Category Archives: All Dressed

NicheMTL’s style and fashion column from Montreal and beyond.

All Dressed

This Continuous Spectrum: in conversation with Jessica Moss

On 20 July 2024, the violinist Jessica Moss was set to perform an intimate gig at Hotel2Tango, the storied recording studio in Montreal’s Mile End district. It was a glorious summer’s day as I walked westward from the Rosemont Metro station. A short burst of afternoon rain gave way to an evening sunset which bathed the iconic 1 Van Horne building in a brilliant golden light.

I was early, so I stopped at the public gardens installed along the south side of the Van Horne overpass. Busy bees pollinated the wildflowers and a gentle stream of traffic flowed over the bridge. I turned around and was suddenly struck by a vivid double rainbow that spanned the entire horizon.

The rainbow, in addition to adorning flags symbolizing diversity and inclusivity, is also a symbol of God’s promise to mankind to never again attempt to destroy us.

“I do set my bow in the cloud,” it is written in Genesis 9:13, “and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth.” What an auspicious sign, I thought, to observe in advance of a musician whose instrument resounds, literally, by drawing a bow against its strings.

“In my mind, I don’t play an acoustic instrument,” Moss informs me 15 months later as we chat over the phone one recent morning. “I play violin and pedals. The combination is the instrument.” Behold, to adapt a phrase from R. Murray Schafer, the new orchestra.

Moss has called me from her studio in the Atlas Building on Jean Talon, a collaborative loft called Error 403 which she shares with a community of artists and musicians. Her portion of the space is crammed to the rafters with trinkets and collected curios: plastic horses and ceramic birds and doll heads and kitschy dioramas. A Mason jar-full of piano tuning pegs. A heavy glass ashtray with an array of lambs lying on their sides. Everything in Moss’s environment possesses some double meaning, it seems, an overabundance of semiotic import.

“I don’t see another way to engage with the world than the one that I do,” Moss tells me, speaking characteristically cryptically. “It’s kind of like a raw wound. But that’s how I roll.”

“I realized how much I loved the technical process of working with recorded material in a collage-type way.” Photographed for NicheMTL.

I have requested an audience with Moss ostensibly to learn more about her newest LP, an album entitled Unfolding, released via Constellation Records in mid-October. But our conversation meanders organically in a patchwork manner that mimics Moss’s overlapping compositions, melodic and melancholic strands of interlaced string-and-electronics arrangements that glide through your ears until they weave themselves subtly into your soul.

Jessica Moss is one of Montreal’s great collaborators, playing with Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra and the Klezmer-influenced Black Ox Orkestar, and appearing as a guest player on albums by Arcade Fire, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and the late Vic Chesnutt, among many others. Yet, over the past decade, Moss has found her footing as an uncompromising solo performer, releasing six sturdy full-length records since 2015.

“The very first time I recorded solo,” Moss explains, “I went to New York and into the basement of Guy Picciotto, who is a dear friend, and we made the cassette, Under Plastic Island, which is technically my first release. I wanted to tour but I didn’t understand that you can’t tour without making a record. So, I said, ‘fine, I’ll just record the stuff that I’m doing.’ Even from that very first moment, I realized how much I loved the technical process of working with recorded material in a collage-type way. It’s a process that I’ve used all my life, making things. It’s the artistic mode that I operate in.”

Unfolding was recorded using Moss’s distinctive montage process, starting with demos captured on her iPhone and culminating in layered strata of sounds that the engineer Radwan Ghazi Moumneh mixed into its final form.

“For me, I have various grooves,” Moss tells me. “My album-making process, even though it has evolved over the years, has kind of remained the same from the very beginning. I only go into the jam space with the intention of recording once I know that I’m in the clear to work on music for the next while, that I have time to make a record. When that happens, I get very, very into it very quickly because usually by then the concept has been boiling in my head for a long time. So, my process is improvising with a theme in mind and slowly picking apart what I’ve done and slowly creating the skeleton of what will end up being the record. All of those feel like being extreme flow states for me. Once that is done and everything is in front of me in ProTools, the pulling things together is one of my favourite things in the world, even though it is also extremely difficult and takes so long. I feel very alive doing that.”

Appropriately, Unfolding is scheduled for a month long run at Habitat Sonore, the immersive Dolby Atmos-outfitted listening room in the basement of Centre PHI. “It’s pretty exciting, that place,” Moss beams. “I just spent a week doing the Dolby Atmos mix. It’s a very special thing for me.”

Moss was raised in Toronto before relocating permanently to Montreal in her late teens. “My grandparents lived here in Montreal and my parents grew up in Montreal,” she explains. “My mother decided even before I was born that I would be having music lessons and that they would be a serious part of my life. My dad played in bands in the Communist Jewish community. There was a lot of singing and a lot of music-sharing circles. We spent summers and winters in Montreal and I knew from an early age that when I could move here I would. And I’ve never looked back. The grown-up me grew up in Montreal.”

Childhood for Moss was filled with Classical music, Jazz, and old-school Blues, until she developed her own individual tastes. “The very first obsession with music that I had was the Grateful Dead. I fucking loved the Grateful Dead. That was my first real passion.”

The earliest album she remembers buying of her own volition was Appetite for Destruction by Guns N’ Roses. “I listened to it a few years ago,” Moss recalls, “and the lyrics are fucking heinously disgusting,” punctuating this disdainful appraisal by elongating her syllables. “It was one of the many eye-opening moments of realizing as a young girl-type person the kind of misogyny that was rampant in the stuff that I listened to. Musically, you can’t go wrong. Lyrically, it’s better to not listen to the words at all.”

Quickly, Moss discovered and was influenced by the more experimental side of Grunge Rock emerging in the early 1990s. “I was in high school when Kurt Cobain died,” she says. “I remember the very day. Sonic Youth was a gateway. The Pixies were a gateway. Fugazi. The classics.”

When she absconded to Montreal in the late ‘90s, Moss found herself on the ground floor of the nascent Constellation Records scene, a cornerstone of this city’s mythology as a nucleus for underground insurgent music.

“One of my first best friends in Montreal was Ian Ilavsky,” Moss remembers. “We played in bands together. We hung out all the time. He and his mystery friend Don Wilkie from Toronto, who was planning to move to Montreal, wanted to start a venue-slash-record label. They wanted it to be called The Constellation Room. So, Don moved here, and then they were confronted with the incredibly Kafkaesque bureaucracy in Montreal with doing anything dealing with the public. They couldn’t get a venue permit no matter what they did. So, they just rented a loft and started the label and started hosting a small concert series in Old Montreal in their first location. And that experience became Constellation Records. Their first release was Ian’s band Sofa, who I was a huge fan of at the time, and I had seen every show of. That was pre-history. I was around for the whole dawn — the Don dawn,” she laughs.

In the ensuing decades, Montreal has undergone seismic political and economic shifts which have translated into a fluctuating cultural landscape.

“For a long time, it felt like Montreal was immune to the global Western world shift towards gentrification,” says Moss. “But in the last few years, what I thought could never happen here has happened here. You’ve seen it. We’re experiencing what everyone else is experiencing of being priced out, if you aren’t lucky enough to have some kind of stable living conditions. Particularly because of the rapid rise of rents here which have not matched the rise in income, what’s happening here is very violent in that way.”

“Having transformative experiences along with people who are working towards making change is a real thing.” Photographed for NicheMTL.

Moss possesses a strong sense of social responsibility, leading by example in an abstract but tangible fashion. She is a founder member of the Montreal chapter of Musicians For Palestine and has co-organized a number of local fundraising events for the cause.

“I don’t think that I’m under any naïve illusions that there is any one thing that can affect change,” she admits. “Definitely music as a general term is too broad. But it’s one of the many tools that a community can have that can offer a space to bring like minded people together, or near-like minded people together, and have it be a situation where a group of people can leave more aligned than they entered. Or they can have this experience of sharing the energy of seeing music performed. To me, that can be a genuinely transformative experience. Having transformative experiences along with people who are working towards making change is a real thing. It’s not just entertainment. It’s a dedication to creating those spaces in the best possible way that I know, to facilitate that type of communion.”

There is an air of urgency, profundity, and gravitas to Moss’s life and work — from collecting obscure ornaments to condensing a multitude of tracks into glimmering sonic jewels that both trouble and delight. Watching Moss in her element is a masterclass in ritual reciprocity, an unforgettable experience for anyone fortunate enough to have encountered her delicate indomitability.

“I feel very committed to it being a reciprocal relationship,” she divulges. “It’s 100 percent the motivation that keeps me like a moth flying at the light.”◼︎

Jessica Moss performs 18 October 2025 at Centre PHI, 407 Rue Saint-Pierre.

Cover image by Audrey Cantwell.

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Forever Young: in conversation with Marianne Perron

I am sitting in an otherwise unremarkable office, except for the majestic Heintzman & Company grand piano, a Canadian-made symbol of the melodious nature of operations herein and a testament to our symphony’s commitment to preserving local heritage.

Today, I have been granted rare backstage access at the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal to learn about the forthcoming season with Artistic Director Marianne Perron, who for more than a quarter century — spanning the careers of three conductors — has helped helm the programming priorities of Montreal’s oldest and most venerable orchestra. And while Rafael Payare is the Symphony’s newest public face, it is really Perron who pulls the strings.

Ironically, a broken violin sits on her desk.

“Yes, that’s mine,” she laughs, “and maybe one day I’ll get it fixed. But I never considered a career as a professional musician,” Perron tells me as she recalls her early life as a violinist. “I started lessons at age six. My mother conceived of it as just another part of getting an education. But I stopped at around 20. I love music, but it was not what I wanted to do. Honestly, I hate playing in front of an audience.”

Perron appropriately prefers to remain behind the scenes. Nonetheless, she is one of Montreal’s most inspiring women leaders, securing a coveted spot on the Women We Admire list, among other well-deserved honours.

Perron started with the OSM in 1999 as head of Education and Contemporary Music and continued climbing to her current role as Senior Director of the Symphony’s artistic sector, overseeing programming, community education, operations, production, and musician personnel. “Now, I am the head of all five of these departments,” she says with a smile. “So, voilà.”

The trick to success is making one’s job look easy — which it never is. And clearly, Perron is no stranger to hard work. She attended the Conservatoire de musique de Montréal, studying and advocating for contemporary music from Quebec and Canada, and later obtained a master’s degree in Musicology from the Université de Montréal, plus an MBA from the HEC with a specialization in cultural enterprises. So, her chops are impeccable from both the musical and management angles.

“There are many things I understand about balancing dynamics,” she explains. “It is always a question of balance.”

From left: Marianne Perron, Rafael Payare, and Philippe-Audrey Larrue-St-Jacques. Antoine Saito for the OSM.

Music, too, is about balance, and patterns, and cycles, and Perron inherently understands that the OSM is faced with balancing tradition and progress, the Classical repertoire and more contemporary works, and Montreal’s cultural specificity with that of the wider global stage.

“True, the OSM is not primarily a contemporary music orchestra,” says Perron. “But all the same, it is an orchestra that programs the works of new composers. Not all conductors believe that contemporary music is important. But for our new conductor, Rafael Payare, it is extremely important. It is really at the heart of his practice. At the Virée Classique and the outdoor concert at the Olympic Stadium, we have contemporary Canadian music. We are now programming more Latin American works as a tribute to our new conductor. And we also have an orchestra that is capable of playing Bach regularly. We are an orchestra that really plays 400 years’ worth of music.”

That historical range is integral to the life of the OSM. For Perron, it is perennially a challenge to program a season with an ear toward both history and the future.

“There are lots of things to consider,” Perron tells me. “We think about how to develop the sound of the orchestra. There are so many great things about Rafael Payare — his artistic sensibility, his talent. But also, his ambition for the orchestra. Rafael Payare has a sonic vision which is in sync with the OSM. We are not going to totally transform but just search for those existing elements to develop. Rafael has a particular interest in Post-Romantic Germanic works. So, we think of those things, as well as the elements we want to develop with the orchestra. We have lots of conversations. I think it’s wonderful that Rafael wants to perform, for example, Bruckner. And then someone says, ‘wait a minute, before we play Bruckner, we should play this and this.’ And that will take Bruckner to another level.”

Perron grew up in a Montreal household where Classical music was regularly part of the sonic backdrop.

“We went to a lot of concerts when I was a kid,” Perron recalls. “They had a series at the Piano Nobile at Salle Wilfred-Pelletier which was called Musique & Brioche. They were short concerts aimed at families, and they had muffins and croissants. I loved those. My family subscribed to the OSM. I was seven when my father took me to the Seventh Symphony of Beethoven. And that became my favourite piece when I was seven or eight years old. And ten years later, my father returned to Place des arts to hear the very same piece. But this time, I was in the Orchestre de Conservatoire as a musician. That was a great milestone.”

To reach out to younger audiences, the OSM is experimenting nowadays with the form of symphonic performance, coupling the orchestra with cinema, for instance, as they did previously with Jaws and The Red Violin, and will be doing again this season with Stanley Kubrick’s epic film, 2001: A Space Odyssey.

“The role of the music in that movie is so special,” Perron says. “It’s interesting because there are lots of moments where there is no sound, there is no music. The orchestra wants to play all the time, but silence is really where the ‘wow’ moments are in that film.”

“There is a suppleness that I think represents us here.” Marianne Perron and Rafael Payare photographed by Antoine Saito for the OSM.

And yet, hardly a silent moment passes in our conversation. There is plenty to look forward to in the OSM’s 2025-’26 season, and Perron is excited about all of it: the return of Barbara Hannigan; Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro; A German Requiem by Brahms with Kent Nagano; The Rite of Spring with pianist Bruce Liu; Gustav Mahler’s Fourth Symphony paired with Perú Negro by Jimmy López, the OSM’s Composer-in-Residence, to celebrate Black History Month.

The OSM has chosen to launch its season with The Damnation of Faust by Berlioz, a bold and symbolic choice that gestures toward the spiritual bargains of our age, and their potential perils.

“We always try to draw a link between the pieces we are programming or commissioning and current events,” Perron reveals. “Is there an exchange? Is there an echo?”

In an era of increasing divisiveness, Montreal is arguably North America’s most progressive metropolis, and a municipal model for achieving linguistic and cultural harmony.

“It’s really about the richness of the whole community together,” Perron notes. “Montreal is very fluid. It’s a very safe place. There is a lot of pride here, but it’s not pretentious. There’s a lot of curiosity and creativity, too. I feel like it’s a city that is open to the world. And I think that reflects in the Orchestra. There is a suppleness that I think represents us here. The Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal is a mirror image of that.”◼︎

The OSM’s 2025-’26 season opens with The Damnation of Faust, 17 September 2025 at Maison Symphonique.

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The Atrocity Exhibition: in conversation with Tomas Dessureault

In a darkened front bedroom is an improbable assemblage of paint brushes, canisters, photographs, various tools and trinkets, a jumble of vintage clothing, stacks of books, empty drinking vessels, prop rubber limbs, and hundreds if not more works of art on paper in various states of composition and decomposition. At the centre of this maelstrom is the artist Tomas Dessureault, 24, who has invited me round to his new garden-level apartment in the Village to document his process in preparation for a forthcoming solo exhibition entitled Peace Please which will open at Galerie POPOP in early September.

Dessureault continues offering me one ostensibly random item from his collection after another for inspection. “Look at these, I found these in the garbage,” Dessureault tells me, handing over two black scrapbooks-full of carefully curated pornographic imagery cut out of late-20th century print magazines. The photographs are catalogued according to some curious and perverse logical system: hair colour, body position, explicit sexual act.

“Someone put a lot of work into making these,” he says dispassionately. Everything in the room including these binders seems to hold equivalent significance — objects of sociological fascination more than aesthetic appeal, items stripped of sense and consequence.

Dessureault manifests at the door with braced teeth, In Utero-era plum-coloured hair, and an oversize t-shirt clinging to a lanky frame. His energy is positive and spirited and he is sincerely pleased to welcome visitors into his creative space. A majestic, panelled painting hangs in the hallway of the entrance and artworks are strewn in every nook and cranny, a residence into which he recently moved and shares with three roommates. One of them, a photographer called Japhy, busily snaps pictures with a film camera. There is a manic vitality to this household that suggests production over capacity.

Dessureault appears to possess many of the characteristics of a promising young artist: a deep passion for art; an articulate mind; and most of all, a furious ethic that drives him to churn out work constantly. “My art practice is,” he hesitates, “I don’t have a practice. There is no moment when I am not doing art.”

Arriving in Montreal four years ago from Val-d’Or, Dessureault first attended university for medicine, then transferred into philosophy, and is currently midway through a visual arts degree at Concordia. “I think I might drop out,” he confesses. “I have a problem with scholarships. I owe a lot of money.”

Dessureault demonstrates the youthful idealism that typifies recent transplants to Montreal, especially art students. He has the air of a dog with his head hanging out of a pickup truck’s side window, careening down the highway, tongue wagging, taking in the passing landscape with wonder and delight. I feel self-consciously like Christopher Walken’s journalist character in Julian Schnabel’s biopic, Basquiat, wishing not to disturb this exuberance with talk of the wicked world that we all will inevitably encounter. But there is an additionally wise-beyond-his-years quality to Dessureault that tells me I won’t. We are here to talk about art, which is to say, about any and every aspect of life itself.

“I hope for the future that I can just sell enough to work.” Tomas Dessureault photographed by Japhy Saretsky.

“The way I make art is very intuitive,” he explains. “I am not thinking at all. I’m trying to not think. To stop thinking.” Dessureault sips from a mug. “I drink ten coffees a day and way more Monster Energy and Red Bull. It’s very intense. You don’t have time to think. The body has to express something. Something is going out of me.”

This intensity is reflected in everything I see — brush strokes and inscriptions and expressionist gestures that scream and dance and imply authentic reckless abandon. “I feel that this work I’m doing, on one canvas, one object, can contain a very intense sentiment and also some kind of tenderness and peace. When the canvas resists them living together in the same area,” he says, “then it’s a fucking good work.”

Dessureault leads me through the apartment and down into a basement, rare for Montreal, with a crawlspace not quite high enough to stand upright. In this underground world is his studio proper, containing even more ephemera, a veritable accumulated mess of activity. In one corner, a dislocated car door rests against the wall. “Oh that? My friend was using it as a purse,” Dessureault deadpans.

I notice coincidentally that Howard Shore’s score for David Cronenberg’s 1996 film Crash is playing from Dessureault’s phone. “I saw it twice,” he recalls, “and I was sleeping. You can imagine with Crash, there’s this shadow, it’s very dreamy. I get my inspiration from things around me. Rap artists are more inspirational for me than any painters: Playboi Cardi; Kendrick; Gezo, the French rapper. But I enjoy listening to Crash. This music got into my head.”

Collision is an apt metaphor for Dessureault’s work — its speed, its unpredictability, its violence and chaos. He picks up a sketchbook from the floor and hands it to me. “I drew this,” he informs me. “I was at my previous apartment on the Plateau, on Laurier. It was like 4am. I could feel the presence of death. This is the evil presence over my shoulder. It was saying to me, ‘At some point, I will take your life.’ I knew this. I knew what I was drawing when I did it,” he divulges, pointing to the loose parchment. “I think I have a demon inside of me.”

Tomas Dessureault, Death Over My Shoulder, Watercolour and grease pencil on paper. Image provided by the artist.

We talk at length about what constitutes excellence in art, and Dessureault outlines a sophisticated set of criteria. “The first layer,” he explains, “is the work has to be good in its composition, the placement, the structure, the texture, the relation of depth. Then, it has to be very honest and say something about you. Then, it has to speak to our age. And then, if there is a fourth layer, it’s magic and you don’t understand what’s happening. Then, probably it’s a very powerful work.”

I ask Dessureault about Peace Please, the title of the upcoming exhibition. “John Lennon got killed by a fan,” he says, “by someone that loved him so much. In peace, there is also so much violence. It’s more a prayer. But I’m interested in selling work. Because I’m spending so much money, buying paint, buying books, buying clothes. There are probably things I don’t want to sell because they are enigmatic to me, and I need access to them.”

Nonetheless, Dessureault recognizes that artists, too, need to live in the world, that he is emerging into a hyper capitalist system in which a fickle art market is constructed speculatively, predominantly by what someone is willing to pay for something.

Undisputedly masterful works accrue like strata of sediment on a dried up river bed, while bananas duct taped to walls fetch multiple millions. “This is not even art,” Dessureault says. “I hope for the future that I can just sell enough to work,” he submits. “This apartment is a dream place for me. Before, I was living with mice, with mouse shit everywhere. If I can live like this, I will be happy. Even if I’m in debt, I don’t care. If I owe money to the bank, what does that mean? I just don’t care. I’m trusting it.”

With this, he grabs another sheet of inked paper. “This is everything,” he says, stabbing the surface with an index finger. “The true, very important thing for me is this. The work itself cannot lie to you. If I’m honest with it, people will see when there’s actually something there. Or not. People are smart.”◼︎

Peace Please runs 9-14 September 2025 at Galerie POPOP, Suite 442, 372 Sainte-Catherine Street West.

Cover image: Tomas Dessureault photographed by Miguel Carcacia-Gauthier.

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Black Bough, Green Shoots: in conversation with Mark Molnar

“In composing, I am trying to express something that I remember but does not yet exist,” the contemporary composer Mark Molnar tells me.

Although he is a classically trained multi-instrumentalist, Molnar has spent most of his life outside the incentive structures and institutional norms of neo-classical chamber music.

When he began working on the musical triptych that would make up EXO, his 2025 debut with Constellation Records, he says, “I had no funding, no ensembles awaiting my work, no creative directors or conductors programming these pieces.”

Instead of lamenting these conditions or waiting for an invitation that might never come, Molnar decided to play and record everything himself — piano, percussion, synthesizers, and half a dozen stringed instruments. Growing up in the 1990s punk and post-hardcore scenes, Molnar has stayed true to one of its central tenets. “Whenever possible, do-it-yourself.”

DIY comes naturally to Molnar. Though he has collaborated with dozens of artists ranging from metalcore heavyweights Buried Inside to kaleidoscopic psych-supergroup Land of Kush, Molnar largely works independently when it comes to his own compositions. With methods akin to a one-man musical nose-to-tail, Molnar writes, plays, and records the pieces, mixes them, and often self-releases them through his own Black Bough label.

“Almost all of the things I have written start with a pencil, an eraser, a ruler, and a blank page,” he explains. “When writing music, I don’t work up the melodies or parts on an instrument until after they are written. I don’t want my conception of them to be limited to my meagre ability on any instrument, or the common keys or positions my hands may casually be most comfortable in.”

Playing each part himself gives Molnar the ability to craft and control every element of his desired sonic tapestry, he says, “from body and frequency, vibrato across instruments, bowing, timbre, phrasing, volume, distortion, and resonance in a space.” He describes the process as a combination of “problem solving, merciless editing, erasure, and a honing or carving down to the essential elements.”

This meticulous and hermetic process has been a feature of Molnar’s solo artistic practice since at least 2007, when under the moniker “Kingdom Shore” he released …And all the Dogs to Shark as Black Bough’s inaugural record. Launched at a time when indie rock was becoming big business and affected ennui and ironic detachment were giving way to hyperbolic, performative sentimentality, …And all the Dogs to Shark was a middle finger to it all: a searing work of uncompromising, discordant string music that owed as much to Drive Like Jehu as it did to Stockhausen.

In 2007, a bygone era of iPod battles and New Atheism debates, there was nothing quite like it. The ars poetica Molnar included in the album’s liner notes firmly established his commitment to the musical margins and his refusal to chase fashion or climb the cultural ladder.

This is not a bid for relevance. This is not modern.

In the nearly 20 years since …And all the Dogs to Shark, time marked in a wider context by the normalization of global forever wars and the subjugation of all facets of aesthetic life to algorithmic whims, Molnar has quietly and steadfastly released a number of solo and ensemble works — with Horseman, Pass By with Bennett Bedoukian, and 1/4 Tonne Overdrive with Montrealers Eric Craven and Nick Kuepfer.

Although he resides in Ottawa, Molnar is something of an honourary Montrealer due to his longstanding ties to the city’s experimental music community. He played at Constellation Records’ legendary Musique Fragile series in the late ‘90s and has performed and recorded with fixtures of the city’s out-music scene such as Thierry Amar, Sam Shalabi, and Vicky Mettler. His previous records have garnered Molnar a modest yet devoted following, and the release of EXO with Constellation brings him overdue national and international visibility.

“I don’t tend to look to art for escape.” Mark Molnar photographed by the artist.

For EXO, Molnar tells me that he wrote, learned, and recorded the three pieces that make up the album over the course of three weeks. He began with harp tracks, then reinforced them with piano, and subsequently added parts for nearly a dozen instruments. From there, Molnar mixed EXO in such a way that, “the patina of it became its own body of sound.” What results is a singular suite of dense, elegiac, and immersive electroacoustic chamber music with shades of drone, holy minimalism, doom, ambient, and musique concrete that ultimately transcends these genre prescriptions.

EXO, which comes from the Greek prefix ἔξω meaning “outside” or “external,” nods toward Molnar’s kinship with that which falls outside of and resists normative culture and processes.

The album’s opening track, “Sub Luna,” begins with a musical calm after the storm such as might traditionally be found in the repose of a classical piece. Only here, it is as if the traditional structure is reversed, and we quickly descend into more disquieting and discordant territory.

Resonating piano chords, down-tuned double-bass, and sustained tones from an MS-20 usher in a cradling envelope of sound. Syncopated harp notes and strings shimmer like filigree within the sonic undertow. Between what Molnar describes as the opposing shorelines of the piece, tidal currents of low-end drift and interweave with melodic tendrils in the higher registers before eventually returning to the opening motif.

There is an elemental heft to EXO, a disquieting sublime immensity, reinforced by Edd Allan’s stark ocean photography that accompanies the record. “My true realm of passionate experience of sound is in the sonic oblivion of low-end and its resonance, always,” Molnar says.

Nowhere is this passion for sonic oblivion clearer than on “Terre Sacer,” a ghostly dirge in which ominous melodic figures move in and out of focus in slow motion, ebbing and flowing, brooding and resisting until settling into a repeating three-chord structure; within this maelstrom, a processed human voice mournfully cries out like a siren going under.   

Music critic Harry Sword, author of Monolith Undertow, proposes that low-end drone, “exists outside of us, an aural expression of a universal hum we can only hope to fleetingly channel.” Accessing this universal hum as a listener can cradle and console, but Molnar is skeptical when I suggest that music is an escape. He suggests that the tendency to look for escapism in art is ultimately misguided. “I prefer Yeats’s contention that there is another world,” he says, “but within our world.”

It is hard to disagree with this rationale. Escape implies fantasy, which in turn suggests the spell cast by entertainment. Entertainment, a variation of well-established aesthetic territory, might provide a reassuring distraction from the hardships of life, but when the distraction is over, “the suffering is waiting,” Molnar warns, “blood-thirsty and merciless.” Only by transforming suffering into a vector for connection can music exceed escapism and become art. “I don’t tend to look to art for escape,” he suggests. “I find it brings me closer to reality and lessens my removal from it.”

Molnar may be an outsider. But his vision is grounded and decidedly anti-utopian. He stoically strives to maintain grace in the face of applause and derision, both of which he claims are distractions from self-knowledge and craftsmanship. Whatever is nascent within him, Molnar finds a way to attune to its cryptic hum.◼︎

EXO is out now via Constellation Records.

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Scenes From an Italian Restaurant: at the table with Nora Gray

The dining scene in Montreal is a central component of our metropolitan cultural identity. Other cities have restaurants. We have icons. L’Express. Joe Beef. Au Pied de Cochon.

Eating out at an outstanding establishment is one of the key criteria for tourists choosing to travel to Montreal, and among the most desirable features of living here. The restaurant industry, according to a 2022 study conducted by MTL2424, generates $1.3 billion annually for the local economy.

Our restaurants put this country on the culinary map. “Without Montreal,” the beloved food writer Anthony Bourdain said, “Canada would be hopeless.”

Restaurant culture has evolved significantly here over the past two decades. No longer is it just bagels and smoked meat, poutine and pea soup. No shade against these mythical dishes, but Montreal nowadays offers some of the globe’s most audacious dining experiences and pleasurable payoffs for those with inquisitive palates.

“Montreal diners are the best and most educated diners in the world,” says Ryan Gray, co-founder of Nora Gray, the stylish 49-seat destination in Griffintown which since launching in 2011 has consistently earned a spot on the list of Canada’s 100 best restaurants. The accolades are well-deserved.

“The expectation here is so high that it forces you to be really incredible.” Francesco De Gallo for NicheMTL.

“I’ve travelled extensively,” Gray claims, “and I think that yes, there’s incredible food in Manhattan and Paris and Copenhagen. But pound-for-pound, our restaurants are on par with anywhere.”

For this city’s discerning gourmands, Nora Gray has become a landmark. Bon Appétit comments that it, “feels like home, if your house has sleek black leather booths, a beautiful long wooden bar, romantically dimmed but not-too-dark lights, and handmade pasta readily available.” Cult Montreal food critic Clay Sandhu has definitively called it, “Montreal’s best Italian restaurant.” The décor is decidedly your grandparents’ basement. But the food is a contemporary take on traditional and regional Italian cuisine, with an emphasis on seasonal, local, and natural fare.

“Montrealers are very savvy and if something isn’t actually great, then they don’t go,” Gray says. “In Montreal, we have this wonderful French heritage where cooking good food is part of our culture. That’s not something you find in other North American cities. The expectation here is so high that it forces you to be really incredible.”

“There’s a lot more high-quality options in Montreal than before.” Francesco De Gallo for NicheMTL.

Save for the stint during the pandemic, which shuttered everything, I have been coming to Nora Gray for more than a decade as often as my budget and belt size will allow and have never left less than satisfied. Owners Ryan Gray, Emma Cardarelli, and Lisa McConnell originated out of Joe Beef’s Liverpool House, where Gray and Cardarelli worked together for five years before venturing off on their own.

“At the time in 2011,” recalls Gray, “there didn’t seem to be a whole lot of options for people like us. We really felt like we were working at the top, working for the Joe Beef group. It was certainly the coolest restaurant in town. We had an incredible roster of clients and regulars, dealing with celebrities, politicians. We were part of something so amazing and the thought of working somewhere else, or for someone else — there was just nothing else like it at the time. But we were hungry for more, we wanted to keep growing and learning, and it was either leave Montreal or open our own restaurant.”

They chose the latter and the rest is history. The Nora Gray group now operates their flagship location on Saint-Jacques as well two additional offshoots, Elena and Gia, with an Elena-adjacent pizza-by-the-slice concept set to open in September at the corner of Ottawa and Murray. “We’re stoked,” Gray exclaims. “It’s been a long time coming.”

“You’re just happy to do what you want to do and work for yourself.” Francesco De Gallo for NicheMTL.

While Nora Gray benefited from being among the first of its breed, evermore of Montreal’s eateries are taking a page from their cookbook. “There’s a lot more high-quality options in Montreal than before,” Gray notes. “Every other day I feel like someone’s opening a new Italian concept. We had the market to ourselves for a little while there. Now, there’s no neighbourhood that doesn’t have its own small Italian restaurant.”

However, maintaining a restaurant at the highest calibre is another feat. The fictional Italian chef Artie Bucco of The Sopranos delivered the now-famous pearl of dining establishment wisdom: “Running a restaurant is like owning an elephant: it costs a fortune and one day it shits on your head.”

Gray laughs, “Don’t these young people know that it’s a terrible business idea? It’s scary. The rates are crazy right now. Construction is out of control. Raw materials are so expensive. You have to be really passionate. And insane. But you’re just happy to do what you want to do and work for yourself. I think there’s always going to be an appetite for that.”

“I consume a lot of cookbooks.” Dmetro Sinclair photographed by Francesco De Gallo for NicheMTL.

Nora Gray’s new executive chef Dmetro Sinclair tells me that the self-imposed pressure of setting the menu is the most challenging and rewarding part of the job.

“I love it when you put something on the menu that maybe seems too weird or too out there and then it flies,” Sinclair says. “It reminds me how much people trust us. This is our dinner party.”

Sinclair arrived in September 2024 via Mon Lapin and Salle Climatisée and has quickly become an integral part of the Nora Gray crew. “I consume a lot of cookbooks,” he explains, “and stay on top of what’s happening at restaurants around the world. I like to change things a lot. Sometimes we change the menu three times a week. Especially in the summertime when you have three micro-seasons and everything is constantly changing.”

Maître d’hôtel Shelby Skaberna and head bartender Lexi Becker are Nora Gray’s most public faces. “Sometimes people see us working and they comment on how there’s so much non-verbal communication,” says Skaberna. “There are so many times that we could have potential collisions, but we move out of the way last-minute. We know each other so well.”

“It’s such a small team,” notes Becker, “not more than 15. If we get too busy, people help without being asked.”

Sinclair agrees. “We’re all dancing together,” he remarks.

Shelby Skaberna and Lexi Becker. Photographed by Francesco De Gallo for NicheMTL.

We are invited to stay for the staff meal — cold gazpacho and a deliciously garlicky Caesar salad followed by fried zucchini flowers, veal strozzapreti, focaccia and spiced olive oil, and a marbled torte for dessert. Everything is carefully prepared, beautifully presented, and remarkably tasty. The camaraderie around the table is tangible as Sinclair and Skaberna detail the reservations, specials, and other such subtleties. I ask Becker what constitutes her ideal customer. “We like people who are adventurous and like to try a bit of everything, share everything,” she says.

It is clear that an appetite for excellence guides Nora Gray’s ethos — from the food to the vibe, the music, the service and staff. “I can’t say enough how important it is to have good people — people who care. We’re so blessed,” Gray says.

“Our diners push us to be better.” Francesco De Gallo for NicheMTL.

Nora Gray’s list of notable clients includes the likes of Kevin Hart, Jennifer Lawrence, James Blunt, Aubrey Plaza, and Georges St-Pierre, icons in their own right.

“We have had a lot of Montreal Canadiens players and players from other teams — and musicians performing at Bell Centre,” Gray says. “Ideally, you’re the kind of place that people out-of-town want to come to. People who travel from abroad and come here, they’re always absolutely blown away. Our diners push us to be better.”◼︎

Nora Gray is located at 1391 Rue Saint-Jacques.

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Joker Moment: in conversation with Orchestroll

The trajectory of the Montreal-based band Orchestroll is a circuitous and slow-burning arc.

Its founder members Jesse Osborne-Lanthier and Asaël Richard-Robitaille have over 20-odd years become central characters in an exclusive but sprawling Dramatis Personae of Montreal’s experimental music scenes. Long associated with fellow local artists like Marie Davidson, Alex Moskos, and Bernardino Femminielli, the two have each independently achieved a sort of mythical status.

Yet despite a string of legendary works under various monikers including Meat Parade and Noir, Bataille Solaire and L’Œil Nu, releasing their music through fabled record labels such as Los Discos Enfantasmes and Ninja Tune, and performing at festivals like Suoni per il Pololo and Mutek, neither quite launched stratospherically in the way the aforementioned acts did.

Now, nonetheless, operating as a core duo with expandable potential, Osborne-Lanthier and Richard-Robitaille seem to have finally hit their stride, coalescing and combining their collective expertise into an endeavour that is one part musical group, one part design team, and one part ritual cult.

Together, Orchestroll concoct an intoxicating sonic tonic, a potent blend of timeless and contemporary acoustic and electronic instrumentation that at once is uncannily familiar and defies categorization. Across four releases in the span of two years, beginning with 2024’s Hyperwide Lustre and culminating in a limited-run cassette called Big P, Orchestroll have verified their credentials among this city’s most talented artists.

Generically speaking, they might be placed at the overlapping margins of techno, ambient, and industrial music, enchanted sorcerers of organized sound somewhere within a Venn diagram of Russell Haswell, Coil, and György Ligeti’s Atmosphères. But pinpointing their origins is a murkier task.

“It’s very hard to find the genesis of Orchestroll,” says Richard-Robitaille on a recent visit to their new studio space, a residential apartment adjacent to Osborne-Lanthier’s home in Saint-Michel.

“It was more of a code name,” Osborne-Lanthier explains. “I had a file of stuff called Orchestroll.wav in 2015 on my computer. I kept that name as something I wanted to use at some point. The initial idea was to involve different people for every record, for it to be like this orchestra thing. And then Covid happened, and it became the two of us. The idea of it being collaborative just disintegrated.”

“I built a studio in my mom’s basement when I was 16.” Jesse Osborne-Lanthier photographed for NicheMTL.

Richard-Robitaille, 40, hails from near Quebec City, having arrived in Montreal in 2004, while Osborne-Lanthier, 38, relocated here from the Gatineau region in 2009. The two have been friends since 2011, meeting in passing while performing at La Brique and The W()mb, two of the city’s now-defunct loft spaces which at that time headquartered a significant stronghold for Montreal’s DIY community. Self-organized events and spontaneous performances routinely erupted in these spaces, providing an alternative nightlife to Montreal’s Grande Public culture.

Richard-Robitaille began playing guitar as a child at his father’s influence. He later studied Classical guitar in CEGEP and attended but did not complete the composition programme at La Conservatoire de musique de Montréal. “I realized that practicing guitar for three hours a day was not my thing,” he says.

Conversely, Osborne-Lanthier’s musical abilities were entirely self-taught. “I built a studio in my mom’s basement when I was 16,” he recalls, “and just kept building on that and moving it with me, learning as I went. When I wanted to acquire a new technical skill, I would just go on YouTube or download the manual.”

I first saw Richard-Robitaille perform as Bataille Solaire at La Sala Rossa in 2012. Playing a set that would have eclipsed James Ferarro while looking like Hunky Dory-era David Bowie, I remember it as one of the most exciting electronic music performances by a local artist that I had attended until that point.

I discover on this visit that Bataille Solaire is an anagram of Asaël Robitaille. “It’s a little over-the-top. But there was always a bit of humour involved in that project,” he claims.

I caught Osborne-Lanthier for the first time as one of the local openers for the American artist Pete Swanson’s gig at Casa del Popolo on 1 September 2012. Of that show, I wrote in the December 2012 issue of The Wire: “even the heartiest in attendance is left feeling rearranged.” A hallmark of any transformative experience involving sound is that it can literally reconfigure one’s constitution, frequencies realigning us physically as well as emotionally in profound and unexpected ways.

DIY or die. Orchestroll’s studio photographed for NicheMTL.

In May 2025, Orchestroll released their magnum opus, a double LP entitled Corrosiv, via the New York City-based 29 Speedway record label, featuring a host of guest appearances including Milanese musician Heith and saxophonist Habib El Bardi.

“It’s been an ongoing project that ended up at the studio here. This record came together as a sort of broken thing where we were working on three different conceptual things that we would take along with us wherever we went. When we got here, finally, we could look at the stuff with a new perspective,” Osborne-Lanthier tells me.

“And keep the strongest stuff and refine the strongest stuff and blend it together and mix it into one concept,” says Richard-Robitaille, picking up the thread. “It’s been two or three years.” He describes the recording as the “baptism” of their new studio. “It was the first Orchestroll project that’s been produced and finished here,” he says.

Osborne-Lanthier explains: “We spent a month refining it in this studio, but it took years elsewhere in other spaces.”

The modular modus operandi befits Orchestroll’s vibe, a kind of alchemical purification process that distills their sound to its rawest essence. The tone is quietly confrontational, a reflection especially of Osborne-Lanthier’s reputation for being an outspoken, endearingly curmudgeonly, uncompromising voice on the Montreal landscape.

This approach at times has undoubtedly ruffled feathers and perhaps alienated the duo from local power brokers. But one thing Orchestroll cannot be accused of is pandering to the politics or tastes of the day. If you live by the motto ‘DIY or die,’ at times you have to accept the latter.

During our freewheeling conversation, Osborne-Lanthier takes aim at several deserving targets. The internet: “It’s a weapon used against people to dumb them down and have them subdued”; Artificial Intelligence: “It’s techno-feudalism at its best”; the corporatization of protest music: “Punk now is buying a pair of jeans online and wearing them cool”; the city’s current administration: “The municipal government seems bent on creating a nightlife where opening a pub up on Stanley until 6am is a way to boost culture.” The salvos land aptly.

“I think that maybe Montreal isn’t as welcoming and easy for a starving artist anymore.” Asaël Richard-Robitaille and Jesse Osborne-Lanthier photographed for NicheMTL.

“I’m so far from nightlife culture that I just disconnected myself,” Osborne-Lanthier admits. “It’s not my cup of tea anymore. I’m not involved as much as I used to be. It’s a very weird relationship. I feel like I have to go elsewhere to find what I’m looking for in music. There’s not enough in Montreal. There’s not enough infrastructure. There’s not enough money. There are not enough venues. It’s hard to really find a sustainability here in music.”

Richard-Robitaille agrees. “I feel like since the pandemic, things have changed,” he observes. “Inflation and the housing crisis — I think that maybe Montreal isn’t as welcoming and easy for a starving artist anymore. That was the luxury that Montreal had: you could have the shittiest part-time job and make art the rest of the week.”

“There’s no shortage of people doing amazing things here,” Osborne-Lanthier notes. “But there’s a hell of a lot of venues that are missing.”

Indeed, with Montreal emulating the concessions of other big cities like Toronto and New York to the whims of real-estate developers and neglecting what made Montreal an attractive destination for groundbreaking creative communities in the first place, it is unclear what the future holds for the next generation of boundary-pushing artists from Montreal and abroad.

“There’s still ways of keeping it alive,” Richard-Robitaille offers, optimistically.

“The first thing would be for the city to invest in actual culture and facilitate bridges so that people can learn. For the younger generation to have access to platforms and locations where they can actually enlighten themselves and take risks and become actual artists,” Osborne-Lanthier suggests.

“I wish it would happen,” he laments, “but it’s so hard to be hopeful. To the younger generation, stick together and keep doing your stuff. Keep hosting DIY events and use the infrastructure you have to keep raving.”◼︎

Orchestroll perform 14 August 2025 at the Society for Arts and Technology, 1201 St. Laurent Boulevard.

Cover image: Orchestroll photographed for NicheMTL.

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Out Of the Past: in conversation with Milly A. Dery

Deep in the heart of the Old Port, among Montreal’s most palimpsestic neighbourhoods, sits a stronghold improbably dedicated to the production, exhibition, and proliferation of contemporary art.

Years ago, The Darling Brothers Foundry, an historic monument on Montreal’s industrial map, forged steel. Today, the edifice is an engine of another kind of creativity. Neither a commercial gallery nor an artist-run centre, Fonderie Darling exists at the interstice of private and public interests, of low and high culture, of old and new architecture, positioned at the crossroads of antiquity and eternity.

The Fonderie’s founding director Caroline Andrieux took leave last October after three decades spent helming one of this city’s most venerable cultural institutions. Quartier Éphémère was launched in 1993, when the area was all but abandoned, rebar jutting out from neglected streets, on the cusp of a bitterly contested national referendum that surely would have pushed Quebec further into economic ruin had the province cleaved from Canadian confederation.

Now, with a tentative sense of permanence, the district is awash in new capital, surrounded by luxury condominiums, posh boutiques, exclusive hotels, and gourmet restaurants. And with a city block-sized footprint, Fonderie Darling boasts fresh direction at the command of Milly A. Dery, who at only 34 is tasked with navigating this behemoth out of the past.

She is here for it.

“It’s super exciting,” says Dery with an authentic grin. “It’s also super challenging. A founding director passing the place on to a non-founding director is always a big step for an organization. It only happens once. But in October when I arrived in the office, I felt ready and excited.”

Dery is dressed in relaxed denims and a crisp white blouse. Her spark is undeniable, demonstrating the desire to stoke Fonderie Darling’s fires for the foreseeable future. At once she exudes youth and wisdom, speaking with poise and confidence about managing the Fonderie’s transition.

Dery studied Art History, first at McGill, then completing a master’s degree at Université de Montréal. She worked in private galleries and joined Fonderie Darling eight years ago after dropping off a resumé on spec. “They needed someone to fill in for a month,” she says. At the end of that month, Dery was hired on full-time and has not looked back since.

“Nostalgia is an easy trap to fall into,” Dery says. “A lot of people talk about the ‘90s and how the era was better, different, the city was different, money was different. I want to step away from nostalgia and figure out how to get a place like this into the 21st century.”

“We do look at this space as a little fortress for the artists in the neighbourhood.” Photograph for NicheMTL.

Doubtless, Old Montreal in the 1990s would have been vastly different. Lofts and artists’ studios were cheap and plentiful. Fonderie Darling’s mandate of reclaiming abandoned buildings for artistic pursuits fit right in and harnessed institutional enthusiasm early on. In 2025, though, with property values skyrocketing and public funding dwindling, there is a tension these days between competing crises: affordable housing, and affordable spaces for artistic production.

“Developers used to ring the doorbell every week and make offers,” Dery tells me. “But we are the owners of this building. And we do look at this space as a little fortress for the artists in a neighbourhood that is otherwise unwelcoming for them. You come here and you wonder how this place is still standing. It’s still standing because people fought for it.”

Fonderie Darling has always possessed a scrappy spirit, combining two exhibition rooms, studios in which artists can work in-situ, and an outdoor esplanade that stages public interventions and performance pieces. The Fonderie does not represent artists as a traditional gallery would. Instead, it generates 50 percent of its operating budget from public sources, and the other half from a combination of autonomous revenues, philanthropy, and private donations.

“It’s a difficult equilibrium to maintain,” explains Dery. “Public financing is insufficient. It’s a crazy amount of work for our team to find 50 percent of our revenues.” The Fonderie does charge a reasonably priced admission, $8. Nonetheless, this accounts for only two percent of its annual income. “We have an accessibility policy,” Dery says. In today’s terminology, that means no one is turned away for lack of funds. “I worked at the welcome desk for a long time before changing roles and it’s important to keep it accessible.”

Because Fonderie Darling is free from the pressures of producing blockbuster exhibitions or programming saleable works, it is able to take risks on unconventional and edgier artists and their ideas. When I visit, the spring show is underway — embedded “liturgical-optic” paintings by Numa Amun, plus an exhibition entitled Simile Aria, an ingenious twist on the relationship between vocal and organ pipes by Fonderie Darling artist-in-residence Maggy Hamel-Metsos.

Detail of Simile Aria by Maggy Hamel-Metsos photographed for NicheMTL.

Dery gives me a tour of the facility and tells me about the forthcoming summer programme. “We have two new solo shows in June,” she says, “by Karen Elaine Spencer and Frantz Patrick Henry.” Spencer is presenting a selection of bold and poetic works that relate loosely to the process of grief. “I think it’s going to be really moving,” Dery indicates.

Henry’s show, exhibiting in the larger gallery, is concerned with architecture from Italy, Montreal, and Haiti as fragments of collective history. “They’re very different practices,” Dery notes, “but still related in methods and approach. Opposite, but connected in some unexpected ways.”

Following Caroline Andrieux’s lead, Dery relishes the liberty to curate challenging programmes. “That’s why we have such a strong reputation today,” she suggests. “Not for economic, popularity, or any consideration have there ever been compromises on the audacity, the quality, and relevance of the propositions that we present. That is a guiding principle.”

Fonderie Darling particularly tends to encourage works that are in dialogue with the space and which revolve around recurrent themes of slowness, sustainability, transformation, and regeneration.

“This sense of reciprocity between the space, the artwork, and the visitor has always been in the DNA of Fonderie,” Dery says, “and important to reinvigorate every time. This space has so many possibilities, and when the priorities are in perfect alignment with the conditions that welcome it, that’s where you get the magic.”

“You don’t need to love art to have an extraordinary time.” Milly A. Dery photographed for NicheMTL.

What, precisely, is that magic? What is art for?

“Art changes my life,” Dery affirms. “It changes my mind. It changes the way I think. It brings joy, unpredictability, a reason to live. Out of the monotony and pressure and oppression of daily life, which is a struggle for many people for many reasons, art is a comfort in many ways. It’s a way to bond, to create relationships. For me, if you come to Fonderie Darling, you don’t need to love art to have an extraordinary time.”

And yet, Fonderie Darling is situated far from what constitutes the ordinary on Montreal’s cultural landscape.

Dery is keenly aware that she has an important job balancing creativity, commerce, urban demands, local politics, and above all, the value of contemporary art in a city perennially on the verge of succumbing to capitalist excesses.

“I would love for Fonderie Darling to be known to every Montrealer,” Dery muses. “For me, it’s about how to make sure that it continues to live for 100 years.”◼︎

No Bystanders by Frantz Patrick Henry and revenons en oiseaux, être un arbre est trop dur et aujourd’hui, il neige by Karen Elaine Spencer launch 19 June and run through 17 August 2025 at Fonderie Darling, 745 Place du Sable-Gris.

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