this week to The Bay at Carrefour Angrignon to buy bedclothes and bath towels.

It has been widely reported that Hudson’s Bay Company is currently liquidating its stock and consolidating operations into six stores, including Montreal’s flagship location at Sainte-Catherine Street and Phillips Square. At least that iconic block will be spared.

In addition to the bluster from south of the border about tariffs and soft annexation, the demise of Canada’s oldest retailer, founded almost two centuries before the country’s Confederation, feels like yet another blow to what constitutes Canadian cultural identity. Regardless of our national disagreements, we all agree on what we are not.

But a sale is a sale.

As I perused the goods on offer, a profound sense of sadness overwhelmed me, along with the renewed realization that capitalism’s zombie endgame is ultimately to consume itself.

Under our absurd socioeconomic system, constellations of products are overproduced as cheaply as possible, maximizing at every stage the creed of shameless exploitation, in order to stock shelves that the consuming public greets largely with indifference.

Nobody really wanted these piles of haphazardly folded yet perfectly wearable beige pants that some sweatshop worker in Bangladesh stitched together for marginally more than slave wages. And still, nobody wants them at 40 percent off.

In the linens department, I pick out two towels, two washcloths, two bathmats, and a set of crisp white bedsheets, taking them to the checkout to pay. A middle-aged man with tired eyes processes the purchase, bagging my new items while reciting the store’s return policy. I ask him what he is planning to do now. He says blithely that he is looking for another job.

I wanted to buy a pair of those ugly beige pants, too, just to rescue them from the loneliness of arbitrary and unnecessary existence.

But as the saying goes, you have to put on your own mask first before assisting others.◼︎

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 images: Detail of the exhibition 1985. Image-Worlds at Centre VOX. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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999 Words

Strange Wind

As long as my breath is in me,
and the spirit of God is in my nostrils,
my lips will not speak falsehood,
and my tongue will not utter deceit.
—Job 27:3-4

Breathe!
Breathe, you fucker!
Children gasping the second-hand air
Death and desperation
We’ve got to cut the lies with truth
We breathe.
—Ministry, “Breathe”

My yoga practicing friend repeatedly instructs me to breathe.

Because sometimes I forget. In stressful situations, or when I’m concentrating on some complex task, for whatever reason, I have to consciously prompt myself to inhale.

Nobody breathes online. We’re all hanging on bated breath attached to screens with trembling fingers, preparing for the next inevitable news-related shock, winded and waiting to exhale. Scrolling is a doomed and breathless exercise.

A number of events and exhibitions with breath as their central — or at least peripheral — theme have recently refocussed my attention on wind and air. In doing so, these remarkable experiences have encouraged me to meditate on and reconsider what is sacred about what we might describe as spirit.

The first is a matinée performance that the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal presents on 20 March, featuring the OSM’s principal clarinettist Todd Cope playing Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in A major. Nothing reminds us of the importance of breathing quite like watching a virtuoso wind musician blowing the audience away with his craft. It is inspiring to witness an artist so in command of his breath, so practiced, doubtless having spent countless hours breathing life into the soul of his instrument.

Mozart completed his Concerto only a few weeks before he died mysteriously and prematurely in 1791 at age 35. This work, then, is literally his last gasp and in retrospect has to be read as Mozart’s final word, written, as it were, on the wind.

In an age long before electrical amplification and recorded music, hearing works performed live would have been the only opportunity to experience them. There is no way today to accurately imagine the gravitas of silence during an era when sound could not simply be dialled up and shut off, when music travelled dryly on airwaves rather than awash in endless torrents and streams.

The thing about breath is that it is not infinite. Angélique Kidjo and guest conductor Elena Schwarz photographed by Gabriel Fournier for the OSM.

Later in the evening of 20 March, the OSM stages the day’s second concert by the Beninese French vocalist Angélique Kidjo, singing Ifé, Three Yorùbá Songs, set to a score written by the American composer Philip Glass. Glass’s iconic compositional aesthetic is machinelike and industrial, entailing a mechanized enactment from its performers, firing like a motor on all cylinders, and superficially at odds with the body’s organic demands.

Kidjo’s vocal performance is a masterclass in acute control, the breath of song aspiring to near robotic perfection. And yet, the human vessel, swinging and swaying, is an unparalleled instrument, one that digital artifice could never accurately reproduce.

Kidjo signals to us that the body is ultimately beyond the binary, never entirely off nor on, always oscillating somewhere between these two poles, exposing their relational arbitrariness and functional impossibility.

The thing about breath is that it is not infinite. The fact that it ends gestures to our fallibility and impermanence. Nonetheless, we strive to extend it through technological means.

During the coronavirus pandemic, the protection of breath was paramount, and ubiquitous in the obsession with personal protective equipment and ventilators, adequate circulation and sufficient social distance. We held our breath as we passed by strangers, forgetting — or wilfully ignoring — the fact that we all breathe the same air, that we are all mortal.

COVID interfered with the interconnected rhythms of our breathing in multiple and profound ways and initiated a period after which each breath was measured and catalogued, a daily statistic to be charted and tallied.

I recognize the endurance of breath in Simile Aria, the cluster of suspended pneumatic organ sculptures that the artist Maggy Hamel-Metsos has installed in the cathedral-like main hall at Fonderie Darling. These breathing machines are at once gathered together and isolated, like the social bubbles we were reduced to during the depths of the COVID restrictions.

Detail of Simile Aria by Maggy Hamel-Metsos at Fonderie Darling. Photographed for NicheMTL.

We can recall that even church choirs were prohibited out of legitimate concern for human health and safety. Still, it is impossible to postulate what was lost with the inability to breathe in harmony together. As the exhibition text notes, Hamel-Metsos’s work reconstitutes “pain as a symphony,” summing up life as “a set of sounds measured out by the cadence of our breath.”

In Fonderie Darling’s adjacent space is a confounding “liturgical-optic” triptych of intricate paintings entitled Absoluité by the artist Numa Amun. These three works depict overlapping human figures that represent out-of-body experiences, the soul transcending the material plane, the spirit giving way to the ethereal pull of the divine. Curator Milly A. Dery explains that Amun’s works attempt to signify something that is usually invisible: the space between life and death; the physical and the astral realms; the convergence of knowledge and faith.

What we experience through the limited spectrum of sensory perception is surely only a fraction of what exists. But the body is what we have been given to contain the indefinable and thus must suffice. The spirit is what ruptures the absolute.

Detail of Réveil dans la mort (2020-2021) by Numa Amun at Fonderie Darling. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“The wind blows where it wishes,” it is written in John 3:8, “and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”

The profound and universal truth of this scriptural passage is that nature possesses its own will. So little of life is within our control. And this makes our choices all the more important if we want to evolve morally and spiritually. The boat with a slack sail is destined to be tossed to and fro on the whims of the waves.

We cannot know when we will run out of breath. We can only remember and remind one another to breathe, consciously and deliberately.

There is something in the air that enriches and enlivens us. Call it spirit.◼︎

Cover image: Angélique Kidjo and guest conductor Elena Schwarz photographed by Gabriel Fournier for the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal.

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Always Forever Now

Shunk with Born at Midnite and Flleur, La Sotterenea, 12 March 2025

Shunk perform at La Sotterenea, 12 March 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Satiation is the point at which you must face the existential revelation that you didn’t really want what you seemed so desperate to have, that your most urgent desires are only a filthy vitalist trick to keep the show on the road.”
—Mark Fisher, “Accept like a curse an unlucky deal.”

“The damage today
They fall on today
They beat on the outside
And I’ll stand by you
Now”
—David Bowie, “Outside.”

“These guys would have been really popular in, like, 1980 or ‘81,” my friend Oliver who checks coats at La Sala Rossa, world-weary with arms folded, asides to me at the album launch on Wednesday night at La Sotterenea for Shunk’s hyper-retro, longer-than-extended but shorter-than-long-player, Shunkland.

It is true.

Oliver says this neither ironically nor with derision; rather, matter-of-factly, with reverence and astute observance that retromania has not ceased, more than 15 years after Simon Reynolds diagnosed and devoted a book-length study to this particularly 21st century condition, to be an operative mode proper to postmodern cultural production.

More than nostalgia, more than cyclical fashion, time itself seems to have collapsed in on itself, every historical era occurring and recurring simultaneously in the present, flattening the entirety of existence into the always-already now.

Myriam Dion, Timelines, Blouin | Division, 15 February – 5 April 2025

Detail of Tile Mosaics (2024), Myriam Dion. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Forward momentum is a thing of the past.

It is possible that futurity was always illusory, that memory was rare and in short enough supply to create the impression that each season was fundamentally different — the length, width, and hem of pant legs; KitchenAid’s colour of the year (it’s butter, by the way) — when time has never been anything more nor less than a flat circle.

But today, memory is cheap, if not free — you can’t even give it away — and forgetfulness is a sentimental luxury, like Polaroid film, heritage hipsterism, and paying with cash.

Pretending not to remember is a new form of conspicuous consumption, with half-recalled experience in place of a disposable product.

Two Readers and Music V, featuring Tara McGowan-Ross, Gwen Aube, and Aistis, 6 March 2025

Aistis performs at yolk’s Two Readers and Music, 6 March 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

If there is no now, then there is no then, and no will be.

More accurately, there are eight billion nows, in an age of siloed politics and niche media, protectionism and regional nationalism. And so, the future will ultimately be all the more fragmented and multifaceted. If cultural memory defies consensus, then so does cultural imagination.

However, contrary to the assumption that variety stimulates autonomy, increasingly granular diversity threatens collective solidarity and remains vulnerable to more totalizing control systems. Functioning society relies upon constructive group psychology. Deteriorating society conversely flourishes within an environment of its destructive inverse.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the failure of leftist political satire. The imperviousness to both ridicule and scorn that the right enjoys right now is a symptom of disintegrating unanimity owing to the “splinternet.”

In his book Post-Comedy, author Alfie Bown observes under technocratic hyper-capitalism “the creation of a closed circuit of didactic humour in which only those designed to experience it do, leaving its potential as a political tool for activism almost redundant.”

For people to find certain attitudes abhorrent or funny, there must exist a kind of ideological consensus. When none does, insults and sarcasm simply keep people and ideas current in consciousness, which paradoxically strengthens their dominance, if only due to renewed visibility.

It accomplishes nothing to skewer Elon Musk on his own social network. Making fun of the orange Cheeto doesn’t change any minds and rather strengthens his brand.

One of the more terrifying realizations circulating lately is that the billionaire class pulling the government’s strings will still be in power long after today’s or even tomorrow’s politicians.

Democracy is fragile now, but capital can resist forever.

For Everyone Stuck Chasing the Clock, dirs. Chloë Lum and Yannick Desranleau, La Chapelle | Scènes Contemporaines, 3-7 March 2025

The cast of For Everyone Stuck Chasing the Clock takes a bow on opening night, 3 March 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

As a child, my first word was “clock.”

It wasn’t “mommy” or “daddy” — you can ask them. As the story goes, I pointed in my infancy at the time-keeping device on the wall and distinctly articulated the word, “clock,” shocking and likely disappointing my parents. Because time was clearly already of the essence. I don’t remember my mindset, obviously, but I may have had an early inkling of the lengthy life sentence to which I’d been condemned.

At times, it seems that time is tight. At others, minutes appear to stretch into hours. It is always when we are aware of time — when we’re late; or when we’re waiting — that it behaves antithetically to our desires.

Back to the Future was one of my favourite movies as a kid. I was eight in 1985 when the film was released and was just beginning to understand the nature of time as infinite and our experience inside time as limited. I knew what death was. So, I understood that everything everyone does in one’s lifetime must somehow fit within time’s puzzle.

When you’re a child, time yawns out before you like a red carpet unfurling into the world. But as time marches on, you can see that roll getting smaller and smaller, and it becomes ever more apparent that the rug will eventually, inevitably, be pulled from beneath your feet.

This is both frightening and reassuring. Who would want to live forever? But also, who wouldn’t want another day when their time comes?

Duality, Persons, Ascension (Personal Records)

Haunting is one way to cheat time. Besides a supernatural extension, there are other methods to haunt the present. Chiefly among them is to make art. Or something of art’s ilk, that endures beyond death.

If as I am you’re obsessed with history, you’re bound to live amid ghosts. Some of them point to lines of flight. Others drag us down. Even the living can have a haunting effect.

Communing with ghosts is where we find ourselves.◼︎

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 images: Detail of Tile Mosaics (2024), Myriam Dion, Galerie Blouin | Division. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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All Dressed

Smells Like Team Spirit: in conversation with Shunk

After meandering through miscellaneous topics such as analogue versus digital recording formats and a friend’s dad’s BMW that had a Foo Fighters CD stuck in the stereo, the conversation ultimately turns to the olfactory qualities of various local bands and with whom it would be acceptable to spend significant time together in a touring van.

These are observations voiced with an equal measure of revulsion, reverence, and glee.

For bassist Julia Hill, 24, guitarist Peter Baylis, 32, drummer Adrian Vaktor, 31, and 30-year-old vocalist Gabrielle Domingue, who together comprise Shunk, Montreal’s darlings of post-pandemic post-punk, an overripe scent is just another part of the aesthetic.

“Don’t print this!” Hill laughs.

Of course, there is no choice but to print it now. Because if you’re not working up a bit of a stink, you’re not doing rock and roll right.

Shunk have invited me round to their rehearsal space at the Marsonic building on Papineau, a gritty warehouse with top notes of lager-soaked carpet and Purple Kush. Converted into diminutive jam cubicles, Marsonic houses some of this city’s scrappiest acts. Four or five other bands share Shunk’s windowless chamber, they say. Nonetheless, this cheap little studio allows artists like Shunk the necessary space to hone their repertoires — and get weird in the process.

“We have good music, and we have really good vibes.” Gabrielle Domingue and Adrian Vaktor photographed for NicheMTL.

“I feel like you can experiment a bit more in Montreal,” Domingue says. “And you’re less worried about fitting it into the box. Music is such a joy, and it would be so sick if everyone could live off of that. But it’s so nice to be with people and create this sonic scape. It’s crazy that we can create that here.”

Aiming for something like Cocteau Twins, Shunk coalesced in the autumn of 2022 during the heady days immediately following the coronavirus lockdowns. As a former member of Pottery, another Montreal indie outfit, Baylis enlisted Vaktor, a fellow local who had trained with the legendary Hasidic drum master Jacob Kaye.

Domingue, who previously fronted the Mothland-adjacent Visibly Choked, brought her friend Hill, originally from Newfoundland, into the mix to round out the rhythm section. With their complementary sensibilities, the foursome strike a unique balance blending elements of ‘70s garage, ‘80s shoegaze, ‘90s grunge, and aughts-era media savvy into something truly thrilling.

“I was always in choirs,” Hill recalls of her childhood musical education. “And then I started taking cello lessons, which was really random because I watched this movie — it was a book adaptation of some YA novel — and the girl in it played cello and I was like, ‘I want to be a classical musician.’ And that didn’t work out because I got into punk rock.”

Baylis studied Royal Conservatory piano. “But after one of those tests,” he says, “I didn’t go back. I wish I’d never taken that break, but way she goes sometimes,” he laments. Instead, he took up the guitar and became a self-described “rock and roll lifer.”

Domingue relocated a few years prior from Ottawa after completing a music degree in operatic vocal performance. Yet she found classical music “too stuffy,” and Montreal’s ever-expanding cultural scenes provided the personnel and playing field “to be loud in,” she explains.

“In a band, you need three things,” Domingue states. “The music has to be good; or the vibes have to be good; or you have to be making good money. And you need two out of three of these to sustain yourselves. Otherwise, you’re screwed. We have good music, and we have really good vibes. So, we’ll keep going and hopefully along the way, we’ll start making good money. But for now, we’ve got the two essential ones.”

After three raucous singles — “Tennis,” “Sated,” and “Goblin,” (the latter of which appears on the NicheMTL 2024 Yearbook compilation CD) — Shunk have now released their first full-length recording, entitled Shunkland, and are slated to play a handful of not-to-be-missed shows in the Montreal-Toronto-Ottawa corridor.

Mastered by the veteran Canadian musician Nik Kozub of Shout Out Out Out Out, Shunkland was recorded over only three days with mixing engineer Josh Kaiser in Baylis’s father’s study at his parents’ house.

“They left for a week,” Baylis confesses. “So, me and Adrian went and set up the drums and tested them out, smacking the snare in different rooms around the house.”

As Vaktor describes, “It was literally walking around his house going, ‘how does this room sound?’ Gong!”

“We had the songs pretty down,” says Baylis, “and I knew that I wanted to do a live off-the-floor record instead of a track-by-track record. And I knew that Kaiser would add a clean shine to it, to the grunginess that we were bringing to it live. I feel like the music comes easy for us in some way,” Baylis claims. “Everybody’s open to listening to people’s ideas when it comes to writing or changing the songs. I don’t think anyone’s too stuck in their route about how it should sound.”

“I’d agree with that,” Hill chimes in. “It’s definitely more just we all have ideas when we’re writing so quickly and we all trust each other’s visions, especially when it comes to the songwriting stuff. So, whoever can put their idea…”

“…into words fastest!” Domingue interjects.

“…and loudest!” Hill resumes. “Whoever has the loudest idea that takes up more space is what we usually end up going with.”

“Sometimes the soft-spoken ideas come through anyway,” murmurs Vaktor, eliciting laughter from his bandmates.

“Yeah,” Hill concurs. “The three of us will be yelling over each other and Adrian will quietly have an idea and we’ll be like, ‘no, that’s not going to work.’ And then 20 minutes later we’ll be like, ‘he was right the whole time.’”

“We’re always hacking away,” says Vaktor. “We’re blacksmithing.”

“We’re like a hive mind,” says Hill.

Domingue deadpans, “We’re the Borg.”

“Performing onstage is such a rush — the ultimate rush.” Julia Hill and Peter Baylis photographed for NicheMTL.

I first caught Shunk live last spring at Suoni per il Popolo, as the opening act for Yoo Doo Right, where the double bill nearly blew the top two floors off of La Sotterenea. Subsequently, I saw them perform twice beneath the Van Horne overpass and again on the rooftop of a house show near St. Laurent and Beaubien.

It is apt that this remarkably entertaining band, which encompasses influences across low and high culture, never seems satisfied to be in the middle. Carpet-bombing their hits onstage, Shunk exudes the unmistakable napalm smell of victory.

“I love playing live shows,” says Hill. “It’s my favourite thing in the whole world. I’ve always been like that, since I was a kid. Performing onstage is such a rush — the ultimate rush. It’s so fun. Nothing else can compare to playing a live show. Or in the studio when you make something exactly how you want it, and you just get super excited. Those things are the best.”

“When you’re playing the best you can with your friends, you’re playing in front of people, that feeling is a great high, for sure,” Baylis agrees. “And when we’re writing something really new and all together on this one idea and it’s really sounding good and everybody is on the same page, that’s also really a rare thing to find with people.”

“In that moment,” Vaktor muses, “you’re seeing a new pathway open.”◼︎

Shunk launches Shunkland with Born at Midnite and Flleur 12 March 2025 at La Sotterenea, 4848 Boulevard St. Laurent.

Cover image: Courtesy of Shunk.

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The Silences That We Live Together

Green Fuse, Claire Milbrath, Pangée, 18 January – 1 March 2025

Claire Milbrath, Skagit Valley, 72×36 inches. Photographed for NicheMTL.

A day drags endless to its close;
While years like arrows flown
Pass fleeting by and snatch away
All values that we own;
—Taras Shevchenko, Three Years

گردن (Gardan), xodkaar x No Cosmos, Bandcamp (Self-released)

Noise is the common auditory denominator of the postmodern experience.

Escaping the constant, ambient din of traffic, sirens, construction, beeping machinery, droning screens, and ubiquitous music is practically impossible in any urban metropolis. Even amidst supposedly silent settings, there is always somewhere an air conditioner buzzing, a 60Hz grounding hum, a faucet dripping, a compressor running. Just try and find a quiet place in the city and you will inevitably encounter some sort of noise instead.

Talking is one of the most ever-present forms of metropolitan noise. There is hardly a place to go for humans to be together in silence. Libraries, perhaps, are supposed to be void of conversation. But they seldom are. Empty churches are pregnant with impending sound.

Whispering is arguably noisier than talk at regular volume, our ears attuned to stifled speech in order to catch some meaning, wet s’s and popping p’s exploding in volume in contrast to the airy whispered utterance.

We feel the need to express the minutiae of emotion and experience. But love emerges in the silence between people. As Quentin Tarantino wrote for his character Mia Wallace to observe in the 1994 film Pulp Fiction, “‎That’s when you know you’ve found somebody really special. When you can just shut the fuck up for a minute and comfortably share silence.”

Silence is empty sonic space. And the postmodern subject seems ill at ease with the notion of emptiness. Into emptiness creeps uncertainty and the potential for psychic rupture. And so, we fill our spaces with objects, activity, noise, and chatter.

It is ironic that a preferred term to describe a forceful verbal expression is “sounding off.”

Approximately 760 kg of Public Property, Pedro Barbáchano, Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, 18 November 2024 – 16 February 2025

Approximately 760 kg of Public Property, Pedro Barbàchano, Hall Building, Concordia University. Photographed for NicheMTL.

The 2003 National Film Board documentary entitled Totem: The Return of the G’psgolox Pole tells the absurd and frustrating tale of a totem pole that was ostensibly stolen from the Haisla people in so-called British Columbia in the late 1920s, and the community’s ultimately fruitless efforts to repatriate it from a Swedish museum where it eventually ended up.

The Haisla first produce a replica pole to replace the original. But efforts stall when the village is unable to raise enough funds to build a space that could adequately preserve the relic — one of the Swedes’ conditions to relinquish it.

Of course, preservation is antithetical to Haisla tradition anyway, totem poles traditionally erected with the understanding that they will inevitably decompose, along with everything else, back into the earth.

The film is a story about the location of power in western society, and the imposition of arbitrary values on diverse and marginal cultures. Posterity and reverence are neither universal nor measurable concepts that we can impose upon or transfer from one society to another.

When something of value is taken from a nation — whether treasure or territory — only those people are capable of experiencing its loss.

Tchaikovsky’s Lustrous Violin Concerto, Sergey Khachatryan with the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, Maison Symphonique, 20 February 2025

Rafael Payare conducts Sergey Khachtryan and the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal. Antoine Saito for the OSM.

In the autumn of 1933, around 117,000 Russian peasants, mostly volunteers, began to arrive in eastern and southern Ukraine to repopulate and “Russify” Ukrainian geographic areas that Stalin’s forced famine-genocide, known as Holodomor, had devastated. These Russian settlers were under the impression that their presence was necessary and that they would be welcomed with transportation, food, and fertile land.

But many of them experienced a contrasting reality upon arrival: eerily empty villages, infestations of mice in the farmhouses and fields, and linguistic hostility from the locals who remained. Then, they were subjected to milk and meat taxes, and as a result of hardship upon hardship, most of this first wave returned to Russia by 1935.

However, second and third waves followed in 1935 and ’36, and they were not voluntary. Secret police officers and locals were enlisted to prevent the new Russian arrivals from escape. Ukrainian-language theatres were closed, and the performance of Ukrainian music was restricted to only three cities: Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Odessa. The Donbas region, according to Sergio Gradenigo, the Italian diplomat in Kharkiv, was undergoing rapid cultural replacement at the level of policy.

The enforced influx of Russian nationals into eastern Ukraine ensured the generational success of “fifth columns,” clandestine agitators from within who interfered with and undermined Ukrainian authority in the region. Nonetheless, by 1991, more than 80% of the Donbas’s residents supported Ukrainian independence from the former Soviet Union.

Yet, as industries were privatized following the collapse of state-run enterprise, corruption and consolidation of wealth and power resulted in Russian oligarchies that took control of the Donbas and further destabilized it. By March 2014, pro-Russian demonstrations escalated into a war between Ukrainian national and Russian-supported separatist forces.

29 ceasefires have been declared since then, with none of them abating the conflict.

This process began in the early 1930s with the intentional starvation of Ukrainian peasants and Stalin’s forced migration of poverty-stricken Russians to replace them. Has this war been going on for three years, or 100?

Judy, Jeremy Young, Cablcar (Halocline Trance)

Bullies crave attention.

It doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad attention, just so long as they are the centre of it. As well, giving bullies the silent treatment can too often have the opposite of its intended effect, enraging them to lash out even more aggressively, demanding that they receive their due response.

As the old axiom goes, violence begets violence. But what strategy to deploy when silence begets violence? You can’t outshout a loudmouth. But you can withstand bullies with bravery.

The world just witnessed a masterclass in expert perseverance.◼︎

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: Claire Milbrath, Green Fuse, gallery view. Photographed for NicheMTL

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All Dressed

Mono Poly: in conversation with T. Gowdy

“Faith… is the substance… of things hoped for.” —Giorgio Agamben, Creation and Anarchy

“What I like about good art,” says the electronic musician Timothy Gowdy over a transatlantic Zoom call from his home in Berlin, “is that you don’t necessarily know what it is.”

We are riffing on a perennial favourite niche topic: the function and value of art in the age of its virtual overproduction. Can art, as it is often unfairly tasked, change minds, change the world?

Gowdy seems cautiously optimistic, mercifully, invoking the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben and railing against art “caught in a productivity model,” as he describes.

“It wasn’t that before,” Gowdy observes. “And it’s not that underneath. It’s because of social media that we’re bombarded all the time with people telling you you should think things and do things. I think that there’s sometimes more power in subversive undertones that aren’t beating a drum at you right away. I’m definitely looking at that in my own music. I think perhaps good art manifests because it can’t be pinned down as one thing.”

It is that indefinable, polymorphous quality that best characterizes Gowdy’s iridescent forthcoming album, Trill Scan, his third and arguably most ambitious release for Montreal’s legendary independent label, Constellation Records. Therapy with Colour, launched in 2020, found Gowdy experimenting with off-kilter hypnotic IDM, while Miracles, arriving two years later, traded on a more arrhythmic form of low-fi analogue grain.

With his latest recording, a euphoric melange of the ancient and postmodern, Gowdy now reaches for a technicolour sound palette, including, in addition to the requisite synthesized pulses and waveforms, traditional timbres like lute and voice.

“I didn’t want to make just another electronic thing,” Gowdy tells me. “I’m fine with that genre and I love electronic music, but I just felt that I needed to expand. And the groundwork for that was going on for 30 years. It wasn’t a stretch. I didn’t have to look that hard, actually. I just had to look inward.”

Gowdy, 42, was trained as a young classical musician whose first experience was instruction in choral works. Hailing originally from Prince Edward Island, Gowdy relocated to Princeton, NJ, where he enrolled as a boarder at the American Boychoir, a choral school, at age 11.

“It gave me some experiences that I would not have had otherwise,” he says. “I always went back to choral music because that’s how I knew vocals the most.” Arriving in Montreal as a teenager, and inspired by a 1990s mashup of grunge, hip-hop, and punk rock, Gowdy picked up the guitar, but eventually reverted again to his classical roots.

On Trill Scan, he considered featuring an acoustic instrument. “But there was something that I didn’t really like about the guitar,” Gowdy reveals. “So, I decided to look at the origins of the guitar and found the lute. And I drove across Germany and bought myself a lute and started practicing and learning how to play that. And three years later, I am now reading the scores and learning how to play Baroque music. It was a full process of learning and unlearning,” he says.

There is an undeniable religious connotation to choral arrangements, an aesthetic that harkens back to the early modern period of western music. Gowdy was raised Catholic but “renounced it from the beginning,” he explains. “I was forced.”

Gowdy believes in the possibility “to disconnect something from its mainframe and repatch it into something else. I like that idea,” he confirms. “One thing that I’m trying to do on this record is take this feeling you get from music of the past and somehow disconnect it from what it was connected to and reconnect it to these other vibes. That’s consciously what I’m interested in doing at the moment.”

There is an exceptionally polished production value to all of Gowdy’s recordings, reflecting his expertise accumulated over 15 years working as a sound engineer in some of Montreal’s most prestigious studios. He paid his dues alternately at Breakglass, Pierre Marchand, and Studio 451 on Rue de l’Eglise, engineering albums for Ensemble, Ada Lee, and Suuns, among others.

“There’s something about Montreal that people really have to work together and depend on one another to achieve art.” T. Gowdy photographed for Constellation Records by Vika Temnova.

Gowdy partly recorded Trill Scan with a small choir in a church in Mirabel and finished at his home studio in Berlin. “I’m really a person that does it all mostly in-studio,” he says. “I think that the recording and the composition go together. And I almost treat it as a performance, too. I tend to record long things. I press record and just go. I try not to have my cerebral mind guide it. For me, it works to fuse those three elements together. I find that you get something that your emotion is pushing more than if you were playing live.”

Gowdy is currently at work adapting the album for a performance setting, he says. “I’m planning on getting some shows going. I have a release here in Berlin and I’d like to do something in Montreal and a few other spots in Canada. That’s the plan.”

While he is based in Germany, Gowdy retains a connection to Montreal’s underground music scenes, in no small part because of his affiliation with Constellation Records. He confesses a soft spot for this city’s DIY spirit, something that doesn’t exist in quite the same way anywhere else.

“It’s difficult to find community in other cities,” Gowdy laments. “Montreal is just the right size. Because the Anglo community is kind of small and centralized, it is physically possible for people to bond together and work together on things and accomplish things together. In other cities that are more spread out, it’s more difficult to do that. There’s something about Montreal that people really have to work together and depend on one another to achieve art.”

Somewhere between Berlin and Montreal, Gowdy has cultivated a supportive public that responds in real time, helping him to determine if what he’s producing really resonates, something that reanimates the world if even in incremental steps, in an environment that more often replaces faith with credit, the good with the good enough.

Gowdy spent the first part of Trill Scan’s recording sessions “making songs that people that I respected didn’t like,” he laughs.

“Sometimes when you’re making new things, you don’t know if it’s good,” Gowdy admits. “But I think that it’s important to have people around you who can offer a second opinion. And based on what I did before, they were able to weigh the current work and see if there’s a relation, first of all, and second of all, if it moves them. Because essentially that’s what it’s for, music — if it’s moving us or not.”◼︎

Trill Scan is released 14 March 2025 via Constellation Records.

Cover image: T. Gowdy photographed for Constellation Records by Vika Temnova.

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Objet petit a

Joyce Wieland, Heart On, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 6 February 2025 — 4 May 2025

Joyce Wieland, O Canada, 1970, Lithograph in red on wove paper, 57.4 x 76.4 cm. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“…there is no language in existence for which there is any question of its inability to cover the whole field of the signified…”
—Jacques Lacan, The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious.

In the wake of the Super Bowl halftime spectacle that the rapper Kendrick Lamar performed on 9 February, which was, of this renowned un-Canadian sporting institution reportedly the most-watched edition, likely due to multitudes tuning in to see whether or not there would be a third and ultimately successful assassination attempt on Donald Trump, the catastrophic U.S. President and billionaire blowhard, a flurry of frothy media commentary emerged, the kind of chatter that passes in our intellectually insolvent neoliberal era as “cultural discourse,” regarding the intention and interpretation of the political statement the artist was apparently making in the act.

Lamar clearly designed the elaborate show to entice spicy takes.

Almost all of these observed Lamar’s lowercase ‘a’ on a diamond-encrusted chain and proposed what it meant: the Amazon logo, perhaps, or a nod to his production company, or another sly swipe at Drake’s supposed penchant for minors.

Still, none entertained the possibility that a deeper meaning should be discerned by delving into any unintended or subconscious reading.

Kendrick Lamar performs at the Super Bowl LIX Halftime Show, Caesars Superdome, New Orleans, 9 February 2025. Gregory Shamus/Getty Images.

Curiously, no hot take that I read invoked the 20th century French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, which seems a glaring oversight, since obviously the chain at once signifies and is the signifier of Lacan’s “Objet petit a.” The pendant is literally a small ‘a,’ and as an object of desire, it also represents the anxious lack sought in subjective otherness. This to me screams peak America.

Did Lamar explicitly intend to elicit this analysis? I don’t want to underrate the dude. He did win a Pulitzer Prize. But I harbour my doubts.

Nonetheless, it doesn’t matter whether it was intentional or not. Because as any philosopher of art understands, poetry, and art more broadly, as Wimsatt and Beardsley observed in 1954 in The Verbal Icon, “is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it.”

For Lacan, the “Objet petit a” is “what falls from the subject in anxiety,” and, more simply, “the cause of desire.” For the Buddhist, it may also be the source of all suffering.

HRT, Taverne Tour, La Sotterenea, 7 February 2025

HRT perform at La Sotterenea, 7 February 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“The fundamental substance of an epoch and its unheeded impulses illuminate each other reciprocally.”
— Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament.

It is fascinating that Trump is the first sitting American president to attend a Super Bowl game, and highly symbolic to the neofascist form of politics that he represents. The Olympic Games in Berlin in 1936 were central to Hitler’s display of power, too. The objectification of bodies in Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia is as unambiguous as the marching columns of red, white, and blue, Black performers that formed and reformed around Lamar.

Doubtless Trump viewed this spectacle unfolding for his own personal amusement because Trump, with the exception of McDonalds cheeseburgers, is composed of pure unconscious desire, pure id.

L’enfant et les sortilèges, Opéra de Montréal, Théâtre Maisonneuve, 8 February 2025

The cast of L’enfant et les sortilèges onstage at Théâtre Maisonneuve, 8 February 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“A little man does not know he is little and is afraid to know.”
—Wilhelm Reich, Listen, Little Man!

America functions on the libidinal drive. It is so repressed that it represses its own repression, which is only revealed to itself in fantasy and horror and violence. It is ironic that digital language is called hypertext, because the nation’s native language, rather, is subtextual. This is why artists like Lamar layer their true messages in code, and why critics fall all over themselves to attempt to decode them as if performing some elaborate reciprocal gymnastics routine. Of course, this process only produces more anxiety in the form of surplus unfulfilled desire.

It took Trump all of a few days to reveal his overt desires upon assuming the presidency for a second time. In addition to Muntzing (or should we now call it ‘Musking’?) the government apparatus as if he were pulling out circuit boards from a HAL 9000, Trump finally verbalized his imperialist impulses to territorially expand America as he had enviously seen Vladimir V. Putin doing for three years. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Trump called the move “genius,” and doubtless, he could scarcely wait to demonstrate his own, however unstable his cognitive processes had become.

Ravel and Prokofiev with Weilerstein and Payare, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, Maison Symphonique, 12 February 2025

Alisa Weilerstein performs with the OSM at Maison Symphonique, 12 February 2025. Antoine Saito for the OSM.

“Desire begins to take shape in the margin in which demand rips away from need…”
—Jacques Lacan, Subversion of the Subject.

The Panama Canal, Greenland, and Canada are all in Trump’s crosshairs, and we would be wise to take the threat seriously, because Trump disguises his expansionist desires not as wants but as needs. America needs to absorb these sovereign territories for the sake of national security, or of economic security, or of restorative balance and retribution. These are the same excuses Putin used to invade Ukraine, and that Hitler used to invade Poland. But what they repress is the Objet petit a, that which Trump — and America — lacks, and which will never be satisfied.

Benjamin Appl & Eric Lu, Schubert’s Swan Song, Salle Bourgie, 13 February 2025

Benjamin Appl & Eric Lu onstage at Bourgie Hall, 13 February 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Of Children in Swaddling Clothes
“O cities of the sea, I behold in you your citizens, women as well as men tightly bound with stout bonds around their arms and legs by folk who will have no understanding of our speech; and you will only be able to give vent to your griefs and sense of loss of liberty by making tearful complaints, and sighs, and lamentations one to another; for those who bind you will not have understanding of your speech nor will you understand them.”
—Leonardo da Vinci

The intentional fallacy extends past poetics and penetrates into politics. There were far graver motivations, for instance, for George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan than to prevent terrorism and root out weapons of mass destruction. There were generational fixations that served as factors.

And there are much more sinister explanations behind, say, Musk’s double Nazi salute following Trump’s inauguration. Unlike Kendrick Lamar’s deliberate obscuring of overt political symbolism, Musk’s was laid bare for all to see — and immediately excused by him and his apologists as unintentional. For Lamar, what audiences had to decipher was its real message. For Musk, what they unequivocally witnessed was not.

If the time to be alarmed was not before 5 November 2024, it is certainly now, as Trump and Musk alternate at behaving on a national scale like sexually frustrated frat boys with GHB prescriptions. There is no critical or analytical skill necessary to crack their code, and no thinly veiled good intentions behind which to hide. The word ‘alarm’ comes from the French, à l’arms.

If Canada has any saving grace, it is that America, in its perpetual repression, already has a 51st state — the permanent state of anxiety.◼︎

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: Installation view of Joyce Wieland’s Flag Arrangement, 1970–71, knitted wool.

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