Category Archives: 999 Words

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

999 Words

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, whither art?

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

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

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

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

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

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

And yet, the devil is in the details.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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999 Words

Dead Kapital: notes on Mark Fisher’s Ghost

“Value is too valuable to be left to capital.” —Brian Massumi, 99 Theses on the Revaluation of Value

The creepypasta meme referred to as The Backrooms — a collection of first-person visuals of endlessly self-replicating liminal spaces — would have been textual catnip for the writer and critic Mark Fisher.

Low-culture, horror-adjacent imagery, hauntological aesthetics, user-generated media, boring dystopia, claustrophobia, the weird, the eerie — all of these things were right up Fisher’s street.

In his 2013 book Ghosts of My Life, Fisher wrote about the traumatizing specter that the British TV series Sapphire & Steel represented for him as a young person. The dialogue delivered by a woman in a simulation of a World War II-era roadside diner during the show’s finale could serve today as a tagline for every bit of Backrooms-related content:

This is the trap, this is nowhere, and it’s forever.

The dearth of viable alternatives to capitalism was obviously front-and-centre to Fisher’s perennially recurring problematic — the ambient global sense of “anachronism and inertia,” he wrote.

“The slow cancellation of the future has been accompanied by a deflation of expectations.” —Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life. Still image from Sapphire & Steel.

In our increasingly technological, interconnected, and neoliberal world, lines of flight were becoming fewer and further between and there was, as Fisher feared, simply no escape: from mental illness, from socioeconomic class, from capitalist ideology, and ultimately, from self-destruction.

Also known by his blogging alias k-punk, Mark Fisher died by suicide on 13 January 2017. To think of the avalanche of crises that have befallen the world since his demise — the coronavirus pandemic, two new wars, cascading climate catastrophes, Trump 2.0 — is also to acknowledge that Fisher, as fragile as he seemed to be, may not have happily survived for long into the new millennium’s second decade.

And yet Fisher’s writing during his lifetime was never as popular, prescient, and indispensable as it has become in the ensuing eight years. To grimly adapt an adage of ancient folk wisdom, the best time to plant an apple tree was 20 years ago.

Had he only known that he would become a household name, perhaps Fisher would have gone on living. And still, in death at age 48, he achieved the sort of melancholy immortality bestowed upon the “27-Club” legends. A paradox.

What Fisher foresaw, and described more eloquently than most of his contemporaries (the verbose impenetrability of Slavoj Žižek, for instance, or Fredric Jameson’s rigid prose) was the slow cancellation of the future.

This was more than the No Future slogan of Maggie’s Sex Pistols-era Britain, or even the trend toward retromania during the early aughts that Simon Reynolds diagnosed. This was the wholesale erasure of future shock and its mutation into a contemporary form of hypernormalization.

“The future didn’t disappear overnight.” —Mark Fisher in London in July 2014.

The past would at once reiterate infinitely inside the present and be masked behind a flurry of superficial novelty in the form of revisionist history. It is no surprise that nine of the top ten grossing films of 2024 were either franchise reboots or sequels.

The question then becomes: does the public consume sameness because that is all that producers are serving, or does repetition of resemblance satiate some dormant and deep-seated desire in the zeitgeist?  

An inkling of an answer comes from late-capitalism’s nowhere-forever modus operandi. Perpetual economic growth relies upon the exponential exploitation of systems of value. And value itself cannot afford to be defined as anything beyond economic.

For instance, a Hollywood studio has to achieve ever-higher box-office receipts each year, making original cinematic stories progressively riskier. Furthermore, the stories themselves must represent and ideologically reinforce the profit-driven system that produces them.

The cultural value of prospective arthouse sleeper hits like, say, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, is sacrificed for the surefire financial success of another Godfather. Hence Deadpool & Wolverine and the fourth installment of Despicable Me.

The Backrooms simulates the illusion of variation amidst mindless proliferation. And while proliferation is abstract, ceaseless proliferation is the consequence of capitalist realism.

However, what’s at stake is more than just an indie filmmaker’s hypothetical oeuvre, the possibility of another Coppola breaking into the mainstream. Because capitalism incentivizes the worst possible human impulses, it becomes more profitable to escalate ethical dissolution than to elevate consciousness.

This is distinct from the panic of moral decay — Leonard Cohen’s dire warnings of “crack and anal sex” are the least of our concerns right now. Rather, capitalism makes it economically disadvantageous, for lack of a better descriptor, to do the right thing.

Think of the most handsomely remunerated professions and name one that benefits the common good more than individual advancement. Everyone can clearly see that the endgame is one kid in the playground holding all of the marbles. And we remain powerless to visualize much less mobilize any viable alternative.

When Mark Fisher died, he stopped imagining an escape route from the consolidation of capital, the impossibility of conceiving of value outside of monetary wealth. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t one. I see obvious examples in art, which most often is functionally useless, but always has the potential to possess immeasurable value that transcends currency.

The importance of art is wholly incommensurate with its price tag. Like love, art and its experience can be simultaneously worthless and priceless. Art in its very existence gestures toward the dialectical evolution beyond capitalism, that which both Karl Marx and Jesus commanded, the triumph of the irrational, the immediate cancellation of the immediate, forever.

Mark Fisher co-founded Repeater, the imprint that published my books. But beyond that, I didn’t know him. Nonetheless, not a day goes by that I don’t think of him or read his work or wonder what he would have made of this or that. The world is a better place for having had Fisher in it, if even temporarily. I expect to encounter his ghost someday in one of my Father’s many mansions.

The work now is to confront capital’s metaphorical and virtual backrooms and reorient them into the real. Acknowledging that we are hopelessly lost, but making good time, is the first tentative step upon a path toward an improved future renewed.◼︎

Cover image: The original Backrooms image posted on 4chan.

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999 Words

High Fidelity: notes on multiple Messiahs

He that hath ears to hear, let him hear. —Matthew 11:15

Faith is a word with a number of competing definitions.

Most commonly, we use it interchangeably with the word ‘belief,’ to describe our confidence in something intangible. These beliefs, too, can vary in significance.

We’re not certain, for example, of something as inconsequential as the metro arriving when it’s late — which in Montreal is often. We take it on faith.

Increasing on the scale of importance, we can’t be positive that our plane won’t crash. But we have faith that it will land at its intended destination, and so we faithfully climb aboard. We can’t be sure that a romantic partner won’t betray us. We must believe that they’ll be faithful.

Perhaps a more apt synonym for faith might be ‘adherence.’ Audio culture proves instructive in this definition of fidelity. When we say, for instance, that a recording is ‘high-fidelity,’ what we mean is that it adheres faithfully to the original sound.

A pristine 180-gram vinyl spun on a hi-fi sound system may make us believe, if wishfully, that Miles Davis could be right there in the room. It accomplishes this because the record adheres precisely to the veritable timbre of Davis’s trumpet.

Or, we could say that this or that performance of the Messiah adheres more or less to Handel’s score and original libretto and therefore is more or less faithful.

Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Anna-Sophie Neher, and Emily D’Angelo perform Handel’s Messiah at Notre-Dame Basilica. François Goupil for Orchestre Métropolitain.

Likely few if any of us who listen to Miles Davis ever witnessed him play live. And nobody attending performances of the Messiah nowadays saw Handel. But we believe that these recordings and performances adhere to the original — that they are in one way or another faithful.

Three recent holiday season performances in Montreal of Handel’s Messiah espoused various degrees of what we might call fidelity. First, there was the Orchestre Metropolitain’s sober Messiah rendition conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin on December 11th at Notre-Dame Basilica. Then, there was the Orchestre Classique de Montréal’s solemn version which Roï Azoulay conducted in the crypt of Saint-Joseph’s Oratory on the 12th. And finally, there was two-time Juno winner Maestro Matthias Maute’s fast and loose iteration with Ensemble Caprice on 22 December at Maison Symphonique.

Each possessed their virtues. But the ultimate conundrum remains: was one Messiah most faithful to Handel’s initial idea? The answer to this riddle depends upon an assortment of factors.

First is the location. Since Handel’s Messiah is a work of Christian theology, it should probably be performed in a church. This rules out Maestro Maute’s version.

Then, the question becomes, in which church should it be performed? Notre-Dame Basilica was constructed in the Baroque style, nearer to Handel’s historical timeframe and aesthetic tradition. But because of its ornamental composition, the massive reverb of a larger auditorium like Notre-Dame’s muddies all of the score’s intricate notes. Plus, the Messiah is technically an oratorio, which logically demands an oratory. So, the crypt at Saint-Joseph’s emerges as the early frontrunner.

The Orchestre Classique de Montréal performs Handel’s Messiah in the crypt of St. Joseph’s Oratory. Brent Calis for the OCM.

The second factor is the performance itself. Although it has been adapted over the centuries for enormous orchestras and choirs, Handel wrote the Messiah for a decidedly modest, chamber-sized ensemble of only nine instruments: two trumpets, two oboes, two violins, viola, basso continuo, and timpani. The Orchestre Metropolitain comprises nearly 40 musicians, whereas the OCM and Ensemble Caprice are less numerous, producing a tighter, more focussed, and more faithful sound.

However, each of the three sections ought also to be performed in their entirety, without interruption. Ensemble Caprice took liberties with the compositional structure, omitting a handful of segments for brevity, and both the EC and the OCM’s audiences applauded after nearly every individual piece. Maestro Nézet-Séguin literally frowns upon ovations between refrains. So, the OM probably remained more faithful to Handel’s original intentions.

Another factor is how closely the performance sticks to the piece’s compositional spirit. Handel’s score was written in only 24 days, which some scholars interpreted as celestial inspiration, and others, including librettist Charles Jennens, regarded as careless haste. Either way, it is a work reflecting exuberant joy, revolving around the famous Hallelujah chorus, perhaps the best-known piece of western music ever written, and should be executed with equivalent boisterous enthusiasm.

Despite Nézet-Séguin’s irrepressible gusto, the Orchestre Metropolitain’s performance topped the running times at over three hours, a long show by any measure. Comparatively, the Ensemble Caprice’s concert sped by in under 80 minutes. The OCM’s rendition, however, moved at a lively and consistent pace and spanned a reasonable two and a half hours.

The Orchestre Metropolitain provided no information about the period of the instruments upon which its members performed. But the OCM was careful to publish a list in its programme notes about the provenance of each stringed instrument, including the age of their bows, and Maestro Maute went so far as to emphasize that Ensemble Caprice featured historically consistent instruments.

Ensemble Caprice performs Handel’s Messiah at Maison Symphonique. Tam Lan Truong for Ensemble Caprice.

Consequently, it’s difficult given the above criteria to judge which Messiah was indeed the best. If we gauge by the venue’s acoustics, the OCM at the oratory doubtless wins. But if we decide through adherence to the score, the OM’s note-for-note reproduction demonstrates superior fidelity. And if we factor in the oratorio’s energetic essence and attention to its epoch, Ensemble Caprice prevails.

Herein lies the metaphor: it seems that the problem is not the idea of Messianism, but the notion that we should adhere to only one. Is a multiplicity of Messiahs possible? As Rabbi Robert N. Levine suggests, could we be them?

The Abrahamic Jews supposed that a divine Messiah would unite their tribes and usher in a new post-sin consciousness. Jewish Christians 2000 years ago believed that Jesus of Nazareth was the guy. A few centuries later, Muslims thought that Jesus was satisfactory, but that Muhammad was the true and ultimate prophet.

If God created us in His image, then we each have the potential — and the responsibility — to be the Messiah we want to see in the world. That requires a higher fidelity.◼︎

Cover image: The vaulted ceiling at Montreal’s Notre-Dame Basilica. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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999 Words

Split Pulse: in conversation with Nassir Liselle

“When you’re coming up with a new band name, it’s kind of a hellish thing to have to take on,” says Nassir Liselle, the lead guitarist and founder member of Montreal Art Rock band DahL. “To find something that’s relevant, catchy, that hasn’t been borrowed.”

As literal as it may sound, the band name DahL is derived from the South Asian stew, typically made with lentils and a mishmash of optional ingredients, each with its own particular flavour.

“When I was younger we often ate it,” Liselle recalls. “We chose the name DahL because one of our sound techs had once described our sound as a bunch of people going in different directions. I like that idea. It’s like a different series of grooves all working together.”

For the uninitiated, DahL’s sonic aesthetic is as diverse as any soup recipe, more than the sum of its parts, incorporating elements of Trip Hop, electronic, and spoken word and fusing those into something uniquely contemporary.

The band — which consists of Liselle, Bryan Greenfield, Edward Scrimger, and William Winston — garner comparisons most frequently to a Montreal-specific blend of Dean Blunt, TV On The Radio, and Massive Attack. “I love Daddy G,” Liselle admits.

“When you’re out west you always hear about Montreal as this mythological spot.“ DahL band image provided by Nassir Liselle.

Hailing originally from Calgary, Liselle relocated with Greenfield to this city in 2013 and has since become something of a fixture within Montreal’s independent music scene.

“We’ve gone to school here,” Liselle tells me. “We’ve had more than one iteration of a musical project. We’ve built lives here, and roots, and built community.”

Montreal’s legendary sense of community is what drew Liselle and Greenfield eastward, with few outlets in Alberta’s more conservative environs for their outré creative sensibilities.

“It was hard to find venues in Calgary,” laments Liselle. “At the time it was still limited to community centres. We just wanted to be more immersed in a music scene. When you’re out west you always hear about Montreal as this mythological spot. But it’s not even a mythology, it’s very much real.”

Indeed, the achievements of bands like Suuns, agencies such as Mothland, labels like Constellation Records, and the storied Suoni per il Popolo festival called out like a siren song to Liselle.

“What Suoni has done here is so important to art and sustaining art and giving it some vitality,” he says. “The spaces and the venues they operate are so intrinsic to Montreal. They’re accessible to so many people. A lot of their efforts have been done to facilitate that. In terms of community, Suoni is deeply involved in different events and community-based organizing. They’ve done so much.”

Liselle’s musical education and influences span a wide generic spectrum — from country and folk to calypso and punk. “My mother was really, really into kind of crooner-esque stuff like Kenny Rogers, and Neil Diamond, and Graceland by Paul Simon,” he remembers. “But the first albums I ever owned were Tragic Kingdom by No Doubt, Smash by Offspring, and Dookie by Green Day.”

Liselle’s parents enrolled him in classical piano lessons at age five, and he developed an immediate aptitude for singing and songwriting. His paternal uncle in Edmonton was that city’s sole steel drum band leader, and his cousin, Janayah Ellis, in the early 2000s performed Dancehall-inflected Reggae under the moniker Souljah Fyah.

“We didn’t have a lot of money when I was growing up,” he confesses, “so I would make makeshift drum cases by putting plastic bags on cups of different sizes, trying to figure out what Tré Cool was doing. I’ve been obsessed with composing and writing songs since I can recall, but I started playing music and being more ambitious about it in my early 20s. What matters to me these days is the song. And I love a good story.”

DahL perform “Una Minutes” at CHMA Live Session in Sackville, New Brunswick, 8 November 2024.

DahL’s singular compositions come together through an inimitable dialogue between Liselle and Greenfield, its principal songwriters.

“We often will work on our own thing and bring it to each other,” Liselle explains. “I’ll be in my room working on something, or at the studio space, and Bryan will ask what’s going on and I’ll be like, ‘not yet. I can’t show you yet.’ When I’m still in my own little world is when I’m closest to the art, dumping the Lego box out and trying to make pieces of something, even before they really become songs that I think I’m ready to show, when I’m still in discussion with myself.”

With a 1990s Hollywood surf movie as an unexpected touchstone for inspiration, Liselle has just started writing what he believes, in two years’ time, will become DahL’s next album.

“In terms of songwriting, it’s going to be a lot less linear. The band might hate me for this,” he laughs, “but right now, I’m obsessed with the score to Point Break. Gary Busey sounds. I recently bought this lovely synthesizer that the American composer Mark Isham used to make that soundtrack. I’m like, that’s the sound.”

Liselle feels an affinity with Montreal’s established and emerging indie rock scene in bands such as Museums, Chasm, and Bluebird. “They’re more country-folk,” he tells me. “It’s really organic and from the heart, off the floor. And I’m a huge fan of Kristian North, formerly of the punk band Babysitter. Crooner singer-songwriter vibes. There are a lot of strong, tight-knit communities in Montreal, and it’s both a blessing and a curse. Those communities and the wealth of community that can be generated when people are together is great. But if you’re outside of it, it’s hard to access.”

Nonetheless, the Montreal music community has nurtured DahL across ten recordings, including, most recently, an EP entitled That’s It, a remix split with Scottish electronic duo Post Coal Prom Queen, and a live album called The Earl’s Hall Sessions, which the band recorded in Wakefield with saxophonist and prolific local collaborator James Goddard.

“There is constantly so much going on in Montreal. If you want to take the time and make yourself open, you can take in a lot.”◼︎

Dahl perform with LAL and Bianca Supercell at La Sotterenea 24 November 2024.

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Any Colour You Like: in conversation with Nicolas Bernier

In 1959, the British-Canadian poet Brion Gysin and his partner, Ian Sommerville, an electronics pioneer who was closely associated with William S. Burroughs and the group of artists known as the Beat Generation, conceived of a device called the Dreamachine.

A crudely constructed contraption, the Dreamachine was little more than a cardboard cylinder with cutout abstract shapes placed upon a turntable, with a 100-watt lightbulb positioned in its center.

As the turntable was switched on, stroboscopic light patterns would flicker through the cylinder at a frequency intended to induce an alpha wave mental state. In addition, the Dreamachine could reportedly produce temporal distortions and other hallucinations and gained renowned cultural status with the rise in Burroughs’s popularity throughout the 1970s and ‘80s.

The stroboscopic flicker effect is fundamental to the Montreal-based academic and musician Nicolas Bernier’s latest album, entitled Visions Couleurs, set to be released 1 October 2024.

“The Dreamachine is part of my influences,” Bernier tells me during a recent telephone conversation. “It’s so simple. It’s just a piece of paper and a turntable and a light and it’s really working, that thing. It’s pretty impressive. I’m a big William S. Burroughs fan. I like to read — this is where I take all my ideas from, and how I get soaked in a topic. I was reading on all those flicker-induced hallucinations and theories of colour and it all just melted together in this project. Burroughs is definitely the author that marked my life the most.”

Notoriously, William S. Burroughs experimented with altered states, including the use of psychedelic drugs for their legendarily synesthetic potential. While not at all drug-induced, Bernier’s recording is a collection of psychedelic musical movements for modular synthesizer that aim to combine auditory and visual experience, producing impressions of colours from sound, and vice versa.

“This summer, I was reading Frontiers of Being, by Duncan B. Blewett. He was a psychologist who was doing this research group on LSD testing in a university in the ‘60s. He was one of the first people who wanted to make more scientific research into LSD. When I was younger and taking drugs a little bit,” Bernier admits, “I could just take a puff of a joint and see things — and hear things. Fun fact. So, this is why I can’t take recreational drugs.”

Bernier instead chose to dedicate his creative efforts to constructing an “idealized fantasy vision” of psychedelics, combining audio and video in an immersive and transcendent performance-based experience.

“I decided to make a visual part to the album as well, where I would play the colour on the synthesizer,” says Bernier. “We made a system where the synthesizer is controlling colours in a real-time projection. As I play, the colours are changing. There’s never a beat, but there’s always some kind of pulsation making the colours flicker.”

Bernier recorded Visions Couleurs at the Université de Montréal Faculty of Music’s experimental Laboratoire Formes – Ondes, where he additionally serves as professor and co-director. And he will premiere the album there in a free performance on 3 October.

“It’s going to be really intimate,” Bernier says. “It’s a small, maybe 50-person venue. You can’t get more niche than this.”

Bernier succeeded in composing an ambitious album that he could recreate more-or-less uniformly and structurally every time. “This is a challenge with modular synthesizer because it’s all a bit hectic. You turn one knob a little bit and all the sound will be changed,” Bernier explains.

Hailing from Gatineau, Quebec, Bernier was steeped in synthesizer-based music from an early age, listening to popular scores created for 1980s film and television. “I still have my tape of the Miami Vice soundtrack somewhere,” he laughs.

Yet by the early 1990s, Bernier’s tastes turned to more indie genres, albeit with a particularly Canadian slant.

“Furnaceface is still today among my favourite bands,” he says, “even if history forgot about them. And ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit.’ That video changed a lot. That generation was going quickly from Metallica and this really macho Rock to Alternative music and Nirvana. Then, the transition went fast from Grunge to things like Portishead and Björk. That was my youth.”

Bernier relocated in 1999 to Montreal to complete an internship with Voir, the now-defunct French-language alt-monthly newspaper. “I started out studying marketing,” Bernier says, “but I was more interested in the web. I did an internship at Voir and worked there for a couple of years. It was just a three-month internship, but I’m still here, 25 years later.”

In the interim, Bernier completed a Ph.D. in Sonic Arts at the University of Huddersfield; released a series of well-received albums spanning Musique Concrète, field recording, and electronic musical traditions; created scores for cinema and stage, including Structures Infinies – Light Object, which was shortlisted in 2017 for the U.K. Aesthetica Art Prize; performed at prestigious international festivals such as Sonar in Spain, Transmediale in Germany, and Montreal’s own Mutek and Elektra; and taught in the Digital Music program at UdeM.

“I’m doing something more colourful and playful. I want to make it joyful.”

Visions Couleurs marks another milestone for Bernier, who immerses himself deeply in every creative endeavour he undertakes. Although the recording is not monumental in scale, it is widescreen in scope, and technicolour in its aesthetic sensibility.

“There’s no orchestration,” Bernier confesses. “There’s not much editing. I didn’t make it like super big or anything. It’s me playing and that’s about it. But it’s a synthesizer piece that’s really played. I’m not triggering sequences. I’m really doing a lot. I feel it’s a way to approach synthesizer that is a bit less common. I’m doing something more colourful and playful. I want to make it joyful — that’s one thing.”

During a rehearsal for the live performance, Bernier divulges that the Burroughs-inspired flicker effect of the video images even managed to destabilize him, if only momentarily.

“At one point it became overwhelming. But it’s cool. I just felt lost in my own thing. I hope I don’t pass out in the colours.”◼︎

Visions Couleurs is released 1 October 2024.

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999 Words

Gonna Make You Sweat: in conversation with Félix Gourd

Industry mechanized modern life. A sense of self-awareness made the mechanical post-modern.

As culture in the 21st century pushes past modernity’s afterword, a new zeitgeist of hybridity characterizes our current moment — a simultaneous collapsing of past, future, and the now.

No music captures and encapsulates this post-human condition more than techno, its automated rhythms mimicking the machinery of industry, while its groovy organicity speaks directly to the human body’s corporeality.

Félix Gourd, who currently records and performs as Eƨƨe Ran and heads Montreal’s premiere techno imprint, Humidex Records, understands this dichotomy.

“The groove in techno is what helped make it so popular,” Gourd tells me, from across a picnic table in Little Italy’s Dante Park. “People could relate to it, physically. Their bodies could be involved. It’s what drives you.”

Humidex Records celebrates its 5th anniversary in 2024, having begun operations just prior to the pandemic.

The label’s first offering was a three-song compilation featuring works from each of its co-founders: Leticia Trandafir, aka softcoresoft; Simon Chioini; and Gourd, who at that time operated under the name Absurde.

Trandafir since departed to work with Ableton, the music technology company, and Chioini is pursuing a Ph.D., leaving Gourd alone in the driver’s seat.

“Honestly, the biggest challenge for me is doing everything almost by myself,” Gourd admits. “It’s a lot of time — for practically no income.”

Nonetheless, Humidex is thriving, having recently released Timbres Oblit​é​r​é​s by Montreal producer Errance, a self-financed cassette comprised of soundtrack music composed for Rodrigue Jean and Arnaud Valade’s Maple Spring documentary film entitled 2012/Through the heart, and Patterns / Threshold, a four-track 12-inch split EP of club cuts from Measure Divide and Gourd’s own Eƨƨe Ran.

And on Friday, June 7th, Humidex fêtes its half-decade with a proper knees-up at the Société des arts technologiques, showcasing live performances by Pascale Project, Amselysen & Racine, and the Detroit-based headliner, 2Lanes.

“I got really excited listening to his stuff,” Gourd tells me. “He has old-school influences.”

Gourd, 33, was born and raised in Montreal, having lived his entire life within the Hôtel-de-Ville-Plateau-Mile-End district. His parents were artistically minded, enrolling him in piano lessons at age nine, and encouraging Gourd to pursue a creative life path.

“My mom loved classical music,” Gourd recalls, “and my dad was friends with all the Musique Actuelle community.”

Gourd studied percussion at École secondaire Pierre-Laporte and was a young fan of French Touch and British Drum & Bass music.

“In high school, I was really into Justice, MSTRKRFT, Sebastian, Daft Punk. I remember going to a Daft Punk concert when I was a teenager. Also, a lot of Mr. Oizo, Squarepusher, Aphex Twin, Venetian Snares. Weird rhythms,” explains Gourd of his adolescent influences.

“Because I was studying percussion, I was really interested in different types of rhythms and sonorities.”

Travelling to Berlin in the early 2010s, Gourd encountered the viscerality of techno in a large club for the first time. He returned to Montreal and immediately connected with this city’s underground rave scene, completing the Intermedia Cyber Arts programme at Concordia and working as a visual artist and VJ for various local musicians.

Gourd turned his attention in 2017 back to musicianship, beginning with modular synthesis and improvisatory electronic music.

“I always enjoyed a powerful kick drum,” Gourd says, “the effect that it has on your body.”

Gourd and Chioini collaborated on a live hardware music project called Musique Nouvelle, performing at Mutek’s franchises in Mexico and Buenos Aires before launching Humidex with Trandafir in 2019.

“Leticia’s vision was to focus on Canadian techno,” Gourd explains. “Simon comes from the more experimental and academic background, and I wanted to make more experimental dance music. We did a bunch of parties that summer, and all of our DJ fees would go back into the label to finance further releases. But then the pandemic came.”

The strict global coronavirus measures meant that live music fell silent and the label “slept for a few years,” as Gourd recounts. But he continued to produce recordings, releasing an album of dark, atmospheric bangers called Derelict Memories in 2022, and Constant Decay, a crunchy and throbbing three-song EP, in 2023.

Although Humidex’s roster is small, the label quickly garnered a mythic reputation along the lines of Juan Mendez’s Jealous God, or the legendary Sandwell District collective. Eƨƨe Ran’s tracks in particular could drop seamlessly within a DJ set of Regis or Surgeon, some of the genre’s heaviest hitters.

In addition to helming Humidex, Gourd is presently producing music for the Montreal choreographer Andrea Peña’s dance company.

“It has these two faces: techno and experimental,” Gourd says, describing the project. “It’s weird and unconventional. There’s lots of ambience. But sometimes there will be a looped rhythm. Dancers need rhythm. And the work she does is really intense for the dancers. They’re like athletes. They’re like beasts. Sometimes I need to feed them something.”

Although Gourd draws from across the spectrum of international electronic music’s subdivisions and scenes, there is still a quintessentially Montréalaise quality about his compositions, an indefinable note of the Quebecois carnivalesque.

These are records that yearn for a late-night dancefloor, that land hardest in the live context, where music is experienced as collective and cathartic and transcendent. They also bridge the gap between languages and civilizations, fusing influences from Europe and America and distilling them into something distinctly chez nous.

“What’s unique about Montreal is that it’s very accessible to make art. The rents are still low, and we need to do everything possible to keep it that way. I mean, the CAQ’s recent abolishing of lease transfers is outrageous, their corporate mindset and total indifference towards people in precarious situations is threatening Montreal’s and Quebecois culture. But life is easier here — in comparison to bigger cities like Toronto, New York, or London. There, you need to have two or three jobs to pay for your small apartment.”

Ours is a city of monumental industrial history, timeworn warehouses and factories-turned-ateliers haunting every neighbourhood like ghosts of a revolution that modernized and transformed western society.

“Techno was not born in Quebec,” says Gourd. “So, we definitely appropriated something that comes from elsewhere. But that’s why Montreal is so rich, culturally,”

“It’s a meeting point of different cultures.”◼︎

Humidex Records celebrates its 5th anniversary 7 June 2024 at SAT, 1201, Boulevard Saint-Laurent.

Cover image: Anna Arrobas

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