Category Archives: 999 Words

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

999 Words

Split Pulse: in conversation with Nassir Liselle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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999 Words

Any Colour You Like: in conversation with Nicolas Bernier

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Visions Couleurs is released 1 October 2024.

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999 Words

Gonna Make You Sweat: in conversation with Félix Gourd

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cover image: Anna Arrobas

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Feel Good Inc.: in conversation with Super Plage

During the mid-1960s, as the French and Italian neorealist cinemas, led by filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard and Michealangelo Antonioni, were amidst a new-wave renaissance, the American director William Asher produced a string of immensely popular movies that rode the waves, literally.

Beach Party, Muscle Beach Party, Bikini Beach, and Beach Blanket Bingo weren’t intellectual, political treatises like Breathless and Band of Outsiders, and they didn’t represent internal emotional turmoil like Red Desert and Blow-Up.

As their names implied, they were about no more than a few sunshiny teenagers’ seaside escapades. But they came to define a time of relative peace and prosperity in the United States following the shocks of World War II, and before the tumultuous Vietnam war era.

Six decades on, as students once again occupy university campuses, and artists of all stripes respond to pressures from every side to politicize their productions, there is something to be said, a new value to be discovered, in music as pure entertainment.

“It’s not politically engaged, and it’s not therapy for me, like it is for some artists,” explains Jules Henry of Super Plage, the Montreal-based Electropop act.

“That’s always been the element that links the projects that I’ve had under various kinds of music: I’ve always wanted it to be catchy and appealing.”

“We just watched Blink 182 and Sum 41 on MusiquePlus. That was our school, I guess.” Marie Michele Bouchard for Lisbon Lux Records.

Henry began playing in Pop-Punk bands and mounting intimate gigs with friends in his native Rimouski as a teenager. Coming of age in a distinctly Francophone community, embracing Anglophonic culture might have been Henry’s first real act of rebellion.

“I never heard a song in English that my parents played,” Henry says. “I grew up listening to very local Folk-Pop music. But then I started really having my own records and cassettes. We just watched Blink 182 and Sum 41 on MusiquePlus. That was our school, I guess.”

Henry is a self-taught musician who didn’t respond well to the confines of music lessons. “At ten, I knew that it wasn’t for me, and I never really did it after that,” he confesses. “I took production classes here in Montreal a few years ago, so although I don’t know the theory of music that much, I know the practice of producing.”

After relocating to the city in the summer of 2014, Henry quickly decided to devote his life to musicianship. “Most of the time, I’m alone in front of my computer with my synths and stuff,” he explains, “and I’m trying to come up with cool musical ideas that I could lay down some lyrics on. Lately, like in the past year, I’ve been experimenting a lot more in the studio with other people, in other studios.”

Henry found himself influenced by a certain strain of Electropop with roots in the French Touch sound. “I’m not a big connoisseur of that era, but I love Daft Punk,” says Henry. “I really love La Femme, I’ve been into Channel Tres lately, and all that more house-y stuff that is more bassy, almost Rap. Although I was never into Rap. You know, back home, we had to make a choice: you were either a Punk guy, or a Rap guy.”

Henry began recording under the Super Plage moniker in 2019 and soon became affiliated with Lisbon Lux Records, the Montreal Indie imprint.

“I’ve been following the label for a lot of years before I signed with them,” says Henry. “La Couleur is one of the reasons why I do what I do, and I’ve always been a fan of their career. So, it was very exciting for me to sign with the same label. And we’re really getting along, so hopefully this lasts.”

Almost immediately after Henry launched his new project, the pandemic struck, and he was forced, along with everyone, offstage and indoors. “I was here, man, in my bathrobe just making music,” he recalls of the two-year shutdown. “I would wake up very early, go into the studio, and try not be touched by laziness, and just make the most of this time, that I could just, like, chill at home and make something worthwhile.”

Although it’s ultimately live performance that propels Henry and gives him a sense of purpose as a professional musician.

“I do have a lot of fun at home, producing stuff,” he says. “But sometimes if I don’t play a show for a month or two in the wintertime, I don’t know, I don’t really feel like an artist unless I’m in a situation where people see me doing it. If I’m at home alone, I’m just a guy making music.”

However, there is doubtless genius in simplicity. And with the accolades around his 2023 release, Magie à Minuit, and a slickly produced new video for the single “Rue Dandurand” — a track upon which La Couleur features — Super Plage is setting a new high watermark.

“We’re working on an album that’s going to come out next year,” Henry tells me. “We’re working on some singles that will be coming out in the next few months. And we have a big show coming at Fairmount Theatre in Montreal. It’s going to be pretty amazing, I think. It’s been faster and slower, and simpler and more complicated. But I’m always trying to just make something catchy that makes you feel good.”

A little bit of feel good goes a long way. In the cultural sphere, there has been an attitude for too long that great art needs to challenge and provoke its audiences, that discomfort equates epiphany.

The 1960s American beach movies and their enormous success, despite a spate of serious-minded art cinema, were evidence that not everything need be some didactic statement, that sometimes it’s advantageous to just let go and enjoy, even — especially — if it feels like the surrounding world is falling apart.

“I like to think that some parts are clever, and there’s a bit of nostalgia added to it, but mostly it’s just to listen and have fun.” says Henry.

“It’s not intended to be a lot more than that.”◼︎

Super Plage performs 23 May 2024 at Fairmount Theatre, 5240 Avenue du Parc.

Cover image: Jules Henry photographed by Marie Michele Bouchard.

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999 Words

Before You Can Be, You Must Do

Dear Dale;

Literally some people have been commenting — favourably, I might add — on the fantastic logo you designed for me for NicheMTL. They’ve been saying how eye-catching it is, how it’s familiar somehow, how they’ve seen it around town on the stickers plastered on mailboxes and in the bathrooms of all the hippest places.

I wish that I could send them to you because you’d be getting an awful lot of extra graphic design business. But I can’t give them your email or your phone number or your Instagram. In fact, there is no way to reach you now because you died.

Dale Nigel Goble, April 29, 1972 ~ December 15, 2019.

You died just before the pandemic started, Dale, so you missed a pretty dark time. “Escaped” may be more apt. Maybe you got out while the getting was good.

But you were only 47 years old, and there’s no doubt that you had so much more life in you, so much more art to make, so many more smiles with which to lighten any dark time — even a time of plague, war, famine, and death.

It can’t stay like this forever. But there is no way to bring you back.

You were the first artist I ever knew who only made art, who didn’t have a square job. In Edmonton in the 1990s, that was a big deal. Nobody was just an artist in Edmonton. Everyone gave in and worked on the rigs, made enough money to buy a truck, get married, build a new house south of the Henday, and settle into the Alberta dream.

You and I didn’t do that. You moved west, and I moved east, but neither of us ever gave up on making art.

You got me my first studio, Dale, in the AIDS Driving School building on 81st Avenue. You were in the basement, screen printing t-shirts, and I was one floor up, making music. Your door was always open, and whenever I needed a rest, I could always count on coming downstairs for a smoke break, listening to Radiohead, or Björk, and having a conversation about what we were going to do when we were famous.

We used to roll out of bed at four in the afternoon and meet at Tommy’s for breakfast just before they closed. Or at Your Friends and Neighbours. Eggs, bacon, toast, coffee, and cigarettes in one of the back booths.

Then we’d head to “the stu,” as you called it, and work into the night. I always wished we’d had more time to drink coffee and smoke. But you were busy, and you taught me to stay busy.

Dale Nigel Goble, Dream Head, 1998, Acrylic on wood.

We did a lot of shows together, at Manifesto café, with Carol and David, and at the Works Festival in Sir Winston Churchill Square. I made music while you spray-painted graffiti on huge sheets of canvas.

Years later at the Tam-Tams in Montreal, I saw a DJ and a graffiti crew doing the same thing, and it made me think of you and me, not that long ago. Good ideas are timeless.

Maybe we smoked too much weed. You’re gone now so I’m not telling tales out of school by saying that you might have dealt a bit to pay the rent. But even the way you sold pot was artful, wrapping it in brown butcher’s paper and tying it up with twine instead of just sealing it in Ziploc baggies like all the other chumps. “Art supplies,” we used to call it. But in retrospect, we probably would have been more productive without those supplies. I am now, certainly.

Dale Nigel Goble, sign from The Special Shop, 1997, Acrylic on wood.

I remember driving with you and Sarah and Mark Ramsay out to Holly’s mom’s farm near Edson. We sat around the campfire and roasted Mundare sausage, when someone got the idea that we should run naked through the fields under the silver moonlight.

So, we took everything off except for our shoes and socks and felt the tall grass passing between our legs, laughing, chasing each other, not a care in the wicked world. I had never felt as free before as I did that night. Nobody told us what to do or not to do. I’ve never felt that free ever since, Dale.

You gave me paintings which I still hang with pride in my home. The Dream Head, the Special sign, and the 9×5 foot Cityscape that’s a bitch to move, never mind to mount. I almost got trapped behind the fucking thing once. This is your art, and it is dangerous.

Dale Nigel Goble, Cityscape, 1997, Acrylic on canvas.

I know countless people across Canada — and around the world — still have your pieces in their collections. Especially the Applebet, which made you a modest celebrity in nurseries and Mommy magazines.

Dale Nigel Goble, Applebet, 2010, Laser-cut wood.

You lived out your last days in the Cowichan Valley. I imagine the old-growth forest and the ocean air must have given you comfort as your illness progressed. You might have known you didn’t have much longer. But you still took the time to design a logo for me and my hairbrained scheme of starting a new publication, just as journalism itself was disappearing.

Unlike me, who’s an acquired taste, everyone liked you, Dale. You had that glint in your eye that hinted at some special secret. You always knew the right thing to say. It would have been your birthday on April 29th. I’m turning 47 this year. Sometimes I wish I could be dead, too. But it’s not my choice to make.

I remember in your studio you had all these aphorisms and daily affirmations hand-written and taped to the walls. “Before you can be, you must do.” I said I wanted to be an artist, and you reminded me, you are an artist — whenever you’re doing art. So, I don’t stop doing art, even when nobody’s looking.

Along with your logo, the cover image on NicheMTL.com is my tribute to you, Dale. The only window with a light remaining on, working after everyone else is asleep.

I’m still working. So, you can sleep now.◼︎

Cover Image: Dale Nigel Goble, Love Heads, 1998, Laser-cut wood.

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Join The Club

I have never been comfortable with the concept of clubs.

In school, I never joined the chess club, or the math club, or any sort of club for that matter. Clubs were for those who couldn’t make friends on their own. People who needed to constantly surround themselves with other people to feel validated as people.

Secret societies seemed even worse, the idea of initiation and ritual and adherence to arcane doctrines smacking of unnecessary conspiracy. If you want to be in a club, why not own it?

I would never be a member of any club that would accept someone like me as a member, the old saying goes. It’s often attributed to Groucho Marx, but Woody Allen stole it, and meant it. Now, there’s a club I wouldn’t want to join.

However, my most preferred type of sandwich has to be the club sandwich. In most restaurants, you don’t even have to show a membership card to order one.

A triple-decker, the basic club sandwich consists of sliced turkey, bacon, lettuce, tomato, and mayonnaise on three slices of toasted white bread, cut into quarters, toothpicks skewering the wedges in place. Some restaurants ham it up with ham and cheddar cheese, which is fine, but in my opinion excessive.

There is already such thing as a ham and cheese sandwich, which is perfectly complete on its own. I find that bacon plus ham is too much pork to put together on one plate. A good sandwich should only be constructed of a few constituent ingredients. And the beauty of the classic club is its simplicity. Less is more.

I have long searched Montreal for the best club sandwich, and a few old-school diners stand out. There’s Oxford Café on Sherbrooke in NDG. They’ve been around since 1944. Oxford makes their club sandwiches with real chicken, not prepackaged pressed turkey, so they score points for authenticity. A great club sandwich is worth travelling for. But unless you’re already in NDG, it’s a bit of a journey.

I also like Paul’s Patates in Pointe-Saint-Charles. They’ve been open since the mid-1950s and, depending on who’s working, you may receive your club sandwich in geometrically sliced segments that would impress Pythagoras. Paul’s has a distinctive neighbourhood joint vibe, with the stainless steel countertops and the (sadly non-functional) jukeboxes, which are nonetheless time capsules of Quebec popular music.

Another plus is their homemade Bertrand spruce beer. It smells kind of funky, but the original recipe is not too sweet, not too carbonated, and hasn’t changed much in over a century.

I highly recommend both these diners and the club sandwiches therein. But recently, I’ve been returning to Chez Nick in Westmount and ordering the club sandwich, fries, a side of gravy, and a ginger ale. The combination of that particular lunch in that particular place is perhaps my favourite thing in life right now. Chez Nick has been going strong for 103 years, and there is an unmistakable air of history there that is hard to ignore.

Nick’s is by far the most elegant of these diners, being on Greene Avenue, where bourgeois retirees congregate, and young upwardly socially mobile families bring their prep school kids. But there’s a down-to-earth atmosphere, too, that makes anyone feel immediately comfortable and welcome, no matter how fancy or how casual you might look.

Nick’s is already famous to most Montrealers. The author Louise Penny has written about it in her Chief Inspector Armand Gamache mystery series, and frequently goes there herself for breakfasts when she’s in town. Other renowned writers have been regulars there, but I won’t name any names. Brian Mulroney used to stop in from time to time, and one of the staff recently told me that he once served Jean Chrétien.

Whenever I go to Chez Nick I feel like I’m part of this cast of illustrious and everyday characters. I’ve been visiting Nick’s for nearly 20 years, and it is the one restaurant in which I have never had a bad meal. I particularly love their club sandwiches which I customarily order dry, with a white paper container of mayo. That way, I can regulate the dressing in every bite.

There are lots of things that make Nick’s one of my favourite places in the city. The warm and long-time staff; the regulars, whom I’ve come to recognize and in some cases befriend; the ambiance; the legacy; the mythology. And of course, the club sandwich. But one thing I especially love about Nick’s is their gravy.

As a kid, it was a treat to go after school for a pre-dinner snack of French fries and gravy. My mom would habitually pick me up from class and take me to the local food court where we would order a basket of crinkle-cut fries and dip them in a tub of warm and salty brown sauce.

It was less routine that my dad would collect me, but I could usually convince him, too, to take me out for French fried potatoes. It was during one of these outings that I remember he gave me the news that he and my mom were divorcing. Certain things stick in your memory more than others, and that afternoon has embedded itself deeply into my experiential scrapbook.

I don’t recall it being particularly painful at the time, as one might expect of hearing such momentous news. Not to my 11-year-old self. It’s possible that the gravy and fries cushioned the blow. There’s a reason why we call some dishes “comfort food.” Disentangling sustenance from remembrance is an impossible task.

In my youth, I couldn’t wait to distance myself from my broken family. But I crave familiarity now, as the world appears to be coming apart at the seams.

Family comes in all different forms. It’s not just about genealogy. Long ago, my biological family was scattered to the wind. But I feel a sense of belonging at Nick’s, like I’ve found a club I want to be in.◼︎

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999 Words

Unprepared Piano

I haven’t contributed much to human history.

I don’t have children and may never do, if my perpetual singledom, unemployment, and financial poverty continue on their current trajectory. I’m not good at business, nor keen on new technology, nor fond of predatory capitalistic practices — generally the characteristics that ensure upward social mobility in today’s society.

I write words by hand, which is something that my AI assistant continually tells me I should improve, by breaking my paragraphs into smaller chunks, and adding subheadings in order to lead my readers. Ostensibly, Artificial Intelligence doesn’t think much of us. Surely within a decade, AI will render my profession unnecessary, if there is any necessity to it now.

However, before artful writing fell out of favour, I elicited a minor stir at the offices of The Quietus, in January 2013, when one of the site’s editors noted that a word I had used in an article celebrating the 30th anniversary of MIDI came up a Googlewhack. That term was “claviocentrism” — referring to the centrality of the twelve-tone, clavier-style keyboard to Western musical traditions. My MIDI article constituted its first use. I knew this because I indeed invented the word, as none was previously sufficient.

This week, I had the good fortune to attend two very different concerts that returned the piano to my center of attention. No Hay Banda, the excellent Montreal-based concert series, which exists somewhere between a concept and a band, organized the first one, aptly titled “The Last Act of the Piano.”

The troupe’s three members — percussionist Noam Bierstone, keyboardist Daniel Áñez, and violinist Geneviève Liboiron — come from diverse backgrounds. But they somehow blend seamlessly in ethos, a veritable power trio of in sounds from way out.

No Hay Banda is renowned for staging exceptionally dramatic performances that push the boundaries of Montreal’s live music scenes. For better or worse, there is nothing else quite like what they do. It is impossible to overstate how challenging — even alienating — their concerts can be. No Hay Banda is truly art for art’s sake, audiences be damned. Easy listening, it isn’t.

Although, “The Last Act of the Piano” happily was both sonically and visually appealing, perhaps because No Hay Banda chose to focus upon Western music’s most familiar instrument, albeit in a profoundly experimental way.

The trio performed two pieces of 21st century post-classical piano music that were at once delightful and rare to experience in a live setting: Jennifer Walshe’s 2008 composition, entitled “Becher;” and “101% mind uploading,” the 2015 piece by Elena Rykova.

Rykova’s score calls for the instrument to be prepared with magnets, Scotch tape, and an optional sticker of X-ray radiation. No Hay Banda photographed for NicheMTL.

“Becher” is the contemporary equivalent of Mauricio Kagel’s post-modern 1970 album, Ludwig Van, reconstructing snippets of Beethoven’s compositions, running them through amplitude modulation and other forms of effects, intending to mimic the way that the composer might have heard his own compositions as his natural hearing deteriorated.

Jennifer Walshe, “Becher’s” author, stitches together borrowed scraps of popular piano compositions — from Beethoven to Coldplay and beyond — in a technique that emulates digital sampling, and which tests the virtuosity of any pianist performing the piece. But No Hay Banda’s Daniel Áñez tackled the task with incredible skill, doing justice to Walshe’s ambitious work, and doing so with the group’s signature David-Lynchian laconicism.

Without saying a word, all three members then donned medical scrubs and surgical gloves to perform “101% mind uploading,” which had the threesome operating upon the piano’s insides as if it were a patient undergoing an emergency appendectomy.

Rykova’s score calls for the instrument to be prepared with magnets, Scotch tape, and an optional sticker of X-ray radiation. No other band in Montreal would have the guts to rip out a piano’s guts in such theatrical fashion, and few other Canadian cities could muster enough of an congregation to support such an endeavour — a testament to both.

The week’s second claviocentric concert could not have been more different; comparatively speaking, more palatable to a wider patronage — the Russo-German pianist Igor Levit interpreting the works of Brahms, Mahler, and Beethoven at Bourgie Hall, on the venue’s recently acquired Hamburg Steinway grand.

Just being in the presence of this instrument was itself worth the price of admission, as evidenced by the sold-out crowd, who were enraptured with Levit’s shoeless performance. Apparently, he injured his foot days prior to the recital. But this lack of footwear in no way hampered his dexterity.

As I sat there recalling No Hay Banda’s wild concert, listening now to one of the world’s most celebrated pianists caressing this perfect instrument, it occurred to me that keyboards are devices that require human intelligence to bring out their best qualities.

The electronic musician Richard D. James, aka Aphex Twin, famously experimented with programming mechanical machines to trigger an analogue piano’s keys. A generation prior, the avant-garde composer Conlon Nancarrow produced player-piano reels that spat out extreme, impossible compositions. And MIDI, the computer protocol that digitally controls any imaginable instrument, has given rise to the niche genre known as Black MIDI, which attempts to pack the largest number of notes into the smallest time span.

The question, though, is why? Just because it is technically possible to exceed human skill doesn’t mean it should be done. And once it is, there is no reason to try and surpass it, as if in some robotic pissing contest. Less is more — in this sense, less machine means more human.

What I initially meant with the term “claviocentrism” was not what the word has come to mean to me recently. I coined it as a shorthand for a cultural logic that prefers pianos over, say, guitars, or drums.

But what claviocentrism means today is the ability of this wonderful instrument to gather people around it in something approaching harmony, something approximating peace, with an unmistakable timbre that is unquestionably beautiful, whether it is played with fingers, mallets, or magnets.

Maybe AI can parse information faster than we can. But can it invent useful words and innovate new musical forms? Is there still another act for pianists and writers?◼︎

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