Category Archives: All Dressed

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

All Dressed

100% In It: in conversation with Radwan Ghazi Moumneh

The power is out at Thee Mighty Hotel2Tango.

The legendary Montreal recording studio on Van Horne Avenue that has produced some of this city’s most iconic recordings over the past two decades, by the likes of Arcade Fire, The Dears, The Barr Brothers, and Godspeed You! Black Emperor, among many others, a building that is normally positively buzzing, both literally and figuratively, stands eerily quiet on a recent Wednesday.

In a whirlwind of apologies for the lack of electricity, its co-founder, the composer and recording engineer Radwan Ghazi Moumneh arrives right on time, to the minute. Hydro Quebec had months ago scheduled an outage to accommodate routine maintenance work, Moumneh tells me. But he had forgotten, and on this afternoon, we would have to proceed under natural light. In the studio’s main room, fortunately, the sun streams in as if from some divine source.

Moumneh wears dark glasses, his head covered by a bright pink hoodie and a pair of signature leather loafers over bare feet. He speaks rapidly and affably and philosophically and curiously self-deprecatingly, entirely void of any sense of rock star ego, even if it might be warranted by the sheer volume of celebrated albums in which he has participated. Recordings by Thee Silver Mt. Zion, Jessica Moss, and Land of Kush, just to name a few.

“The other day,” he confides, laughing, “we were at the PA, and my son turns to me and asks, ‘Dad, are you famous?’ And the clerk looks at me like maybe I am. And I’m just standing there like someone who’s trying not to be recognized, with a potato and an onion in my basket. And I say, ‘no — and we’re not getting any chocolate or chips, either. We’re getting an onion and a potato for dinner.’”

Moumneh and his business partners Efrim Menuck, Howard Bilerman, and Thierry Amar purchased the unassuming white complex that houses Hotel2Tango nearly 20 years ago. Constellation Records has its offices upstairs, and Grey Market Mastering rounds out the edifice as a one-stop record workshop. This is our Abbey Road, our Brill Building, our Sound City all rolled into one — in a city with its own undoubtedly signature sound.

“When people make their records here, it’s such a precious thing,” Moumneh muses. “So, I make sure my heart’s 100% in it. Each one is such a unique experience and a very important piece of the puzzle. And each one has really annoying things that make me get fucking upset at the artist because I’m like, ‘God fucking damn it, this sucks. This is a silly way to work. This is a silly thing that you’re doing.’ But I’m also very conscious that that is a very important part of making something. Nothing can be wholly perfect. The perfection is the bad and the good.”

Moumneh, 49, is an Orson Welles-level Renaissance man who has worked as a musician with Jerusalem in My Heart, in partnership with Edmontonian expat Erin Weisgerber, a producer, a filmmaker, a composer for cinema, dance, and theatre, an actor, and a sound designer for public art installations. He was responsible for the audio of 21 Balançoires, the musical swings created in 2011 in the Quartier des spectacles and exported to various cities around the world as a work of living urban sculpture.

The swings, a collaboration with the design team Daily Tous Les Jours, rewarded users’ cooperation with more complex melodies as they swung in unison. 21 Balançoires won numerous international awards and caught the attention of the talk show host and global tastemaker Oprah Winfrey. “I do so many different things,” Moumneh says, “but I still feel like I have no idea what I’m doing half the time. I’m still such a student of everything.”

I caught Moumneh last year at Hotel2Tango performing an improvised electronics set with the Parisian musician Frédéric D. Oberland, with whom he has just completed recording a long player to be released in 2026.

“What we do is dangerous and fun,” Moumneh explains. “Just experimentation in the truest sense. Knowing that this could be not amazing and that’s okay. That’s the spirit. Let’s do something singular and unique and we’re never going to do it again.”

Moumneh also freshly wrapped sessions with the Lebanese post-rock band SANAM, with which he will perform a handful of live dates at Suoni per il Popolo, the 25th iteration of the storied Montreal music festival, in June 2025.

“I’m going to do a duo with the synth player of SANAM,” Moumneh tells me. “And Jessica Moss will do a trio with the bassist and the drummer, who is a phenomenal musician. I’m really lucky to have these people as dear friends.”

Born in Lebanon and raised in Oman, Moumneh’s family fled to Canada in the mid-1990s while he was still in his mid-teens, as part of a government initiative to resettle at-risk migrants. “My parents had no idea where Canada was,” Moumneh divulges. “But it was this or go back to Lebanon. They were just trying to offer these crazy deals to people with young children and nowhere to go.”

Moumneh remained in Montreal while his family returned to Lebanon fewer than five years later. “My parents spoke no English and no French. They hated it here,” he says, elongating the operative word. “I was like, ‘I really need to have my own thing, away from you guys.’”

Soon, Moumneh found his footing attending engineering school and teaching himself to play a variety of musical instruments. “I just started playing music because I met a couple of weirdos in class and they were like, ‘hey, do you want to try and learn how to play music?’” He relocated momentarily to Lebanon but moved back to Montreal in the early 2000s and was among the cohort that founded Hotel2Tango. “I was working on stuff before that, too,” he says, “but this is where things really got serious.”

Moumneh travels to Beirut twice a year, he tells me, to visit family and close friends, recounting how the city was bombed twice on his last sojourn. “It was typical, stupid shit,” he deadpans. “3:30 in the morning jumping out of bed because the whole fucking neighbourhood is bombed and you’re like, ‘fuck you guys.’”

It is striking how nonchalantly he speaks of the routine violence that Lebanon has endured historically, escalating again with the most recent war in neighbouring Israel. “It’s not as dramatic as it sounds,” Moumneh says. “It is dramatic, but people deal with it on a whole different level. Our idea of danger is a different thing. People like my parents can’t leave, but people who are young can’t live there. All the youth leave because it’s so dead-end.”

“I absolutely worship challenges. I live for them.” Radwan Ghazi Moumneh photographed for NicheMTL.

We talk at length about the disparities between the West and Middle East. “Two people can go to the same area and have completely different experiences of what they understand Lebanon is,” he describes. “It’s very un-understandable. That’s our sectarian system. If you want to see the extremes of all aspects of life, you go to Lebanon. It’s just extremes in every direction. It’s a really spectacular place. There is obnoxious wealth, of course. Beyond obnoxious wealth. And beyond insane poverty. And beyond insane beauty. And beyond insane ugliness. There is more beauty than there is ugliness. And even in the ugliness there is beauty.”

I ask him to contrast Montreal and its unique brand of ugly beauty.

“If someone was to come from abroad and only visit Montreal and that to them is what represents Canada, how distorted of a fucking idea would they have of what Canada is? This is a crazy place. It’s so absurd that this whole place,” he says, spanning out his arms, “is an arbitrary country. You can fit three Montreals into Lebanon. It’s so tiny. It’s like from here to Ottawa. And yet we have a million different populations that are so drastically different. There are so many dialects, so many accents, culinary differences, cultural differences, within one tiny little blob. Imagine. It’s all beautiful. But it’s sad, also, the destructive side of it.”

Finding beauty in despair, or creating it when none seems readily available, is the responsibility of the socially conscious artist, someone like Moumneh with that superpower that produces spontaneous voltage, especially when the electricity is out, either metaphorically or actually.

“I love throwing myself into hoops of fire,” admits Moumneh, speaking now more broadly about his general approach to life. “I love it. I love the challenge. I absolutely worship challenges. I live for them. I think it’s what keeps you mentally a child. It feels like you have so much to learn.”◼︎

Radwan Ghazi Moumneh performs as part of Suoni per il popolo with SANAM 21 June 2025 at La Sala Rossa, 4848 Boulevard St. Laurent.

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Our Lover’s Story: in conversation with HRT

“Enya rocks so hard,” proclaims Anastasia Westcott who, along with vocalist Kirby Lees, comprises the legendary Montreal-based Rave-Punk duo HRT.

The three of us are riffing in the living room of Westcott’s McGill-ghetto flat, which serves simultaneously as HRT HQ, on the music that we listened to as kids, delighting in many of our similarities: Free Jazz; Death Metal; Classic Rock; Hole.

Somehow it doesn’t altogether come as a surprise that Westcott, in addition to edgier artists, from Metallica to Coil, might count Enya among her influences — considering that Enya, too, is known for crafting tightly composed and densely layered electronic music.

Hailing originally from Atlantic Canada, Westcott from Newfoundland and Lees a Haligonian, there is something of a maritime work ethic and misty spirit that Enya and HRT share. And while HRT might aesthetically be as confrontational as Enya is calm, there exists an undeniable throughline.

Still, HRT is impossible to pin down, generically speaking, spanning Hardcore, Breakbeat, Electro, Post-Punk, and Darkwave. The result is a melange of infectious, industrial, danceable bangers specifically unique to this twosome, and indicative of Montreal’s appreciation for music’s most experimental margins, more broadly. Theirs is a decidedly niche brand of no-nonsense knees-up business.

For the uninitiated, HRT does indeed stand for Hormone Replacement Therapy, a not-so-subtle possession of their identity as Transgender artists.

“We kind of threw people a curveball not putting periods between the letters, I guess,” Westcott laughs. “We were initially going to start an anonymous hyperpop group called HRT because we thought, ‘what’s the most Trans-coded name we could think of?’”

“But then we were just like, ‘fuck it, go for it,’ and called ourselves HRT,” Lees elaborates. “I haven’t really thought about our music in relation to identity. We don’t write anything specifically with Trans identity in mind. We’re just Trans girls making music. I think the two just inherently happen.”

While music and identity can be mutually exclusive, every act is arguably political. And HRT are as radical as contemporary performance gets. They attract a core community of like minded devotees with volatile and cathartic live shows, one of which I attended at La Sotterenea on 7 February as part of the Taverne Tour. Standing at the edge of the stage, I suddenly realized, like a volcanologist poised on the threshold of an active lava lake, that I was precariously close to being sucked into the vortex of the mosh pit.

Their audiences “come to party,” as Westcott describes.

The crowd at La Sotterenea reacts as HRT’s Kirby Lees jumps into the audience. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“That night felt particularly insane,” Lees remembers. “It was very packed. We weren’t really expecting it either, considering Taverne Tour had eight other shows happening on that block that night. Especially lately, it’s been that kind of energy pretty consistently.”

Westcott echoes: “Often when we play shows, I have to be like, ‘how was it?’ Because I don’t see. I don’t think. I’m nothing. Which feels amazing.”

The indomitable vibe that Lees and Westcott conjure together is vital, and it seems that the pair have their division of labour down pat. HRT formed in 2018 and, like everyone, was compelled into a two-and-a-half-year hiatus during the coronavirus crisis. “We had to take a forcible stop where we tried to write stuff together over Zoom,” says Lees. “I learned a lot about how to use gear, but it was kind of a nightmare.”

“The original songs were like Kirby making janky beats over a vocal sample and me turning them into songs on actual gear,” Westcott explains. “We’ve written in so many different ways at this point.”

“I learned how to play bass during the pandemic,” Lees professes. “And I did a lot of gear stuff. But my comfortable space is handling lyrics, largely.”

Both Lees and Westcott are self-taught musicians with no formal training. “I’ve been playing shows since I was 14 or 15,” Westcott tells me. “I did some Jazz guitar lessons in my early 20s. But most of my experience comes from just playing music.”

Lees fronted a band called The Dolly Partners after she moved in 2014 to Montreal from Halifax. “It was a Punk Dolly Parton cover band,” Lees deadpans. “But this has been my longest-standing project.”

Westcott decamped from St. John’s in 2012. “Originally I was going to go to Concordia for Jazz studies and didn’t get in,” Westcott confesses. “I’ve been part of a lot of different scenes, made a lot of different types of music. I’ve been in, like, way too many bands.”

Lees explains that HRT’s modus operandi is, “just doing it because we like it. The sound of it keeps changing, too,” she says, “between each thing we record. We’re not sticking necessarily to any one particular genre. We’re just doing what we want to do, when we want to do it.”

That liberatory ethos has served the band from their first release under the name Dregqueen, Connective, in 2019, to a live EP recorded at Café Cleopatra just before the lockdowns and launched on Bandcamp in 2021, and ultimately, to their most recent LP, entitled warm wet stroke of luck, released in late 2024.

If there were a band motto, Westcott says, it would simply be, “making people feel like they have a place to dance.”

“Our main goal is to keep doing it until it’s not fun, honestly.” Ana Westcott and Kirby Lees photographed for NicheMTL.

Providing that safe space is central to HRT’s endearing appeal. Unfortunately, however, North America, and expressly our neighbours to the south, seems dead set upon making public spaces less safe for Trans people. The U.S. under Donald J. Trump has just passed an executive order banning travellers whose passport documents don’t conform to their birth-assigned genders.

“We would love to do a good tour,” Lees says. “But it doesn’t really look like the states is the place to do that right now. So maybe a European tour at some point. We’re literally living in a hellscape. But our main goal is to keep doing it until it’s not fun, honestly.”

For the moment, Westcott and Lees are content to hunker down in Montreal and explore the possibilities afforded by incremental technological innovations.

“I got a computer,” Westcott boasts. “I didn’t have one that could run Ableton before. So, I’m making music on the computer instead of hardware. It feels pretty good so far. But it’s weird to have everything because I am really used to working within limitations and having limitation act as a creative tool.”

As a cultural observer, I am tempted to suggest that social limitations to a large degree encouraged Westcott and Lees to pursue creative fields rather than, say, careers in finance. Some artists are made while others are born. Nonetheless, Montreal has nurtured HRT to an extent that few other metropolises would. How long this continues, though, is unknown.

“It’s changed a lot, but this city does offer you space and time and access to work on passion projects,” says Lees.

“Up until recently, there’s always been a lot of DIY venues,” Westcott recalls. “But housing is so fucked in Montreal right now that that’s having an impact. When I moved here, I was paying $170 in rent. That’s not the situation anymore. Community is what makes bands. And the more that Montreal becomes like other cities, the less it will be like Montreal.”

Lees concurs. “If you make it harder to live here, you’re going to lose everything that made this city what it is: its art scenes; its music scenes; the actual culture that makes up this city. And for what? Don’t wreck your city. It’s the last one we have in Canada where you can actually make something happen if you want to because you have that access. We’re losing it really quickly. Make living affordable. That’s the baseline.”◼︎

HRT perform 9 May 2025 at the D4E Rave, Location TBA.

Cover image: Anastasia Westcott and Kirby Lees photographed for NicheMTL.

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Smells Like Team Spirit: in conversation with Shunk

After meandering through miscellaneous topics such as analogue versus digital recording formats and a friend’s dad’s BMW that had a Foo Fighters CD stuck in the stereo, the conversation ultimately turns to the olfactory qualities of various local bands and with whom it would be acceptable to spend significant time together in a touring van.

These are observations voiced with an equal measure of revulsion, reverence, and glee.

For bassist Julia Hill, 24, guitarist Peter Baylis, 32, drummer Adrian Vaktor, 31, and 30-year-old vocalist Gabrielle Domingue, who together comprise Shunk, Montreal’s darlings of post-pandemic post-punk, an overripe scent is just another part of the aesthetic.

“Don’t print this!” Hill laughs.

Of course, there is no choice but to print it now. Because if you’re not working up a bit of a stink, you’re not doing rock and roll right.

Shunk have invited me round to their rehearsal space at the Marsonic building on Papineau, a gritty warehouse with top notes of lager-soaked carpet and Purple Kush. Converted into diminutive jam cubicles, Marsonic houses some of this city’s scrappiest acts. Four or five other bands share Shunk’s windowless chamber, they say. Nonetheless, this cheap little studio allows artists like Shunk the necessary space to hone their repertoires — and get weird in the process.

“We have good music, and we have really good vibes.” Gabrielle Domingue and Adrian Vaktor photographed for NicheMTL.

“I feel like you can experiment a bit more in Montreal,” Domingue says. “And you’re less worried about fitting it into the box. Music is such a joy, and it would be so sick if everyone could live off of that. But it’s so nice to be with people and create this sonic scape. It’s crazy that we can create that here.”

Aiming for something like Cocteau Twins, Shunk coalesced in the autumn of 2022 during the heady days immediately following the coronavirus lockdowns. As a former member of Pottery, another Montreal indie outfit, Baylis enlisted Vaktor, a fellow local who had trained with the legendary Hasidic drum master Jacob Kaye.

Domingue, who previously fronted the Mothland-adjacent Visibly Choked, brought her friend Hill, originally from Newfoundland, into the mix to round out the rhythm section. With their complementary sensibilities, the foursome strike a unique balance blending elements of ‘70s garage, ‘80s shoegaze, ‘90s grunge, and aughts-era media savvy into something truly thrilling.

“I was always in choirs,” Hill recalls of her childhood musical education. “And then I started taking cello lessons, which was really random because I watched this movie — it was a book adaptation of some YA novel — and the girl in it played cello and I was like, ‘I want to be a classical musician.’ And that didn’t work out because I got into punk rock.”

Baylis studied Royal Conservatory piano. “But after one of those tests,” he says, “I didn’t go back. I wish I’d never taken that break, but way she goes sometimes,” he laments. Instead, he took up the guitar and became a self-described “rock and roll lifer.”

Domingue relocated a few years prior from Ottawa after completing a music degree in operatic vocal performance. Yet she found classical music “too stuffy,” and Montreal’s ever-expanding cultural scenes provided the personnel and playing field “to be loud in,” she explains.

“In a band, you need three things,” Domingue states. “The music has to be good; or the vibes have to be good; or you have to be making good money. And you need two out of three of these to sustain yourselves. Otherwise, you’re screwed. We have good music, and we have really good vibes. So, we’ll keep going and hopefully along the way, we’ll start making good money. But for now, we’ve got the two essential ones.”

After three raucous singles — “Tennis,” “Sated,” and “Goblin,” (the latter of which appears on the NicheMTL 2024 Yearbook compilation CD) — Shunk have now released their first full-length recording, entitled Shunkland, and are slated to play a handful of not-to-be-missed shows in the Montreal-Toronto-Ottawa corridor.

Mastered by the veteran Canadian musician Nik Kozub of Shout Out Out Out Out, Shunkland was recorded over only three days with mixing engineer Josh Kaiser in Baylis’s father’s study at his parents’ house.

“They left for a week,” Baylis confesses. “So, me and Adrian went and set up the drums and tested them out, smacking the snare in different rooms around the house.”

As Vaktor describes, “It was literally walking around his house going, ‘how does this room sound?’ Gong!”

“We had the songs pretty down,” says Baylis, “and I knew that I wanted to do a live off-the-floor record instead of a track-by-track record. And I knew that Kaiser would add a clean shine to it, to the grunginess that we were bringing to it live. I feel like the music comes easy for us in some way,” Baylis claims. “Everybody’s open to listening to people’s ideas when it comes to writing or changing the songs. I don’t think anyone’s too stuck in their route about how it should sound.”

“I’d agree with that,” Hill chimes in. “It’s definitely more just we all have ideas when we’re writing so quickly and we all trust each other’s visions, especially when it comes to the songwriting stuff. So, whoever can put their idea…”

“…into words fastest!” Domingue interjects.

“…and loudest!” Hill resumes. “Whoever has the loudest idea that takes up more space is what we usually end up going with.”

“Sometimes the soft-spoken ideas come through anyway,” murmurs Vaktor, eliciting laughter from his bandmates.

“Yeah,” Hill concurs. “The three of us will be yelling over each other and Adrian will quietly have an idea and we’ll be like, ‘no, that’s not going to work.’ And then 20 minutes later we’ll be like, ‘he was right the whole time.’”

“We’re always hacking away,” says Vaktor. “We’re blacksmithing.”

“We’re like a hive mind,” says Hill.

Domingue deadpans, “We’re the Borg.”

“Performing onstage is such a rush — the ultimate rush.” Julia Hill and Peter Baylis photographed for NicheMTL.

I first caught Shunk live last spring at Suoni per il Popolo, as the opening act for Yoo Doo Right, where the double bill nearly blew the top two floors off of La Sotterenea. Subsequently, I saw them perform twice beneath the Van Horne overpass and again on the rooftop of a house show near St. Laurent and Beaubien.

It is apt that this remarkably entertaining band, which encompasses influences across low and high culture, never seems satisfied to be in the middle. Carpet-bombing their hits onstage, Shunk exudes the unmistakable napalm smell of victory.

“I love playing live shows,” says Hill. “It’s my favourite thing in the whole world. I’ve always been like that, since I was a kid. Performing onstage is such a rush — the ultimate rush. It’s so fun. Nothing else can compare to playing a live show. Or in the studio when you make something exactly how you want it, and you just get super excited. Those things are the best.”

“When you’re playing the best you can with your friends, you’re playing in front of people, that feeling is a great high, for sure,” Baylis agrees. “And when we’re writing something really new and all together on this one idea and it’s really sounding good and everybody is on the same page, that’s also really a rare thing to find with people.”

“In that moment,” Vaktor muses, “you’re seeing a new pathway open.”◼︎

Shunk launches Shunkland with Born at Midnite and Flleur 12 March 2025 at La Sotterenea, 4848 Boulevard St. Laurent.

Cover image: Courtesy of Shunk.

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Mono Poly: in conversation with T. Gowdy

“Faith… is the substance… of things hoped for.” —Giorgio Agamben, Creation and Anarchy

“What I like about good art,” says the electronic musician Timothy Gowdy over a transatlantic Zoom call from his home in Berlin, “is that you don’t necessarily know what it is.”

We are riffing on a perennial favourite niche topic: the function and value of art in the age of its virtual overproduction. Can art, as it is often unfairly tasked, change minds, change the world?

Gowdy seems cautiously optimistic, mercifully, invoking the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben and railing against art “caught in a productivity model,” as he describes.

“It wasn’t that before,” Gowdy observes. “And it’s not that underneath. It’s because of social media that we’re bombarded all the time with people telling you you should think things and do things. I think that there’s sometimes more power in subversive undertones that aren’t beating a drum at you right away. I’m definitely looking at that in my own music. I think perhaps good art manifests because it can’t be pinned down as one thing.”

It is that indefinable, polymorphous quality that best characterizes Gowdy’s iridescent forthcoming album, Trill Scan, his third and arguably most ambitious release for Montreal’s legendary independent label, Constellation Records. Therapy with Colour, launched in 2020, found Gowdy experimenting with off-kilter hypnotic IDM, while Miracles, arriving two years later, traded on a more arrhythmic form of low-fi analogue grain.

With his latest recording, a euphoric melange of the ancient and postmodern, Gowdy now reaches for a technicolour sound palette, including, in addition to the requisite synthesized pulses and waveforms, traditional timbres like lute and voice.

“I didn’t want to make just another electronic thing,” Gowdy tells me. “I’m fine with that genre and I love electronic music, but I just felt that I needed to expand. And the groundwork for that was going on for 30 years. It wasn’t a stretch. I didn’t have to look that hard, actually. I just had to look inward.”

Gowdy, 42, was trained as a young classical musician whose first experience was instruction in choral works. Hailing originally from Prince Edward Island, Gowdy relocated to Princeton, NJ, where he enrolled as a boarder at the American Boychoir, a choral school, at age 11.

“It gave me some experiences that I would not have had otherwise,” he says. “I always went back to choral music because that’s how I knew vocals the most.” Arriving in Montreal as a teenager, and inspired by a 1990s mashup of grunge, hip-hop, and punk rock, Gowdy picked up the guitar, but eventually reverted again to his classical roots.

On Trill Scan, he considered featuring an acoustic instrument. “But there was something that I didn’t really like about the guitar,” Gowdy reveals. “So, I decided to look at the origins of the guitar and found the lute. And I drove across Germany and bought myself a lute and started practicing and learning how to play that. And three years later, I am now reading the scores and learning how to play Baroque music. It was a full process of learning and unlearning,” he says.

There is an undeniable religious connotation to choral arrangements, an aesthetic that harkens back to the early modern period of western music. Gowdy was raised Catholic but “renounced it from the beginning,” he explains. “I was forced.”

Gowdy believes in the possibility “to disconnect something from its mainframe and repatch it into something else. I like that idea,” he confirms. “One thing that I’m trying to do on this record is take this feeling you get from music of the past and somehow disconnect it from what it was connected to and reconnect it to these other vibes. That’s consciously what I’m interested in doing at the moment.”

There is an exceptionally polished production value to all of Gowdy’s recordings, reflecting his expertise accumulated over 15 years working as a sound engineer in some of Montreal’s most prestigious studios. He paid his dues alternately at Breakglass, Pierre Marchand, and Studio 451 on Rue de l’Eglise, engineering albums for Ensemble, Ada Lee, and Suuns, among others.

“There’s something about Montreal that people really have to work together and depend on one another to achieve art.” T. Gowdy photographed for Constellation Records by Vika Temnova.

Gowdy partly recorded Trill Scan with a small choir in a church in Mirabel and finished at his home studio in Berlin. “I’m really a person that does it all mostly in-studio,” he says. “I think that the recording and the composition go together. And I almost treat it as a performance, too. I tend to record long things. I press record and just go. I try not to have my cerebral mind guide it. For me, it works to fuse those three elements together. I find that you get something that your emotion is pushing more than if you were playing live.”

Gowdy is currently at work adapting the album for a performance setting, he says. “I’m planning on getting some shows going. I have a release here in Berlin and I’d like to do something in Montreal and a few other spots in Canada. That’s the plan.”

While he is based in Germany, Gowdy retains a connection to Montreal’s underground music scenes, in no small part because of his affiliation with Constellation Records. He confesses a soft spot for this city’s DIY spirit, something that doesn’t exist in quite the same way anywhere else.

“It’s difficult to find community in other cities,” Gowdy laments. “Montreal is just the right size. Because the Anglo community is kind of small and centralized, it is physically possible for people to bond together and work together on things and accomplish things together. In other cities that are more spread out, it’s more difficult to do that. There’s something about Montreal that people really have to work together and depend on one another to achieve art.”

Somewhere between Berlin and Montreal, Gowdy has cultivated a supportive public that responds in real time, helping him to determine if what he’s producing really resonates, something that reanimates the world if even in incremental steps, in an environment that more often replaces faith with credit, the good with the good enough.

Gowdy spent the first part of Trill Scan’s recording sessions “making songs that people that I respected didn’t like,” he laughs.

“Sometimes when you’re making new things, you don’t know if it’s good,” Gowdy admits. “But I think that it’s important to have people around you who can offer a second opinion. And based on what I did before, they were able to weigh the current work and see if there’s a relation, first of all, and second of all, if it moves them. Because essentially that’s what it’s for, music — if it’s moving us or not.”◼︎

Trill Scan is released 14 March 2025 via Constellation Records.

Cover image: T. Gowdy photographed for Constellation Records by Vika Temnova.

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Ghost Hardware: in conversation with Frédérique Duval & Christian Richer

15 or so years ago, compact cassettes curiously resurged in fashion as a favoured format, as clusters of boutique tape labels sprang up throughout Europe and North America to release independent musical recordings. A dedicated society of tape collecting ensued.

Cassette culture in the 2010s followed a throwback to vinyl records a few years earlier, which CDs had rendered obsolete in the 1990s but which reemerged as a technology of fascination in the subsequent decade for a niche market of audiophiles and residual media aficionados.

The explanation at the time was that consumers who had come of age in the 1960s and ‘70s, during the era when vinyl was the dominant musical format, were then entering into middle age and upward social mobility and were possessed with a sense of nostalgia for the records that they had collected as kids. Logically, cassettes followed suit for children of the 1980s and ‘90s.

Less logical, though, was the fact that cassette tapes were never considered high-fidelity media. While they were analogue in nature, as opposed to CDs, DATs, and the more recent proliferation of digital file formats and online streaming services, tapes, even during their heyday, were neither a prevailing standard format nor did they provide listeners the best audio quality.

Tapes were characteristically plagued by hiss and a high noise floor, imbuing their recordings with a murky and muddied aesthetic. Tapes degraded quickly. And their playback devices — primarily Walkmans endowed with auto-reverse — frequently chewed up and mangled them.

Their only benefit was that music listeners could record onto them, making compact cassette tapes the first widely available and comparatively affordable home-recording technology.

It was this feature, perhaps, that endeared cassette tapes to their proper generation.

However, nostalgia for a formative consumer format is no longer the only explanation for why tapes, specifically, have weathered other retro boom-and-bust cycles, as millennials and zoomers who never collected cassettes the first time around have steadfastly maintained a desire for them.

“It’s so counterproductive, in a way, to home-dub a small batch of tapes,” admits Frédérique Duval who along with partner Christian Richer has just launched the Verdun-based cassette tape-dedicated imprint, Isohyet.

The name, as esoteric as the format itself, defines a line on a map connecting places that share the same amount of rainfall. Appropriately, idiosyncratic and hyper-specific connection is the philosophy that animates Duval and Richer’s new label.

“We came from kind of different musical backgrounds,” Richer says. “But they’re connected.” Duval and Richer’s cassette tape duplicator photographed for NicheMTL.

“A couple of years ago during the pandemic, we made online friendships with a lot of these people who were passionate about tape culture and music,” explains Duval, who produces ambient electronic music under the pseudonym Fumerolles.

“We met this guy in Vancouver named Jamie Tolagson who runs a label called Hotham Sound. His project is called Mount Maxwell, and he reached out to me to re-release my first album, Nuit Jaune. And we discovered this passionate music community on the West Coast, and we made online friendships with a lot of these people. And we realized there was a need for more people releasing this music. They can’t release everything in B.C. and in the West Coast of the U.S.”

Richer, who has recorded for more than ten years as Element Kuuda, has plenty of label experience, having founded the Bedroom Pop-oriented Kinnta Records in 2012, releasing well-received albums by Chairs and The Haiduks.

“I was trying to get into the Indie music terrain, along with other labels like Planet of the Tapes and Fixture Records. But I had no management skills,” Richer confesses. “I felt like I’d failed, but I didn’t fail. I made it. I did something.”

Duval and Richer bonded immediately, both creatively and romantically, over long-form music bingeing sessions. “That’s what we did when we first met,” says Duval, “spending 12 hours straight listening to music, just saying, ‘that was interesting, now you put something else on,’ listening to music and talking.”

“We came from kind of different musical backgrounds,” Richer says. “But they’re connected. Frédérique knew a bunch of stuff that I didn’t, and we discovered realms of music together.”

“Ten Celtic songs. Ten dolphin songs. That’s probably how I discovered electronic music.” Duval and Richer’s cassette tape production station photographed for NicheMTL.

Richer’s father was a “Beatle head” who studied electronics and encouraged Richer’s early childhood attraction to both music and technology.

“My first tape was Michael Jackson’s Bad,” Richer recalls. “It smelled super plastic, and it sounded so good. My dad dubbed Thriller for me, and I played the tape on repeat. I couldn’t get over how good it sounded. Later on, I discovered why — because of Quincy Jones and all the musicians on it. But it was just naturally in me to listen to that stuff.”

Duval’s parents owned a computer shop and papeterie on the North Shore of Montreal and Duval emerged into adolescence listening to electronic music from an unlikely source. “In Zellers in the ‘90s, you had the New Age panel with all these albums,” Duval says. “My first albums were those. Ten Celtic songs. Ten dolphin songs. That’s probably how I discovered electronic music,” she laughs.

Both Duval and Richer began seriously collecting music in their teens and recognised the transcendent power of a genre-agnostic approach.

“I was into grunge in the ‘90s and I bashed dance music at some point,” Richer remembers. “You know, you chose grunge, and you didn’t listen to anything else. But there was a record shop I went to with a guy with a mullet and he was super into Prog Rock. He was super sweet and not condescending at all, and he opened my mind to stuff I didn’t know. He wasn’t afraid to express his opinion.”

Duval and Richer recently joined forces to collaborate on a new musical project called Preoptic Ridge, performing twice together in 2024, at Ateliers Belleville and Casa del Popolo. Currently, they are recording an LP set for release this year and are readying a batch of albums to be put out through Isohyet, beginning with Lush Vegetation, an aptly titled album by Vancouver-based musician J.T. Gladysz, and local electronic artist Emmanuel Cameron aka Yunam’s Weightless.

“The act of doing DIY tapes for a label today, this is a statement in this Spotify world.” Frédérique Duval photographed for NicheMTL.

“We want to release people who would otherwise have a hard time releasing stuff physically,” Richer says. “Digital music has its advantages. You can listen to it at any second and own it — or not. But the physical thing is more permanent.”

Although Duval and Richer hold no illusions that launching a cassette imprint in the streaming era will be easy going. “It’s a money pit, let’s face it,” Richer concedes. “Releasing people’s tapes is a money pit. Especially now when butter is $75 at the supermarket.”

We might diagnose cassette tape culture as a condition the pop music critic Simon Reynolds coined “retromania,” or the author Grafton Tanner termed “foreverism,” or what the late philosopher Mark Fisher dubbed “hauntology,” or what I will call “future nostalgia.”

Not just a longing for a previous time when the future seemed more optimistic, but also a recognition that the present, no matter how grim it may seem now, is an age for which we will inevitably feel nostalgic in the future. Technological obsolescence is itself obsolete as consumer products we might once have conceived as ephemeral prove to be remarkably enduring.

Still, Isohyet for Duval and Richer is ultimately about an appreciation for the music, the intentionality of making the physical object, and cultivating reciprocal relationships with fellow collectors.

“It’s one thing to do this for the ritual of it, just doing something carefully,” says Duval. “But the act of doing DIY tapes for a label today, this is a statement in this Spotify world. We feel like this is the best contribution we can give to the community. Because we’re hermits. We don’t go out a lot. We don’t have the social energy to build big events. But we have the stamina to do objects and do it with care and love — and archive it properly. That’s what we can give back.”◼︎

Cover image: Frédérique Duval and Christian Richer at their Verdun home and Isohyet headquarters. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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The PHI Phenomenon: in conversation with Myriam Achard

Verily, time is of the essence.

“It’s been busy,” says Myriam Achard as she reclines into one of the plum-coloured sofas in the foyer of the PHI Centre, Montreal’s foremost site for the exhibition of works that exist at the intersection of art and technology.

Achard has recently returned from a festival in the south of Taiwan and will next embark upon a whirlwind Trans-European reconnaissance tour through Geneva, Amsterdam, and much of Germany.

“I’m not complaining, I love what I do,” says Achard. “But I’m not very proud of my carbon footprint.”

Atop a mane of spirited blonde curls that are her trademark, Achard wears a number of hats at Centre PHI: chief of new media partnerships, head of public relations, and an overarching curatorial role in selecting exhibitions.

This last credential is what frequently takes Achard around the world, visiting festivals, vernissages, conferences, art fairs, and related types of events, always on the hunt for the latest in creative technological mediation.

Video taken from Laure Prouvost’s installation Oma-je at Fondation PHI. For NicheMTL.

The PHI Foundation was launched first as DHC/ART in Montreal in 2007 by the producer and Ottawan Phoebe Greenberg, whose father was among the founding partners in the real-estate conglomerate, Minto Group.

Greenberg chose our city over New York and Paris as the home for her philanthropic legacy, and concurrently tapped Achard as one of her closest collaborators. “I’ve been working with Phoebe for 18 years,” Achard tells me. “We met, and it was somehow love at first sight.”

Though unlike other influential curators, Achard peculiarly doesn’t come from an Art History background. Nonetheless, she has assumed the job with a particular sense of purpose and a dose of destiny.

“I’m a trained German teacher,” she says. “But art has always been part of my life. My mom took me to the movies and to the theatre as a kid,” Achard recalls. “I didn’t think I would work in that sphere. But going with my mom to Casse-Noisette, and as a teenager to the movies with friends, going to concerts, art has always been very present. It was a happy accident.”

The waiting room and main hallway constructed for the installation Tulpamancer at Centre PHI. Photographed for NicheMTL.

With its cobblestone streets and Gaslamp aesthetic, Old Montreal might on the surface seem like an incongruous district to showcase some of the world’s most technologically advanced works of art. But across two historic edifices — one tucked into the corner of Saint-Jean and Saint-Sacrement, and the other located at 407 Saint-Pierre — the PHI Foundation and Centre PHI, respectively, have remained at the forefront of avant-garde art exhibition in Montreal for nearly two decades. And PHI Contemporary, a cluster of 18th century heritage buildings across from Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours Chapel on Rue Saint-Paul, is slated to open in 2028.

“PHI Contemporary will allow us to bring under one roof what we are currently doing in two physical spaces,” Achard explains. “Right now, when we speak about the Foundation, we speak about contemporary art, and when we speak about PHI Centre, we speak about art and tech. We just want to speak about art. We don’t want to have to separate this anymore. Artists don’t either. There are more and more artists that are using technology to tell their stories. PHI Contemporary will allow us to have one discussion.”

A rendering of the forthcoming PHI Contemporary space on Bonsecours and Rue Saint-Paul. Visualization by Secchi Smith, ©️ Kuehn Malvezzi + Pelletier de Fontenay.

The Montreal architecture firm Pelletier de Fontenay in collaboration with Berlin-based Kuehn Malvezzi won the international competition to repurpose Maison Louis-Viger and Maison Du Calvet, both of which date from the mid-1700s and are among Canada’s oldest existing structures, into the new PHI Contemporary location.

“We are definitely aware of our responsibility to Montreal’s history,” Achard says. “We feel the pressure of succeeding. But we are convinced that this new institution will become a landmark for Montreal. I sometimes go to New York just to see an exhibition. One exhibition. We hope, we think, that people will do the same — they will come to Montreal to see an exhibition at PHI Contemporary.”

Centre PHI has a unique directive based upon the Kunsthalle model for artistic institutions.

“The Foundation doesn’t have a collection,” Achard says. “We don’t represent any artists. The goal with the PHI Centre is to present international artists to the local community. Artists that maybe never had a solo show in Quebec, or Canada. Our proposition is unique not only in Montreal but internationally. I’ve travelled a lot, and I’ve never found a space like us.”

With its specific mandate of presenting art’s increasing conjuncture with digital technology, Centre PHI has broad license to exhibit works across a diversity of forms and media.

Currently, there are four exhibitions under PHI’s aegis: Oma-je, the French artist Laure Prouvost’s sprawling and multidisciplinary contemplation on ancestry, family, and memory; Habitat Sonore, which invites listeners to experience Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds’ new album, Wild God, in Dolby Atmos sound; Tulpamancer, a clinical installation that projects through Virtual Reality goggles possible pasts and futures individually tailored for each audience member; and The Golden Key, an interactive audiovisual mythology created by Matthew Niederhauser and Marc Da Costa which harnesses A.I. to generate a never-ending user-directed fairy tale.

Still image from Matthew Niederhauser and Marc Da Costa’s The Golden Key. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“We are aware that Artificial Intelligence could potentially be a threat for some artists,” Achard admits. “But with our mission, we have to embrace it. The Golden Key, for example, is making fun of A.I. So, we don’t take it too seriously. We want people to laugh and make fun of what A.I. gives us. I think A.I. in general needs to be regulated. But it’s here to stay, so it’s better to go with the flow than to try and go against it.”

Technology in contemporary art practice is most often associated with themes of disruption, velocity, disposability, and post-humanity — things that seem at odds with Montreal’s local, scrappy, DIY spirit. Yet, Achard is ultimately aware that longevity and collaborative community are the core of any enduring curatorial practice.

“12 years ago, when the paint wasn’t even dry on the walls,” Achard remembers, “we organized a press tour. And some journalists and people from the community were like, ‘why will you show only international artists?’ And we said, ‘that’s our mandate.’ But then, over the years, we enlarged our mandate to include local artists. At the PHI Centre, when I can, I want to show local artists. It’s nice to find a balance. It will be the same at PHI Contemporary. The Montreal audience is so curious, so savvy, so open. Sometimes we fail. But it’s okay to fail. Our audience understands that great collaborations take time.”◼︎

Cover image: Myriam Achard photographed for NicheMTL.

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After Hours: in conversation with Will Straw

Nobody teaches teachers how to teach. They have to keep studying teaching right until the end.

“I’ve learned a lot from my students,” Will Straw tells me as we chat over paninis and Brio at Dante Park in Little Italy. We’ve met here on a Kodachrome autumn afternoon, and I can’t ignore the feeling somehow that we’re both skipping class, telling tales out of school.

“I don’t think when I started as a professor that I was scrambling to keep up with all the new technologies and so on that students are into. Now that’s the case.”

It’s a genuine concession from a recently retired and bona fide rockstar academic who for more than 30 years single handedly shepherded an entire generation of Montreal’s foremost inquisitive minds at McGill’s Art History and Communication Studies department.

Anyone who was ever fortunate enough to attend one of Straw’s classes will report that his lectures were among the most interesting and intellectually stimulating experiences of their student lives.

And though he hasn’t yet written a single-author manuscript — something of an anomaly for such a long-serving scholar — Straw’s impact can be felt in the hundreds of journal articles and edited volumes to his credit. It would take days to document them all.

“My citation index — which I look at every day,” Straw quips, “is pretty good. I travel a lot. I get invited places. I’m happy with the take-up of my work even though I still have that perpetual imposter complex.”

Doubtless, however, he’s the real deal. When the history of Communication Studies is written, Straw will surely go down with the Marshall McLuhans and Neil Postmans of the discipline.

Throughout his career, Straw taught dozens of classes and supervised hundreds of graduate students, directing their research with a light but rigorous touch. And now that he’s hanged up his cap and gown, there will definitely be an immeasurable void left in Montreal’s vibrant humanities and social sciences scenes.

“Everybody wants to say that I’m getting out while the getting is good,” remarks Straw, “They want to say, oh, you’re leaving because it’s too woke or too neoliberal or too this or too that. But believe me, when I came in 1993 to McGill, it was an old boys’ network. It was one of these elite universities that its elite status came from the fact that it had deeply encrusted ideas that weren’t changing that much. All of that has improved. It’s much more diverse.”

Surely, Straw himself deserves some of the honour for this. His critical interests over the years have encompassed only the hippest of topics, dragging McGill into less stodgy and far cooler terrain — areas such as Hollywood movie credit sequences and lurid pulp fiction novel covers, Montreal’s tabloid magazines and the circulation of residual forms and formats.

Will Straw, Cyanide and Sin: Visualizing Crime in ’50s America.

Media and Urban Life might have been Straw’s signature course and perhaps the most popular offering in the Communication Studies department. His aim with that class was to creatively encourage students to engage critically with the media they consume every day.

“I think as professors of media and cultural studies, we can fill in context, we can fill in history, we can encourage different ways of doing academic work,” Straw says. “Like making little films and so on — I’ve done that the last few years. But I don’t think we can just be the ones who wag our fingers and say ‘you’ve got to have a critical perspective’ because I think students already have that. You just have to spend time on any social media and that’s all there is: critique, critique, critique. Maybe it’s not as theoretically informed as we’d like, but it’s there.”

Straw is best known for his literally tireless work studying and teaching about urban cultural scenes and nighttime economies. He’s served on the Board of Directors of MTL 24/24, a not-for-profit that provided analysis and policy frameworks for Montreal’s vibrant nightlife culture. And Straw oversees The Urban Night, an interdisciplinary and inter-university research project concerned with the nocturnal life of cities. It’s a hot topic given the recent discussions around the closure of some of the city’s most storied music venues, as well as the long-awaited comprehensive Montreal Nightlife Policy that the Plante administration released this week.

“I think Montreal is as good as it has ever been.” Will Straw.

“I very much like our current mayor,” Straw proposes. “I think that she’s doing what the best cities do. Some people might think that they’re gimmicks, like pedestrianizing streets, bike paths, urban furniture, public pianos, and things like that. But I think that’s great. All of that is kind of new and for the better. Everybody loves to say that this city isn’t what it used to be, or this scene isn’t what it used to be, but I think Montreal is as good as it has ever been.”

Montreal’s four world-class universities are a collective driving force of the city’s cultural activity.

“They attract 100,000 young people with a little bit of disposable income,” Straw points out. “Even if they didn’t learn a thing in their classes, they’re out there doing things and going to music. Starting magazines. Partly, I think everybody who comes to Montreal goes back home and tells everybody how much they like it. That brings people.”

I ask Straw to elaborate on what makes Montreal such a hub for an undeniably disproportionate field of effervescent creative communities.

“There’s just a vibe in Montreal,” Straw observes. “It’s very hard to find people who don’t love Montreal. It’s an easy city to live in and there’s endless things to do. It has the novelty of the French language in North America. So, I think it’s the relative ease and the sense that the city just charms you almost immediately. The neighbourhoods all have their own character, which they don’t necessarily in other cities. That isn’t the case for cities where you have to really look to find out what’s going on, or what’s charming. L.A. might be like that. L.A. is a fantastic city, but it’s not obvious. You don’t walk around the first day and go, ‘I love this place.’ In Montreal, life has always been a little easier and a little cheaper. How long will that continue? I don’t know.”

Alexandra Boutros and Will Straw, Circulation and the City.

Montreal has so far fared better than most North American cities resisting gentrification and the capitalist impetus to extract maximum value from metropolitan living. It’s nowhere near the cost of New York or Toronto, but property values have steadily been creeping upward, pricing some people out of their preferred neighbourhoods, or preventing others from moving here altogether.

“It’s changed from the good old days of a 6&1/2 for $500,” Straw notes. “That’s bad. Montreal has to do something about that. And they are doing things that people like me aren’t supposed to like, which is building big high-rise condo buildings downtown. But I’m actually not opposed to that kind of high-density living. It’s not the Bohemian kind of living, but not everybody coming to Montreal is or has to be a Bohemian. I think people like us just have to get used to living in something that isn’t a classic 3&1/2.”

Despite the Legault government’s reckless tuition increases, students will continue relocating to Montreal from across Canada and around the world. And given his wealth of expertise and experience, Straw has some valuable advice for them when they do.

“Learn another language,” Straw recommends. “Break out of the Anglo-American domination of the humanities. Read outside your discipline. As a professor, it took me 25 years to decide that I wouldn’t do any academic work on Saturday. If you wait until you’ve run out of work to have some free time, you never will. Academia is a field where, on one hand, we’re in an office, and on another, we’re in a star system. People are famous to varying degrees. So, the main institutional emotion that can go bad is resentment. I would say try and avoid that.”

Reflecting upon a remarkable career, Straw appears surprisingly aloof, draining the remains of his Brio and popping a piece of nicotine gum from a plastic bubble wrapper. Nonetheless, he cannot help but impart some sort of parting wisdom. While you can take the teacher out of the classroom, you can’t take the classroom out of the teacher.

“The term ‘lecture’ comes from the Middle Ages when the professor was the only one who had the books and would read from them. Maybe it’s ridiculously old-fashioned, but I wouldn’t be ready to do away with it,” says Straw.

“I’m going to miss the moment when it goes great, and you come out bouncing off the walls. On the other hand, I won’t miss the first class when you wonder what they’re thinking about you. And the second class when it didn’t go well, and you think they all hate you. I liked teaching, and I think I was good at it, but I’m not going to be one of those retired professors who’s always looking for teaching gigs. We’ll leave that to the younger people.”◼︎

Cover image: Will Straw photographed for NicheMTL.

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