Category Archives: 999 Words

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

999 Words

Cause & Effect: in conversation with Susil Sharma

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cover image: Susil Sharma photographed by Yang Shi.

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999 Words

Are You Reading Me?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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999 Words

Ranking The Noise: notes on excess and harmony

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.◼︎

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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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