Category Archives: 999 Words

NicheMTL’s best essays, interviews, and op-eds in 999 Words.

999 Words

Un Oiseau Rebelle: notes on the location of culture

Culture, like blood and other life forces, circulates around the globe as if through a body.

There are certain locations, like New York or London or Paris, that seem more likely to originate culture, whereas other places, like Chicago or Manchester or Montreal, we might recognize more as receivers or interpreters of culture.

Population plays a part in determining whether a location originates or interprets culture. Larger cities tend to be engines of culture, with sympathetic administrative institutions and cultural infrastructures to incubate it.

Demographics is another indicator of where original cultures are more prone to occur. University cities, for instance, with higher numbers of young and enterprising residents tend to cultivate more unique cultural forms.

A confident and vibrant foundational culture, based upon things like shared language, identity, and history, is another significant condition that a given location might be more apt to originate rather than receive culture.

We frequently assign greater value to original cultures and to the locations that nurture them. Cultural insemination suggests a primary vital élan, whereas a secondary, supporting role is reserved for cultural dissemination. But a different kind of power can be found in locations that receive and reinterpret culture — that of revision, or what Homi K. Bhabha calls, “new and hybrid agencies and articulations.”

A dramatic scene from an opera featuring a man kneeling and reaching for a woman in a bright pink dress with ruffles. The woman appears concerned, while a group of silhouetted figures observes in the background against a blue sky.
Arturo Chacón-Cruz and Rihab Chaieb perform Carmen at Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier. Photographed by Vivien Gaumand for Opéra de Montréal.

The time lag inherent in cultural transmission opens up a temporal space for imperative interventions and interpretive interference. As cultural forms travel from New York — or London, or Paris — to wherever they end up, they evolve in significance and transform in transit. In the time it takes for culture to arrive, it both loses and accrues meaning.

Techno music that originated in Detroit or Berlin but now resounds, for example, out of a stereo in a middle-class bedroom in the Montreal suburbs, may become less about representing art’s postmodern mechanical reproduction than about corporeal phenomenology and the body’s rhythmic regulation. The heartbeat during the depths of a Canadian winter is more immediate than the assembly line or the factory floor.

Taken out of context like this, cultural forms may superficially be misinterpreted or misunderstood. But those apparent interpretational deficiencies are themselves acts of agency that insert new cultural knowledge and multiply possible readings and meanings. Reception, then, is also always a new productive act. Reading is rewriting. And rewriting takes place in the time lag of transmission.

Ralph Ellison writes in his novel Invisible Man about the 20th century Black American experience of temporality. “Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time,” Ellison says, “you are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead.”

Primary culture seems to set the temporal cultural pace — think of the phrase “New York minute” — whereas feeling behind or outside time is a condition common to receptive cultures. Hence the racist pejorative, “CP time.” The reclamation of the temporal sense, I believe, is the origin of the saying most commonly attributed to the Hip-Hop lexicon, which has now migrated to the MAGA Right in America: to “know what time it is.”

Physical travel still takes time, although much less since the 19th century than it did in every century before. But ideas and information today travel with near instantaneity and require practically no time to be received, read, and rewritten. Therefore, there is no longer any location of original culture, since it is constantly and everywhere being produced, circulated, and reproduced. And yet, there are certain places that still persist as cultural centers.

Is the idea of cultural centrality itself an artifact of time lag, just waiting to be read, rewritten, and understood anew? Are ideas also products, subject to the same regulation as commodities, with a short initial shelf life and increasingly rapid successions of cyclical marketplace revaluation?

The reality is that time arrives in waves, and like waves, time is subject to tides. Time is not a straight line, nor is it a cycle. It is a current, a frequency, a living bandwidth that carries culture on it like a radio frequency carries signal. We are each tuned to slightly different times.

Crowd at a live concert with enthusiastic fans cheering, some people are crowd surfing above them, creating an energetic atmosphere.
A crowd surfer rides the Angine de Poitrine audience at Club Soda 18 April 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

What precipitated this line of thought was Laura Snapes’ interview in The Guardian this week with Angine de Poitrine. First off, culture is not supposed to originate in Saguenay. But it is acceptable when it is a revision of culture that originated elsewhere, like a misreading of Frank Zappa or King Crimson. And for a New York minute, Saguenay becomes a center of culture.

It is ironic that this so of-the-moment band is also, aesthetically speaking, all about timing, frequency, and ambiguity. Now that Angine de Poitrine have arrived in London, they can reset their loop pedals and properly impose upon cultural temporality their own brand of CP (coloured polkadot) time. How long this micro-moment lasts remains to be seen. In a time of TikTok, when everyone wants to know what time it is, the clock is ticking…

I also had time this week to contemplate Bizet’s Carmen, a cultural text with comparatively longer staying power, but one which has undergone a series of re-readings and rewritings through the sands of time.

It is probable that, in its time, Carmen was conceived as a cautionary tale against liberated femininity. The Prosper Mérimée novella from which Bizet’s opera is adapted begins with a quotation from the Greek poet Palladas: “Every woman turns sour, twice she has her hour, one is in bed, the other is dead.”

Theodor Adorno in his essay “Fantasia sopra Carmen” writes that Carmen celebrates “eruptions from civilization into the unknown,” rejecting the bourgeois expectations of work and productivity, adherence to commodified temporality and inevitable domesticity. “The Fate which rules and which nothing can halt,” Adorno asserts, “is the primeval and pre-intellectual force of sexuality itself.”

It took 150 years for these thoughts to migrate from Paris to Frankfurt to Montreal.

You can always escape a place. But you cannot fly faster than time. And you can never overtake an idea.◼︎

Cover image: Rihab Chaieb as Carmen photographed by Vivien Gaumand for Opéra de Montréal.

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999 Words

Crazy Clown Time: notes on the weird visions of Beth Frey and Ana Sokolović

“…no frame is secure, all attempts at embedding fail.”
—Mark Fisher, “Curtains and Holes: David Lynch”

At the age of 65, the American filmmaker provocateur David Lynch in 2011 announced his debut solo recording, Crazy Clown Time. Upon its release, the album confounded listeners and critics in large part because traditional analytic criteria could not effectively be applied to it. Was Crazy Clown Time “good?” The answer seemingly necessitated a revaluation of goodness.

Crazy Clown Time was music made by an artist predominantly known for visual arts and the moving image. It was deliberately difficult to generically categorize, encompassing elements of surf rock, spoken word, electronic music, and blues. It was undoubtedly skillful, sonically speaking. But it was impossible to assign a value judgement to these purely arbitrary qualities.

Crazy Clown Time was weird. And Lynch had cultivated a reputation throughout his cultlike career for producing weird artworks. So, it was good at being that. But was weird good?

A similar question faces us when considering a spate of recent weird works including those of the visual artist Beth Frey and the composer Ana Sokolović. Frey’s exhibition, Autoeffigies, and Sokolović’s new operatic oeuvre, Clown(s), both offer representations of self-conscious weirdness that defy typical critique and precipitate a new rubric for analysis. They also beg observers to consider this moment and why now is the appropriate time for these jester-like gestures.

Beth Frey’s work hinges upon the aesthetics of malfunctioning Artificial Intelligence, her viral Instagram account @sentientmuppetfactory receiving exponential attention in the wake of contemporary conversations around the use of A.I. in fine art. One of the more consequential topics in those conversations is what constitutes noteworthiness in this era of art’s artificially intelligent reproduction. With A.I.’s assistance, it has never been simpler to prompt the production of clownish farce.

“It’s very easy to make an interesting image now,” Frey tells CBC arts journalist Chris Hampton, “so I think my conception of interestingness has changed.” For Frey, the facility of generating weird images using technological tools means setting a higher bar for expressing the weird.

Sokolović’s Clown(s) expands the formal elements of conventional opera to achieve an impression of weirdness, for example, beginning the performance with the house lights still up, and warping the customary canned announcement imploring patrons to turn off their electronic devices.

Throughout the following 115 minutes, Sokolović proceeds to draw upon other artistic traditions, like puppetry and acrobatics, to deform the audience’s notions of normalcy. Using clowns as her subject becomes a more peripheral choice that punctuates rather than constitutes the work’s predominant themes. Clown(s) is not weird. It is, instead, about weirdness.

The cast of Clown(s) onstage at Théâtre Maisonneuve, 3 February 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Mark Fisher was our generation’s most astute cultural observer to precisely define and acutely examine the weird. “A weird entity or object is so strange that it makes us feel that it should not exist,” wrote Fisher in his book The Weird and the Eerie, “or at least it should not exist here.”

And yet the persistence of a weird thing, here and now, upsets the legitimacy of the categories with which we have up until the present applied to define and make sense of the world. And so, we are tasked with the choice to begrudgingly accept the troubling and uncanny nature of whatever strikes us as weird, or to redefine our structural categories and reorder the irreconcilable.

The recurrence of clowns is apt. They are undeniably weird. Clowns characterize a complex impetus in human activity. Ostensibly, they intend to amuse and entertain us. But clowns’ antics more often provoke a sense of anxiety and fear in their audiences, especially the innocent. There is always something sinister lurking beneath the explicit attempt to elicit delight.

The problem today is not weirdness itself but its overabundance, a deluge of delusion. 15 years after Lynch’s magnum opus, there is no more befitting a description for this historical moment than Crazy Clown Time. Ours is an age of insane clown posses — ICE, IDF, GRU — assembled within the confines of the greatest national superpowers for the purposes of performing absurdity spectacularly.

Although it may not be enough just to say that our leaders are clowns turning reality into a circus. What they are effectively doing is forcing us to tolerate and hyper-normalize increasingly intolerable and hyper-abnormal circumstances, with the other option being resistance in a system into which a certain level of resistance is acceptable — indeed beneficial — to perpetuating that system.

The third alternative is resistance so disruptive that it threatens to destabilize not just the clown show but the entire circus. The possibility of leaning into instability politically may be manifesting in our works of art first as a form of dress rehearsal for real revolution. It is under the jurisdiction of art, after all, where we can conceive weird disruptions with fewer consequences — and perfect them through habituation and practice. A sane reaction to externally imposed insanity is to induce it internally, under controlled conditions, observe the results, and adapt accordingly.

Throughout his lifetime, David Lynch encouraged audiences to confront what was wrong about weirdness, and in doing so, redefine what is right about order, what is necessary about radical sensemaking, and the inevitability of the conundrums that force positive change. Presumably in 2011, Lynch could have done whatever he wanted, including doing absolutely nothing. What he did do, however, was to position a text entitled Crazy Clown Time before a captive public that would seriously consider it, classify and categorize it, placing it within a grander context.

It is significant that both Beth Frey and Ana Sokolović are producing their crazy, carnivalesque output in the context of a time and place that presents ever-fewer options for immediate survival. This is not only interesting but also important work that serves to reevaluate the political valence of art. Faced with their own versions of infinite choice, these artists elect to gerrymander the map of weirdsville and bring more of us together under its big top.◼︎

Cover image: Detail, Beth Frey’s Autoeffigies, McBride Contemporain. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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Feelings Sans Frontières: in conversation with Karim Lakhdar

‘Progressive’ has become a slippery adjective.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shwaya, Shwaya is out now via Mothland.

Cover image: Karim Lakhdar photographed by Aabid Youssef.

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Cause & Effect: in conversation with Susil Sharma

Tribal allegiance is a powerful impetus behind the construction of various cultural scenes.

Particularly within independent music communities, a sense of individual identity has historically been shaped as much by rejecting as embracing competing conventions. Dance music afficionados aren’t so much into guitar-driven rock and roll; rock and rollers snub hop-hop; rap kids don’t listen to punk, and so on. Or at least that’s how these communities were once constituted.

But nowadays on the island of Montreal, diverse scenes are less islands unto themselves and at least mutually aware if not entirely accepting of one another. This interpenetration arguably makes for more exciting, innovative, and genre-acrostic music in which unexpected influences overlap and bleed into each other.

This is the case for Karma Glider, the shoegaze-inspired, post-punk-tinged, pop-inflected project fronted by Fredericton-born and Montreal-based Susil Sharma. A Canadian of Nepalese descent transplanted from the East Coast and making a mutant form of Britpop in a French-speaking province is exemplary of Montreal’s multivalent cultural Venn diagram.

Karma Glider’s Mothland-released debut LP is the evocatively titled From the Haze of a Revved Up Youth. Sharma, 37, realized it together with producer and engineer Joseph Donovan, and Adiran Popovich of Tricky Woo fame, who now operate Mountain City, a studio located in N.D.G.

“I’ve been recording with them for years,” Sharma says. “They really feel like partners in crafting sound. At one point I went a little Kevin Shields studio madness energy, getting obsessed. I took all the guitar tracks down and redid some stuff. I favour recording a little more and increasingly I’m trying to savour the writing process.”

The LP skilfully traverses the landscape of Sharma’s most potent influences. “I love My Bloody Valentine,” Sharma tells me. “I’m really into Spiritualized and Jesus and Mary Chain. Primal Scream. Being 15 years old in 2003, The Strokes are woven into my musical genetics. The Velvet Underground, The Stooges, Patti Smith — a lot of that New York proto-punk scene is really important to me.”

Sharma relocated to Montreal two decades ago, “for school, on paper,” he explains, and quickly fell into a musical life.

“I went to McGill for one semester,” Sharma says, “but I dropped out right away and joined a band. It just felt like something else was happening. I was working at American Apparel at the time. Vice was the preeminent media. It felt like Montreal was the place to be for a young person trying to make art.”

From the Haze of a Revved Up Youth reflects on that era with a sentimental but not saccharine nostalgic sensibility. Its songs are concise studies featuring melodic riffs and hooks that gesture both back in time and forward at once and set Karma Glider apart from explicitly retromaniacal fare.

“I’ve got two older sisters,” says Sharma. “They’re six and 12 years older and they were showing me a lot of punk music. Grunge. They were around for Nirvana and stuff. They passed on Fugazi tapes and Sonic Youth tapes. I was absorbing all of that when I was 14 or 15. Everyone else was listening to Top 40, and being into counterculture felt like an identity, a special thing, like you belonged to something.”

Sharma took sporadic guitar lessons from a family friend, but is otherwise an autodidact, he tells me. “Both my parents are from Nepal, so we got a lot of Nepalese and Indian music. There wasn’t much common ground. Everyone in the family likes Neil Young, I guess.”

Attending all-ages gigs became a formative part of Sharma’s youthful musical experience. “There was a dead zone in New Brunswick, but there were cool bands coming from Nova Scotia,” he recalls. “I loved Sloan and all the Murderecords stuff. In Fredericton, there was mostly a lot of speed metal and a lot of jam bands. It felt pretty detached from what else was going on.”

“That’s success now — belonging to this community on the grass-roots level.” Susil Sharma photographed by Yang Shi.

In 2005, Spin Magazine published a profile on Montreal’s music scene calling the city the “next Seattle.” Bands like Arcade Fire and Wolf Parade were leading a new wave of rock coming out of the post-Referendum depression that began on the Plateau in the late 1990s.

“That was a huge reason why I moved to Montreal,” Sharma says. “There was an energy to Montreal at that point that probably drew me. Then 10 years after there was another wave. Now there’s another wave. It’s such a cyclical thing. Especially because it’s a city of expats and it’s always reinventing itself.”

This city’s celebrated cultural scenes have perennially been a draw for artists like Sharma looking to achieve a measure of success and satisfaction. Those measures have evolved over the decades, however.

“When I was young, it was all about making it in this industry-standard way,” Sharma declares. “Now, I play small shows in all these venues where I’ve known the promoters and the bartenders and the musicians for years. That’s success now — belonging to this community on the grass-roots level. In our world now, that’s lacking. We’re pretty lucky in Montreal to be able to bond over something that at its core is done from an authentic place. The romantic endeavour,” he admits, “rather than a commercial enterprise is what attracts me.”

Montreal more than other cities seems to thrive on an outsider ethos that relies less on algorithmic forms of discovery and favours more organic sensations. This may help to explain why artists like Sharma thrive here: Montreal is a delicate ecosystem whose constant pressures also ensure art’s perpetual survival, adaptability, and resilience.

“There’s demonstrable proof that some artists have really altered the cultural fabric for good,” Sharma suggests. “I’ve been considering art more through the roll of criticism of capitalism lately. I think being born when I was, my idea of what an artist should be was based on commerce. Selling things. But there’s really a crucial role to play in the community and the local scene. I think authenticity and good music and word-of-mouth will never be replaced. People are looking for something more real.”◼︎

Karma Glider launches From the Haze of a Revved Up Youth Friday 5 September 2025 with Shunk and Poolgirl at Casa del Pololo, 4873 St Laurent.

Cover image: Susil Sharma photographed by Yang Shi.

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999 Words

Are You Reading Me?

Some people make art for fashion. They mistakenly believe that there is a sort of hipster caché to being an artist, some form of romance to smoking Gauloises and drinking absinthe and soft self-mutilation. This belief is false.

In contemporary urban society, it is much more romantic to work in high finance, or better yet, middle management, to dress casually on Fridays and start a family and exercise at least three days a week at the company gym. Inspiration is not required to be at the office on time, to thumb digits into a personal mobile device, to touch base and circle back and follow up and drill down.

Some people think there is money in art. They incorrectly conceive that applying the above-mentioned office mentality to artmaking practices will yield capital as do sweatshops and sausage factories. This is false, too.

Any kind of creative pursuit is governed by a different rhythm — long fallow periods followed by intense bursts of activity, often fruitless. Productivity is the wrong quest for artists because art is not a product. Works of art fall more closely under the loose classification of goods and services. Their purpose is immaterial and intangible. Art accomplishes nothing productive.

Art is necessarily marginal. It is either worthless or priceless. Thus, the marketplace is less for art than it is for ideas. You don’t buy a painting or a sculpture or a pair of stilettos with antique forks driven into the heels. You buy the concept behind the work.

Some people think that art is not real work. They erroneously suppose that because children and trained monkeys and artificial intelligence are capable of making it, art must be distinct from labour. This is especially false.

Art is unavoidably work. It takes effort and time and something approaching skill. But the skill that art requires is not the skill acquired through discipline and practice. Doing more does not mean doing better. Experience doesn’t equate expertise. Art is either perfect, or it is not art.

Some people think that any undertaking can be considered art, that war or deal-making — or high finance, or better yet, middle management — can be artistic. This is also false.

There are only seven artforms: music, sculpture, painting, performing, writing, architecture, and film.

Subtle variations exist within each category. For example, fiction and history are both written arts; photography falls under film; and film no longer necessarily means celluloid. Making money is not an artform, unless we are talking about forgery. A stack of money is not a sculpture. However, setting a stack of money ablaze is performance and therefore art. Burning a stack of money might indeed be the highest art.

And writing might be the lowest. Not to denigrate my own kind. But unlike playing a musical instrument, or making a film, almost everyone can write. Doing writing artfully is the trick.

Like any of the other artforms, writing adheres to conventions of form and content and style and tradition.

Writing is musical, employing a certain melody and metre. Writing is sculptural, moulding words into shapes and scales. Writing is painterly, individual letters like brushstrokes invoking the picturesque, the page’s edge like a frame that encloses a whole scene. Writing is a performance as naked as dancing on a stripper’s pole. Writing is architectural, constructing and restructuring and enclosing and adorning space. And writing is cinematic, capturing thoughts and measuring them out in sequence and time.

Above all, writing is a calling, an unignorable inner voice that compels the writer to transcribe, acting most of the time more as a stenographer than as an author.

Like any worker, writers should be paid. Although writing is perhaps the most difficult mode of artmaking at which to earn a living, and among the most difficult to convince others of its artistic merit and monetary value. Wealth cannot be the end goal of any artist. But there are rich painters and actors and sculptors and musicians and architects and filmmakers. Still, Obama probably makes more for a book deal than Margaret Atwood.

The first time I was paid to write was in high school, when an exchange student, an uncharacteristically tall Japanese girl of astonishing beauty named Hiroko, hired me to complete her final essay for a course called “Career and Life Management.” I do not remember the subject upon which I wrote, but I do recall that Hiroko received an A on her paper and garnered the dubious praise of the teacher who could not quite square how a student with the most rudimentary grasp of the English language might have pulled off such a polished piece of penmanship.

I did at least ostensibly attempt to simplify Hiroko’s vocabulary and make it Japanese sounding, stopping short of exchanging Rs for Ls and Ls for Rs, but trying nonetheless to write as I imagined she might, using only the most basic diction and the simplest of sentence structure.

Hiroko paid me $100 for the task, and I spent my earnings on a Texas mickey of Canadian Club whisky which was consumed in the ravine at an after-school “rager” as we called them in those days. Obviously I was a natural-born writer, with both duplicity and alcoholism occurring to me simultaneously and remarkably without significant effort.

The real reason that artists make art is not to make money, nor to avoid work, nor for popularity or fashion. We do it compulsively, because we must, because it keeps us from plunging a knife into our own throats, or yours. We make art to observe and understand and most of all to be understood. A writer without a reader is like Father McKenzie eulogizing Eleanor Rigby. There is admittedly a vanity to pursuing the artistic struggle.

“All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy,” wrote George Orwell in his 1946 essay entitled Why I Write, “and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery.”

Mysteries are not meant to be solved. Otherwise, they cease to be truly mysterious.◼︎

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On Alternate Planes: catching up with Kiva Stimac

Kiva Stimac is rearranging boxes.

“I’m trying to organize all the merch so we can start printing more,” she says, heaving a cardboard cube onto the chesterfield.

I have arrived at the Suoni per il Popolo headquarters located up one flight of stairs from the legendary Casa del Popolo venue on St. Laurent Boulevard, just south of St. Joseph. The office is plastered on one wall with a spate of colourful hand-printed posters cataloguing two-and-a-half decades’ worth of events. A blackboard featuring the calendar for the forthcoming 25th edition of the storied Montreal music and arts festival covers the other wall, formidable lineups scrawled out in white chalk, uncompromising programmes of innovative music across 12 days.

The Watch that Ends the Night label showcase featuring Polaris Prize-longlisted Quinton Barnes on 19 June; Radwan Ghazi Moumneh with Lebanese post-rock powerhouse SANAM on the 21st; Lesbians on Ecstasy coming out of retirement that same evening, featuring HRT as the local opener; experimental electronic traveller Hiro Kone on the 27th; T. Gowdy supported by a handful of hometown heavyweights on the 28th; Wolf Eyes making their intrepid comeback; Kara-Lis Coverdale performing a solo organ set; the Jellicle Kiki Ball — the list of unmissable shows goes on.

And on.

“Because it’s the 25th anniversary, every single night is going to be sick,” boasts Stimac, Suoni’s artistic director, in-house screen printer, master chef, and resident caretaker. Stimac lives by the DIY ethic, micromanagement be damned.

“None of this was built with money, or investments, or business plans,” she says, gesturing to the living history wallpapering the space. “It’s punk rock.”

“I’m definitely looking for stuff that challenges people’s perception of what music can be, and how to use sound to connect.” Photographed for NicheMTL.

After a quarter century, this festival and its founder have seen ups and downs. But this year is no doubt cause for celebration, the silver anniversary of Montreal’s most risk-taking gathering, both during the festival and in the off-season. Nowhere else will patrons be regaled with a lineup of artists ranging from six to 80 years old, novices and unsung heroes alike, all playing the same stages. “I’m definitely looking for stuff that challenges people’s perception of what music can be, and how to use sound to connect,” Stimac explains.

When Suoni began, she didn’t imagine that the festival would last 25 years and grow to mean so much to Montreal’s arts community. “At 27 years old, I don’t think we thought in our heads that we had this goal of making anything or doing anything,” Stimac recalls. “We were just trying to live our lives as artists and put food on the table and be with our friends.”

But doing that year after year, decade after decade, Suoni has become entrenched into Montreal’s cultural fabric, supporting the Plateau and Mile-End-based music scenes and introducing renowned international artists to new audiences.

“People influence each other in scenes,” says Stimac. “Everybody hears differently and sees differently and thinks differently. But if there’s some collective understanding that we can come together by sharing our visions of the world through our creativity, I think that’s how we can communicate on alternate planes. The other way humans have to communicate outside of speech is our art. But art can be anything. I think cooking a dinner for your friends can be artistic.” (As a professional chef, Stimac ensures that none of Suoni’s performers play on an empty stomach.)

“I believe in my heart that the personal is also political.” Kiva Stimac photographed for NicheMTL.

Stimac offers me a tour of Popolo Press, the studio where all of Suoni’s posters and t-shirts are screen-printed. Linoleum cuts and letter sets, stacks of paper and bottles of ink, paint brushes and glue, a printing press, photocopies, photographs, fridge magnets and books and record covers and hand-written notes — the assemblage of artistic tools and ephemera induces an almost vertiginous sense.

To be surrounded every day with art supplies and creative paraphernalia means that Stimac is literally immersed in a life of making something out of nothing. The office is a factory of near constant production, an organic assembly line. And all of it originates from an impetus for social justice.

“I believe in my heart that the personal is also political,” Stimac asserts. “If you’re singing about love as a queer person, that’s a political act. When I make art, I don’t necessarily think that I’m putting my politics into it. But everything I do is because of humanity’s shared struggle.”

The inherent value of music and art is that it allows for a field for experimentation in which new ideas and ways of doing things can germinate and grow. Art can mirror life, or it can suggest life to come.

“Often, people leave saying, ‘that music changed my life.'” Photographed for NicheMTL.

“I think experimental arts that are trying to test boundaries or coming out of struggle — trying to use creativity as a means for connection in some ways that’s maybe different than the music industry side of it and the selling of things — is very important to nurture and give a platform for. That’s why I’m continuing to do it,” says Stimac. “I do feel the feedback from the community. People come to the shows, and they talk to me. I feel the response at the shows. Often, people leave saying, ‘that music changed my life.’ It can be a really transformative and connecting thing to get through the kind of times that we’re living in.”

Our times undeniably demand action. And Suoni per il Popolo offers no illusions about the struggle’s reality. Still, Stimac and her comrades have programmed a festival this year that aims to entertain as well as enlighten. “A big part of the groove that I look for is fun,” Stimac concedes. “I want to have fun. I don’t want it to be just in the brain. I want people to dance.”

The connection between mind, body, and soul is at the heart of Suoni’s ethos. I ask how someone who is her age when she started out might get to where she is now.

“All I did it with was a pencil, some ink, and the back of a wooden spoon,” Stimac says. “There are so many things you can do. Do them.”◼︎

The 25th anniversary of Suoni per il Popolo runs at various locations from 19 – 30 June 2025.

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999 Words

Ranking The Noise: notes on excess and harmony

“A pact to fight tyranny to the death.”
—Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse

Recently, a friend and I discovered a part of the city I had never seen before. Across from a parking lot on the way down from Mount Royal mountain is a small park surrounded with bright orange tape, beyond which is a large emptied pool covered in graffiti and gated with barbed wire.

As we sat secluded watching teenagers sneak through a hole in the fence, drinking from their cans of beer, we talked for hours and played songs on the pocket stylophone I got last Christmas from my sister. After being unceremoniously kicked out by a couple of security guards, we began walking home under a waning and bruised sky. Descending the steps to the street I noticed some artwork. On the stairs in bold green and black paint were plastered the words: “Stuck In Doom U 2?”

Like a jigsaw falling into place, this phrase echoed a recent desire of mine for some sort of city-wide pulse check, to quantify the general anxiety of the people around.

It has become background buzz in local news that several well-known cultural establishments in Montreal have for years been the targets of deeply asinine noise complaints. And it is not insignificant that these issues have been focused particularly in milieus considered frequent spots for a densely trans and queer demographic.

The flattening of the tectonic nightlife of this city by landlords for the sustainability of their assets is a poison in the well of our drinking water. Bars and venues like Champs Bar and Turbo Haüs should not have to be forced to complete countless expensive soundproofing renovations to pacify a landlord’s every whim. But to allow the contractual demands of private ownership and its associated feelings of moral elevation to be overlooked in popular opinion would be devastating indeed for capital. This is theatre in its lowest form: a handful of actors loudly orating in front of a reluctant audience strong-armed into paying simply to end the show.

There is an implied hierarchy of noise in cases like these — a sense that the stifling and exhausting atmosphere of commercial expansion will continue to be valued by city council boards over the existential necessity for places devoted to assembly.

As a young queer and non-binary adult, I understand how significant a space dedicated to community is to the well-being of individuals like us. These rulings to destabilize the local ecosystem (including the nutty “permit to dance” issued to Champs a few months ago) feel less like punishments for violating the social contract and more the first move in an unraveling series to thin the already marginal canvas of queer voices in culture. To redesign a city dedicated to art, to the purposelessness of craft — to use Oscar Wilde’s words, all art is quite useless — into a much less risky residential one (note what happened to Cabaret La Tulipe and you’ll understand my point) is the expected outcome of a well-known bottom line: silence can always be purchased.

I’m reminded of a lyric from “Change The Channel,” taken from experimental Hip-Hop group clipping.’s latest LP Dead Channel Sky: “Asbestos is best before breakfast.” These words ring out with a deadening lilt when recognizing the ubiquity of mold around us. Cracked foundations, peeling paint, rent increases, surprise evictions, a groaning and wheezing industrial cacophony.

The satire of invoking a toxic and absurd diet here is chillingly uncomedic when adapted to the modern global regression. Is there any evidence that capitalism births genuine technological progress? Are we not trudging through the debris of innumerable industrial “successes” already?

New computers which cost a fortune but never last, self-driving cars that murder pedestrians, endless cheap plastic tchotchkes overflowing from retail shelves that will outlive us all. A worse version of something that already exists, the overcrowding of matter. We are pushing through the radioactive blast of a nuclear event horizon with a cancer blooming in our skin, or in clipping.’s words: “Gum bleed for the lead in the air”.

There is an outcry for resistance at the nucleus of this noise-policing epidemic, a lust for an unshakeable moral outrage against administrative complacency to conservative reactionary appeals. The problem is that this righteous indignation is narrowed against the eldritch horror of bureaucracy. There is a currency applied to particular noise which is never applied in equal measure: the cry of the spurned bourgeoisie versus that of the city it feeds on, which at its current rate will continue to terraform cultural identity.

What happened to La Tulipe, Divan Orange, and Diving Bell Social Club may likely suffocate Turbo Haüs and Champs Bar just like it did the rest. The loss of these spaces will have an immeasurable impact on our landscape. But I am enough of an optimist to conclude on a lighter note.

There is a useful ethos espoused by musician and avant garde composer Annea Lockwood. If you simply pay attention to the thrum of the natural world, you can begin to hear its music. The babble of water, the shock of branches in dance, the eternal ebb and flow of nature eroding its concrete framework. An immutable harmony carried by the air. This is life bursting in a counter-hegemonic inflexibility.

My mind drifts back to the memory of that day on the mountain with my friend. The small pocket of anonymity we had found by accident. The crooked slope of the fractured sidewalk shaded by overgrown grass and the bench we sat on with its several slates of missing wood. The silhouette of it bending to our weight, its blueprint accommodating our shapes. How much of its essential beauty would be lost were it to be repossessed, power-washed and spackled, re-evaluated?

The questions for now however are as follows: how much do community relationships rely on particular architectures, and when will it be too late to learn definitively that they do?◼︎

Ozzy Delacroix is a writer from Montreal who spends the majority of their days working full time in a record store. “Ranking The Noise: notes on excess and harmony” marks their first publication.

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