Category Archives: 999 Words

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

999 Words

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.

Standard
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.

Standard
999 Words

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Standard
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.

Standard
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.

Standard
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.

Standard
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.

Standard