The Montreal-based multidisciplinary artist and community organizer Elle Barbara meets me outside a tiny café at the peak of Montreal’s July heatwave. It is one of those blindingly hot summer afternoons, with pockets of sunlight cresting over the flower beds in a little square just off Maguire Street. She is dressed in light linens, her eyes smiling at me from behind a pair of oversized butterfly-framed glasses as we shake hands.

Word On the Street was released through the Celluloid Lunch label in late June and features collaborations with local names like Markus Floats and Mitch Davis. With influences ranging from Ravel’s Boléro, to Prince’s Purple Rain, to early Public Enemy, and even Celine Dion, Word On the Street is doubtless a generically varied effort. A honeyed brew of ‘80s Pop, Prog, and Classic Funk, with dashes of Jazz and Euro-dance, Barbara’s music resists easy categorization.

“Shout out to Renny Wilson,” she praises the Canadian producer who recorded, engineered, edited, and mixed the record. “The first takes of the album were just skeletal drum, synth, and bass takes that had to be manually quantized, so shout out to him for putting in the time and energy to do that manually.” It is the handmade touch that makes Word On the Street such a singular and honest album.

I ask about the inspiration behind the album, and she reveals an affinity for the work of André Serouille, the Montreal street artist. “I didn’t know his name when I first discovered his writings. I kept running into these little cardboard pieces, like ‘anti-Kraft foods’ and other propaganda pieces, and felt really drawn to them because of how they looked graphically. I was mystified.”

This faceless man, whose paranoid scriptures are strewn throughout the streets of the city, is foundational to the creed of Word On the Street. Barbara has meticulously curated Serouille’s graffiti, which comment on everything from the alleged corporate offences to various crimes committed by the psychiatric community. She pulls a small stack of papers from her purse.

“There’s something clearly conspiratorial about it,” she says, showing me various items that she has collected. “But there’s also something artistic about it. And I use the word ‘artistic’ as a euphemism. I don’t think that his gospel has to be written off on the grounds of him being potentially mentally ill, because there’s also a beauty in what he says.”

The gospel she speaks of is one rooted in anti-surveillance and anti-consumerist attitudes. Barbara believes that the casual introduction of AI into everyday interactions is evidence of a significant overhaul to our collective unconscious. These are the days of pioneering tech-dystopian filmmaker David Cronenberg’s “new flesh” realized, of bodies and desires transformed by cheap access to an infinite content channel. Doubtless, we are indeed witnessing a weakening of our physical senses. As Barbara sings on “Your Favourite Meal,” a track that distills Serouille into song form, “I bet you’ll think to yourself, ‘Oh my why it tastes so good’ / in the end the taste of death will finally taste as it should.” 

However, the advent of digital technology has had some positive consequences which even ardent technophobes would be remiss to dismiss out-of-hand. The democratization of information through internet access, the rejection of the Western-centric canon and conservative interlocutors, and the growing mainstream interest in intersectionality as a political practice are all revolutionary. The internet has enabled a radical confluence of perspectives. The problem is the medium itself, the form, a tool for the billionaire class.

In such a climate, the decision to include Word On the Street on streaming services rather than limiting its distribution to physical media has been the cause of some trepidation for Barbara. “Our relationship to what we consume has changed significantly because we’re in an attention-driven economy,” she says. “I initially didn’t want to release my album on these platforms, and the label that I partnered with convinced me to do it, and I kind of regret it, to be honest. On the one hand, it certainly allowed me to be exposed to more people than I initially would have. But at the same time, I believe that those people are just as easily probably going to forget about my record because there’s so much music being released.”

A formless, atomless digital archive of music is the graveyard of artistic recognition. This anxiety is treated with laser-like focus in the music video for one of the LP’s standout tracks, “BBQ All Dressed.”

“I’m so proud of that video,” she says. “It really tells a story about the relationship we have with art and music as humans. There’s two queer-dos at the start, outside a club, waiting to ambush me. We get into an altercation. Afterwards, there’s a whole voodoo witchcraft ritual where they dip their masks into a pool of my blood, and it’s basically a metaphor. They kill the artist and connect to my essence. It shows how easily you could do away with the artist. Once you connect yourself to those systems of mass consumption, you don’t have to buy the album anymore. You might as well just kill the artist and connect yourself to the matrix.”

Technology at one time blurred the line between reality and facsimile. To quote Professor Brian O’Blivion of Cronenberg’s film, Videodrome, “The television screen has become the retina of the mind’s eye.” Word On the Street is an exploration of our media-synapsed sense of perception and connection.

Barbara’s relationship with Serouille is one she refers to throughout our conversation as a symbiosis, one person’s work directly inspiring and intertwining with another. Such devotion to probing the cannibalistic practices of AI and urbanity combined with a high degree of respect for the language of queer art is what differentiates Elle Barbara in Montreal’s Pop culture landscape. “I’ve historically been a big fan of Pop music, and I find that Pop is not just about music; it’s about aesthetics; it’s about politics, fashion, and performance. It’s such a holistic artform.”

Barbara is on a strong trajectory, having opened for U.S. Girls at Pop Montreal in September, and sharing the stage with Madonna on the Montreal stop of her Celebration tour. Perhaps this record, which is quickly becoming a niche classic, will provide a defining retrospective on a decade overwhelmed by despotic tech’s simultaneous obsession with content, and contempt for creativity. Heat, in the creative world as in the climate, is determined by the seasonal zeitgeist.

“I know it’s just not going to be a Billboard-charting hit because I don’t have those resources,” she concedes. “It’s just not my socioeconomic reality. But I’m confident that I make music that is unique and will stand the test of time, of that I am sure.”◼︎

Word On the Street is out now via Celluloid Lunch Records.

_{Cover image: Nico Stinghe}