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

All Dressed

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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Losing My Religion: notes on the organ’s past and future

Ten years ago, I travelled to Carlsbad, California.

The purpose of my journey was to conduct research at the National Association of Music Merchants headquarters for my doctoral thesis, a cultural history of the technical protocol called MIDI, an abbreviation for the Musical Instrument Digital Interface.

Electronic musicians know MIDI as the standard that allows them at once to control several digital musical instruments — like synthesizers and samplers — with one central device, usually a computer. A consortium of five companies developed MIDI in 1983 and it still remains the industry standard for connecting digital music-making machines more than 40 years later.

Its influence on electronic music and recorded music in general is impossible to overstate. However mundane and nerdy an invention, MIDI in fact “stamped its post-human character over an entire era of pop” — or so says Simon Reynolds’s blurb on the cover of my book, Mad Skills.

The impetus behind MIDI wasn’t new, though.

Long before Herbie Hancock and Jan Hammer, Harold Faltermeyer and Hans Zimmer, musicians dreamt of single handedly governing an entire orchestra of sounds. The conductor fronts a symphony, commanding them with a baton. The organist produces a wide variety of musical colours from a keyboard-and-pedal-controlled console.

At NAMM HQ, one of the unexpected archives I stumbled upon was a trove of hundreds of LPs of organ music that belonged to former NAMM Board Chairman and professional organist Dennis Houlihan.

Among these recordings were albums of everything from classical and sacred music performed on majestic pipe organs to cheesy covers of 1960s and ‘70s pop hits played on chintzy electric organs that you could buy at the mall.

I became fascinated with these records because I recognized in organs something like a precursor to MIDI. Organs could mimic the timbres of flutes and trumpets, woodwinds and strings, allowing one musician to effectively play all of these instruments simultaneously.

And yet, saying that organs are proto-MIDI is also de-historicizing the subject since it projects a contemporary form of cultural logic onto the past. Nonetheless, the Western model of making music, it seems, has always been about control — beginning with the claviocentric interface.

Organs are fascinating and complex musical instruments. They have a lengthy history of association with Christianity and are ubiquitous in churches — which are ubiquitous in Montreal.

Furthermore, church organists intrigue me because, even though the priest is ostensibly the center of the Sunday service, it’s the organist who essentially leads the liturgy.

“I thought, I guess I play the piano so I could try playing the organ.” Maria Gajraj photographed for NicheMTL.

“You really have to be confident playing in such a huge space,” says Maria Gajraj.

Gajraj, 27, is one of two organists who perform the Masses at Holy Spirit of Rosemont Catholic Church, an enormous Art Deco edifice in the heart of the Rosemont–La Petite-Patrie borough. Hailing originally from Ottawa, she is also concurrently completing a Ph.D. in Organ Performance at McGill.

Providing the musical accompaniment at Holy Spirit of Rosemont is “not the time to be timid or shy,” says Gajraj. “You have to own the room.”

Gajraj began playing piano as a child and studied from age eight to 18 with the famed keyboardist Dina Namer.

“I got a job in a church as a teenager because my parents knew this priest who was looking for an organist,” she tells me. “And it was a way for me to get out of Sunday obligations — and get paid for it. I thought, I guess I play the piano so I could try playing the organ. Then I realized that this is not a piano at all.”

Gajraj grew up going to church yet is not religious. “I was very anti-religion, anti-church,” she admits. “But strangely enough, being an organist has made me okay with religion. I feel like I’m helping people achieve a sense of peace and comfort in the ritual of going to worship. If I can be a part of that, it feels bigger than myself. I can respect the beauty in that.”

Various organ parts at Holy Spirit of Rosemont Catholic Church. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Since 1998, Benoit Marineau, 71, has acted as Director of Music and chief organist at Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours, the oldest chapel on the island of Montreal.

“I am of the generation where everyone went to church,” says Marineau. “The churches were all full. It was natural. I think for many people in Quebec it was like that.”

Marineau served as an altar boy from age seven and asked the organist of his parish church if he could tinker around with the instrument.

“I didn’t even know how to turn on an organ,” Marineau recalls, “or about stops, or choosing sounds. I could have broken something. But the organist gave me the key to the church and said, yes, of course you can play.”

“The organist is the one that gives the energy to the celebration.” Benoit Marineau photographed for NicheMTL.

Marineau usually comes into work at Chapelle de Bon-Secours seven days a week, so fortunate tourists and locals alike can catch him practicing on off days. He chooses all the repertoire for the Masses himself, preferring to play Baroque music befitting of the Chapel’s historic epoch.

Marineau is specifically partial to pieces contained in the Livre d’orgue de Montréal, a book with over 300 compositions that Jean Girard, the first organist at the Notre-Dame Cathedral, brought with him from France in the late 18th century and transcribed meticulously by hand.

“Some people say that they come here for the music,” Marineau beams, “and for the organ, particularly. The organ is kind of a leader. And the organist is the one that gives the energy to the celebration.”

The instrument at Chapelle de Bon-Secours was built in 1910 by Casavant, a legendary organ manufacturer located in Saint-Hyacinthe.

“It’s a 15-stop instrument and it was in very bad shape when I came here as an organist in ‘98,” Marineau says. “It was breathless. It sounded like it was under a hat. But we got a gift from someone very important — I won’t name her — but it has been restored and the brightness of the organ is now like the light coming in from the stained glass.”

Marineau betrays a profound philosophy when he conceives of his precious instrument.

“It has some wood pipes, some metal pipes. Some are so small they’re like a matchstick; some are so big that they are 30 feet long. Some are horizontal, some are vertical; big, tall, small, short, black, white, yellow. The organ is a representation of the people of God,” he says, gazing off into the congregation.

Detail of the Livre d’orgue de Montréal. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“I am religious, myself. I do have a faith,” the English organist Roger Sayer tells me. We’re speaking over Zoom in advance of his Montreal performance of the Interstellar score, which Hans Zimmer composed for the 2014 film and Sayer originally played on the organ at Temple Church, London.

“I find it’s not easy to have a faith working in the church,” he says, paradoxically. “I think human nature is the problem. There’s a hypocritical mix there that what you see is not quite what you get. But I have a faith that’s strong that survives that.”

Interstellar, the Christopher Nolan-directed sci-fi film, has nonetheless spiritual themes, which is why Zimmer chose the organ as its principal instrument.

“He had put as an integral part of this score the organ,” Sayer explains, “which was kind of unheard of. He’d been waiting all his life to write this particular score. And the opportunity arose with Christopher Nolan coming to him to do a film about loss and searching.”

Much of the world’s great organ literature was written with the church in mind, Sayer informs me. “Bach was famously the organist of St. Thomas Church, Leipzig, and was writing music for every Sunday of the year. He was a fantastic organist. He wrote a lot of music based on church melodies. So yes, it’s definitely got that connotation. But it’s a concert instrument as well.”

“Anything that pushes the boundaries and raises awareness of the organ is a very good thing indeed.” Roger Sayer photographed for NicheMTL.

In light of the organ’s progressive secularization, and that of society at large, I ask Sayer what he thinks the instrument’s future holds.

“It’s one of the oldest instruments,” Sayer notes, “and it’s so rich in its repertoire and it’s got a very good following. Young people are starting to become aware of it. Very good young organists are coming through. I think that the heritage and richness of the repertoire — even if religion is not necessarily going in a good direction — the musical side is so strong that there’s no doubt that it will survive. One of its great natural elements is that it has this never-ending breath.”

Certainly, the British organist James McVinnie has for the past decade achieved acclaim performing the organ works of the composer Nico Muhly and Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood. Post-classical musicians like Kelly Moran and Hania Rani are increasingly enlisting the organ in innovative and exciting ways. And drone artists including Tim Hecker and Sarah Davachi recruit the organ to produce durational compositions that expand its potential audiences.

I mention these new musicians to Sayer. “Anything that pushes the boundaries and raises awareness of the organ,” he says, “is a very good thing indeed.”

Back on the balcony at Holy Spirit of Rosemont Catholic Church, Maria Gajraj asks me if I would like to try out the organ. Although I’ve played piano since the age of four, it is my first time sitting down at a pipe organ console.  

This particular instrument is also built by Casavant and has a strong Quebecois pedigree — but with a few modern modifications.

“There’s actually MIDI in this organ,” Gajraj says, laughing.◼︎

The Canadian International Organ Competition runs 13-27 October 2024 at various locations throughout Montreal.

Cover image: The Casavant Organ at Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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The Elephant in The Room: in conversation with Quinton Barnes

A useful phrase exists in the academic world that applies equivalently to the realm of music: cite down and punch up. What this means is that newcomers — to any creative field — ought first to give credit to those below them on the ladder and problematize if not all-out attack those above.

On the opening track to Quinton Barnes’s 2024 album, Have Mercy on Me, the Montreal-based hip-hop maverick begins by taking aim straight at the top: “Yeah, and boy we tired of that Fisher-Price Yeezus.”

It’s a bold and necessary diss on a deserving and dishonoured figure, and hints at once at the heights Barnes himself might hope to achieve. Why not? With the throne of rap music left vacant, it’s anyone’s game. And Barnes, 27, is poised to claim a key position on the court.

Unlike so many hip-hop artists, Barnes is unabashed about putting his vulnerability on full display. Although he exudes an effortless cool onstage, there’s no contrived thug or ‘gangsta’ posture about him, no Instagram posts boasting of luxury lifestyle aspirations. Barnes’s rapid-fire falsetto register, too, betrays an individual who is comfortable venturing into sensitive territory — something like a mix of Frank Ocean and Ol’ Dirty Bastard.

“I personally can’t think of anything more human than a digital, quantized machine.” Chelsey Boll for Quinton Barnes.

“You’re going to hear in the first few songs,” Barnes confesses after sending me an advance copy of his latest recording, “I try to act tough. But that doesn’t last for long. It doesn’t take me long to get emotional.”

It’s that emotional sincerity that immediately draws audiences into Barnes’s music, and world. On Have Mercy on Me, Barnes grapples with issues of loss, family, addiction, memory, and hope, with a rare kind of honesty that is both raw and empowering.

“Grown men cry for the love of their mother,” Barnes raps on “Glory,” among the album’s standout singles. “I can read him like no other / Just know when he cries, better run, duck for cover.”

The breadth of sentiment is infectious for Barnes’s listeners as well, who feel an immediate sense of identification in his ability to put complicated feelings into song form. “When I hit upon the ideas but they’re still new, I’m not thinking about them, I’m just creating,” Barnes states. “The creation process is seamless.”

Barnes was born and raised in Kitchener, Ontario, and has only been a fixture on Montreal’s music scene for a little over a year now. However, in that time, he has established a nearly legendary reputation, the kind of artist fans want to discover, to tell their friends about.

Barnes attempted at first, unsuccessfully, to relocate to this city during the height of the coronavirus pandemic. “It was a really terrible idea,” Barnes admits. “But I was allowed to have terrible ideas when I was 23. I think that’s appropriate.”

Eventually, Barnes connected online with the musician Jean Néant, who performs under the name Joni Void, and the two acquired a large apartment together with fellow artist José Lobo, which stimulated their respective creativity.

“I think it’s easy to tell what the move to Montreal has objectively done for Quinton,” Néant tells me via email. “Just by looking at the list of gigs they have had the chance to perform since residing here, and the mood shift in their music.”

Indeed, Barnes began the summer by opening at La Sala Rossa for Backxwash in a triumphant performance as part of the city’s storied Suoni per il Popolo festival. And Have Mercy on Me is destined to rank highly as one of 2024’s standout releases.

Astonishingly, Barnes recorded the album in only three weeks leading up to the Suoni engagement. “I felt really in the zone for that whole month,” Barnes recalls. “Just focussed. I really wanted to do something good. I wanted people to walk away having had an experience.”

Live, Barnes has an uncanny ability to resonate profoundly with his crowd, to communicate his personal experiences in ways that make those experiences personal to others as well. His musical aesthetic is a unique blend of R&B and soul with inflections of early-2000s IDM and dance music, wrapped in a hip-hop package. Although a somewhat problematic fav today, Michael Jackson was one of Barnes’s earliest influences.

“I saw those videos, I saw that he was the Motown guy, the Moonwalk, all of that. I thought, ‘this is it.’ My favourite album of his was Dangerous because it was so industrial, it was so digital, but he filtered that through the instruments of soul, like James Brown and Gospel. I feel like a lot of hip-hop and R&B has evolved from that. I’m not a fan now because of all the conversation around him,” Barnes discloses. “But the music will always mean a lot to me.”

Barnes’s production style fuses that soul tradition with a more techno-infused convention that, until recently, has been regarded as comparatively soulless — and undoubtedly white.

“I really love Autechre,” Barnes tells me. “I love SOPHIE a lot. I love Aphex Twin. It’s so forward. I always hate when people talk about digital music. I love digital music. People have this construct of a human as it relates to music. I personally can’t think of anything more human than a digital, quantized machine. At least in this world, this existence, that’s a very human thing. That’s not something you’re going to find in nature.”

Barnes is acutely aware of the imaginary cultural and racial borders that have circumscribed musical tastes and is intent upon breaking through them. “I know it’s so complex, and music evolves,” Barnes muses. “But I often wonder what a free music could be. Free from being coded that way. Because I think of music not just in terms of how I listen to and enjoy it, but in terms of how people have certain reactions to music. Like the same way someone can be anti-Black or racist towards someone else, they can have a Black reaction to a certain sound.”

The elephant in the room is that Barnes’s lyrics are peppered with the noun that is, in our society, most racially loaded. I bring up the late comedian Richard Pryor as an example of a Black man who at one time embraced and later renounced his use of this particular word. Barnes is mindful, nonetheless, and clearly deploys his language deliberately.

“What you really want to do is get into people and touch them and reach them.” Chelsey Boll for Quinton Barnes.

“I don’t think anything a refusal I can do on my end can change the status of what it represents and what it means,” Barnes explains. “I feel like when I’m creating and when I’m engaging with the world, it’s part of the culture, and it’s an interesting part of the culture. I think most of us do. So, I don’t want to refuse it and pretend that if I just don’t say it, my stance will mean something. I know it’s there for a reason and we engage with it for a reason.”

That reason, obviously, is to confront the lived experience of perceived difference in contemporary culture, and in doing so, to collapse the categories that only serve to divide and conquer us. Barnes’s music is part of a larger unifying current underway that seeks understanding through honest communication. “Tell the truth,” Barnes repeats on the album’s eponymous closing track. It comes across at once as incantation and commandment from a singular new prophet.

Though Barnes is conscious of the ecosystemic character of creativity in Montreal, specifically. “I personally also have a great group of friends and an artistic community here,” says Barnes. “I’ve been lucky to be embraced by so many great artists.”

As a dear friend, Jean Néant is especially awestruck by Have Mercy on Me and the giant leap that it represents for Barnes. “I was completely taken aback how it progressed into this personal outpouring,” Néant tells me. “I have listened to the album a lot and I do have lots of thoughts about it. But I think I’m actually more interested in seeing how it will be received and how others will react to it, given that it’s a very honest, self-explanatory album.”

Music is an extraordinarily powerful tool for transformation because it is a universal language that every person, regardless of linguistic or cultural identity, innately understands. Throughout the course of our conversation, Barnes recurrently meditates on the processual nature of his intentions for musical expression.

“What you really want to do is get into people and touch them and reach them,” Barnes reflects. “I often feel like there’s a confinement. But we can reach people to find a better understanding and more freedom.”

Barnes pauses for a moment and laughs.  

“I don’t know, I’m just talking.”◼︎

Have Mercy on Me is released 23 August 2024.

Cover image: Chelsey Boll

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The Conspiracy of Art: in conversation with Dominique Toutant

The phone is ringing.

With apologies, Dominique Toutant implores, “Can we please stop for 10 minutes?”

It is one day before the opening of a new exhibition at Blouin | Division, the distinguished contemporary art gallery housed on the second floor of an enormous, converted warehouse perched at the edge of the Lachine Canal in St. Henri, and its director’s mobile phone is buzzing.

Like money, art never sleeps. Or, more to the point, art today is money, a perpetual motion machine.

Contemporary art is value, power, currency, desire. Art in its most modern incarnation is omnipresent, simultaneous history and destiny.

Above all, art is a form, a timeless cultural logic, a way of existing in the world, and of manifesting existence.

As a trained artist and art historian, Toutant understands this more than many of his gallerist peers. He recognizes that his function at Blouin | Division is akin to a barometer, measuring the pressure of the surrounding cultural scenes and forecasting their atmospheric movement.

“It’s my job to help the public to find their way into the work,” Toutant tells me. “It’s my job to look around and see what’s up.”

Earlier, amidst the sound of power drills, hammers, and the ubiquitous ringtones, Toutant had given me a tour of the pair of exhibitions being installed just in time for a vernissage the following day — an assemblage of whimsical Papier-mâché sculptures by Serge Murphy, and the photographer Angela Grauerholz’s latest collection of images, entitled Ellipses.

Toutant speaks excitedly about the works and their creators, towing me from room to room, pointing out recurring themes and revealing minute details about each with a keen artist’s eye.

“This one was taken in a restaurant in Mumbai,” he says of one of Grauerholz’s photos.

“That’s steam in the window. Almost all of these portraits are slightly off, slightly uneven, taken at an angle, with a reflection, a lot of fuzziness. She’s really known for that foggy effect.”

Angela Grauerholz, Restaurant Kitchen Window (Mumbai), 2022. Ed. 1/5. Inkjet prints. 40” x 60” (unframed). Courtesy of Blouin | Division.

Toutant talks with a great deal of affection for the artists under the gallery’s aegis. “To be an art dealer, you need to love the artists you’re going to be with. You need to be excited to listen to them. You need to be, at the same time, an art historian, a coach, a psychiatrist, a friend, their agent. There’s so many aspects to it.”

Coming of age in Quebec City, Toutant always wanted to pursue art as a full-time vocation. “My background was to be an artist, and I was for a long time. I was represented by Joyce Yahouda Gallery,” he recalls. “For a day job, I was also working in the art world. In my 30s, that’s when I got here, and things changed.”

Toutant completed a master’s degree in art history at UQAM, producing a thesis titled “Art History as Material.”

“My project was around the late ‘80s and early ‘90s,” Toutant explains, “The postmodern era, the end of art history, the end of the studio at large. I was very happy in this, and I just loved art. So, to make art was an homage to art. As a gallerist now, I feel like I’m somehow inside of the production of the art with the artist. It’s at that moment that I feel privileged to witness this.”

Toutant defers significantly to his artists to take an active role in the exhibition of their works at Blouin | Division, preferring, as he says, not to “over-curate.”

“Not to say that curators are not important,” he elaborates. “But the artist works on their thing for so long that they pretty much know what they want to do. I know my space, I know my gallery, I know my lights, I know my walls, and I know how people will receive things. So, there’s an exchange with the artist. But as an art dealer, I think it’s important that the voice of the artist comes out most. The art isn’t done until they put it on the wall and put a light on it.”

When choosing which artists to represent within the gallery, Toutant is attentive to how they think of themselves in relation to art history’s overall trajectory.

“If you are interested to be a part of the evolution of an aesthetic,” he notes, “if you are part of that desire to basically put another stone in that story, another brick in that wall, then I’m interested to follow you. For me, I think it’s important for an artist to feel that they are part of a continuum of art history.”

Installation view, Serge Murphy. Courtesy of Blouin | Division.

Toutant sees no problem placing a monetary value upon the works of art that he sells. “It’s actually super easy,” he confides, describing the process much like a formula based upon the age of the artist, their costs of production, demand for their oeuvre, the rate of exchange, their potential for distribution, and even the size of the works.

“It’s important to create a price range for every artist,” says Toutant, “But there’s so much art that has been sold in the world that you just compare.”

Still, it’s not merely about slinging art like any other product.

“If I woke up one morning and said I would like to make five artists that I can sell, knowing the market, frankly, I could totally do it,” Toutant scoffs. “But if I do this, I’m cheating. And frankly I think the artists themselves would know pretty quickly that they are being cheated, too. If art history is made because there’s something to sell, well, I’m sorry but this is not art history.”

Toutant believes that Montreal in particular is a singular city well-positioned to lead the avant-garde in an increasingly globalized art market. “People here are just very happy to be touched by talent,” he observes. “It’s that overall acceptance that is Montreal. There is that energy that, yes, art is important. You don’t have to say that to people. They just get it.”

Though, the role of artists in society has changed significantly in the era of digital reproduction, with anyone, anywhere, able to disseminate images through social media, producing novel kinds of networks that exist beyond geographic boundaries and outside of traditional exhibition spaces.

“It’s less the white cube era now,” Toutant admits. “I think it’s moving out of the gallery a bit lately because of Instagram. Suddenly, the context can be a bit absurd.”

Nonetheless, galleries will always be important venues for the discovery and experience of new artforms, and Toutant takes extra care in curating a space with Blouin | Division that is both challenging and enlightening for audiences.

“I strongly believe that art history is my only guidance.”

Just then, his phone rings again.

Toutant rises from the black leather sofa in his back office and motions to me with an index finger.

“I’m sorry, this one I really need to take.”◼︎

Blouin | Division is located at 2020 William Street.

Cover image: Dominique Toutant photographed for NicheMTL

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若武者: in conversation with Yuki Isami

A certain fascination with Japan doubtless preoccupies the West.

Europe in the mid-19th century was swept away with the fad known as ‘Japonisme’ after the nation’s ruling class ended its Edo-era protectionist policies. Still today, with all of its technological advancements and futuristic fashions, Japan exudes a sort of ancient wisdom that mystifies, captivates, and resonates globally.

North Americans especially revere the restraint, order, and precision that stereotypically characterize Japanese culture — pristinely manicured gardens and aesthetically decorative raw fish dishes and Samurai swords as sharp as the devil himself.

Yet fascination is a two-way street.

“I had heard that Montreal was the Paris of North America,” says the flautist Yuki Isami when I inquire why she chose to relocate here over two decades ago. “It was my dream to speak and understand different languages, and I heard that in Montreal, they speak French and English. When I arrived, I didn’t speak any French. I learned in my second year. I was still struggling with English.”

Isami has long since mastered both of those — as well as Catalan and some Spanish — worked with Claire Marchand at the McGill Conservatory, received the Prix avec grand distinction at the Conservatoire de musique de Montréal, and furthermore, fortified this city’s reputation as an international music hub in the process.

“I think it’s the vibration of the music or the sound that makes us happy.” Serge Vaillancourt for Indie Montreal.

As a member of the Montreal-based Japanese prog rock band TEKE::TEKE, whose 2023 album Hagata was longlisted for the 2024 Polaris Music Prize, she literally blows audiences away with her raucous technique. Now, following the release of her debut solo album, entitled Rives, Isami explores a more virtuosic post-classical approach to her craft, fusing traditional Japanese and contemporary musical influences into something truly exceptional.

“Classical music is where I started,” explains Isami. “For the contemporary music side, it’s like an extension of my classical training. My album is like all genres mixed together.”

Rives indeed is comprised of an eclectic selection from the French composers Claude Debussy and Eugène Bozza, as well as of Japanese counterparts like Makoto Shinohara, Toru Takemitsu, and the sound artist Reiko Yamada, who also studied music composition at McGill. The recording is as evocative and enchanting as its performer, who launched the album with an exultant recital on 17 May at Joseph-Rouleau Hall.

“I was so nervous,” she confesses of that show. “I really didn’t want to go on. I was crying five minutes before going to the stage, saying ‘I cannot do it, I cannot do it.’ But when I walked on the stage, some switch was turned on, and I really felt like it was one of the best performances of my life.”

Fortunately, audiences will have additional opportunities to experience Rives; she repeats the concert for the Jazz Festival 1 July at the Club Montréal TD stage, as well as opening for the acclaimed pianist Alexandra Stréliski the following two sold-out nights at Maison Symphonique.

Isami began studying piano at four years old in her hometown of Osaka. Her parents, who enjoyed listening to Japanese pop music, The Beatles, and singing Enka-style Karaoke, believed it would give Isami a necessary sense of discipline.

“It’s our culture when we have girls in the family to send the girls to piano at an early age for basic training,” Isami explains. “They sent me to ballet school, piano school, calligraphy school. They sent me to all kinds of private lessons.”

Isami is the eldest of two siblings. Her mother worked part-time in a bank, and later, as a social worker. When she was nine, her father, who was in the building trades, moved the family from Osaka to the Tokyo region. And it was there that Isami encountered her chosen instrument.

“On the first day of September, I entered a new school,” she recalls. “We all got together in the auditorium, we sang the school song, and the school band was accompanying the song. Then, that day, I saw the flute. It was like electricity in my head. I heard the sound and thought I would like to become a flautist. It was so clear. I went back to my house, and I was pulling my mother’s arm to go buy a flute. I collected information — where to buy, who I should contact to have a private lesson. I subscribed to the music club. I did it all myself.”

Isami became obsessed immediately, purchasing her first record — an album by the Irish flautist Sir James Galway. “I was very much into his playing,” says Isami. “I would listen and try to imitate his sound. It was so powerful and special. I remember when he came to Japan, I was 10, and I had just started playing flute. My teacher brought me to his concert. I was so impressed. I was in the very front of the hall, so amazed.”

A chance meeting in Tokyo with the flautist of the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal made Isami consider moving here. “They used to come touring very often when I was in university,” she says. “I think it was the first time I spoke in English to Western people. It was a real experiment to have that conversation. I was so excited. I thought, ‘oh, I can speak.’ I could understand something. I had a special connection to Montreal. So, I wanted to live in Montreal. I realized that people want to learn the connection between Japanese and Western culture.”

Isami has spent more than 20 years elevating her music-making skills here, both onstage and off. “There is a moment, I think for me, when I make sound with my flute when I really have the ideal sound that I would like to make,” she tells me. “I’m reaching and reaching. It is so concentrated, that moment in the practice room, when I feel that connection.”

As a performer, Isami preserves a profoundly philosophical approach to her work, letting go and trusting, in “the God of art,” as she describes.

“I think it’s the vibration of the music or the sound that makes us happy. I believe that it influences other people. If I feel good and I’m having fun, I think it goes to other people, too. My work is really connected to good feelings, good vibes, and to share this. I don’t think about it too much. It’s more searching within myself and connecting and centring myself. I believe if I do good things, it will impact in a good way to people — and the world.”◼︎

Yuki Isami performs at Club Montréal TD for the Montreal International Jazz Festival, 1 July 2024.

Cover image: Serge Vaillancourt for Indie Montreal

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City Of Industry: in conversation with Caroline Andrieux

I find myself awkwardly telling Caroline Andrieux, the artistic director of the Fonderie Darling, amidst our meeting in the gallery that she helped to establish, about the contemporary phenomenon called “decay porn.”

Ruins photography, as it is sometimes less problematically labelled, is the artistic movement dedicated to the aestheticization of urban deterioration.

Abandoned factories, deserted construction sites, gutted shopping malls, rotting grain silos, defunct train stations, disused warehouses, crumbling interchanges — these non-places constitute ripe raw material for those with an eye toward the poetics of futures past.

Reclaiming the remnants of the industrial age is a post-modern form of gleaning, wringing out symbolic value from discarded sites of production. But I don’t need to teach Andrieux, who more than 20 years ago took over this majestic Old Montreal edifice and retrofitted it into one of the city’s most vibrant arts centres, anything about this.

“I was always fascinated by old buildings,” says Andrieux. “In 1997, ’98, another building that we were looking at — it was so beautiful. But it burned down. This area was a ghost village. It was like a game board. And it was also full of stories. It was a real miracle, in a way, that we saved this building.”

“I cross my fingers because it’s been difficult to get funds. But for now, we’re lucky enough to have them all sponsored.” Detail of the Darling Brothers Foundry from Éphémère Forever: 20 Ans de la Fonderie Darling, 2022.

Over the past two decades, Fonderie Darling has served as an invaluable workshop, exhibition space, and megaphone for countless artists at all stages of their creative lives.

Through partnerships with public funding agencies such as the Ministère de la culture du Québec and the now-nonexistent Ministère de la Métropole, and private industries like Bétons Lafarge and the Darling Brothers, the building’s original occupants, Fonderie Darling has managed to sustain the opposite economic model to most commercial art galleries.

Rather than representing artists and taking a percentage of their sales, Fonderie Darling instead pays artists to produce works of art in their adjacent ateliers and showcases them in the converted Foundry space, a cavernous three-storey arcade on Ottawa Street, right in the heart of Montreal’s most historic — and gentrified — neighbourhood.

“All the studios receive a sponsoring,” Andrieux explains. “So, artists don’t pay for their studios. They don’t pay rent. They have a grant to produce. And they have a lot of exposure because we work with them. We set up the best conditions for artists to launch their careers.”

There are currently eight Montrealers and four international residents working on-site with support from the Foundry. “I cross my fingers,” says Andrieux, “because it’s been difficult to get funds. But for now, we’re lucky enough to have them all sponsored for the past three years.”

Hailing from Hyeres, in the south of France, Andrieux was reared by her grandmother, an aspiring painter of Lebanese ancestry who married a French officer at the beginning of World War II.

“When the war was starting, she had to raise her kids by herself. So, she abandoned art,” recounts Andrieux. “But she was always painting at her place. Painting on Sunday. Even if I don’t remember very well, I remember the smell, and I remember her as an artist.”

Andrieux began taking drawing classes as a teenager and for a time entertained the notion of becoming a professional artist herself. “I was never happy enough with what I was doing,” she admits. Nevertheless, Andrieux soon discovered Art History and found her calling studying art as a discipline more than merely as a practice.

She completed a Ph.D. jointly through the Pantheon-Sorbonne University in Paris and Université du Québec à Montréal, writing her dissertation on the concept of the void in art. Andrieux focussed on a single work each from four New York artists — Agnes Martin, Gordon Matta-Clark, Yoko Ono, and Robert Barry.

“I chose Day’s End by Gordon Matta-Clark, which is a work he did on a pier in New York,” she tells me, “It helped me to understand why I’m so attracted to industrial buildings.”

Andrieux relocated permanently to Montreal in the early 1990s and founded Quartier Éphémère — an organization dedicated to recuperating some of the city’s most storied abandoned buildings as artists’ spaces — at the corner of Prince and rue de la Commune. Quartier Éphémère was responsible, for instance, for the legendary Silophone project, which turned the enormous Silo No. 5 on Rue Mill into a resonant echo chamber.

“I like the dialogue with the space. It can be in an architectural way, but it can also be in a posture.” Detail of Observatoire sonore, [The User], Silophone, 2001.

“There were all these buildings around us,” says Andrieux, “and there were still people working in them. I remember when I was walking to work at Quartier Éphémère, I was always the first person to walk the street in the morning.”

Although Fonderie Darling focuses mainly on contemporary artforms, Andrieux is intent on engaging with art history in general, and Montreal’s history, specifically. Its summer 2024 exhibition is entitled Black Summer ’91 and centres boldly on that particular season in this city.

Curated by Rito Joseph, an historian of Montreal’s Black cultural legacy, the show is a multidisciplinary project bringing together new works from five artists, as well as archival materials that document the events of that precise year.

“In 1991, it was still very difficult for a Black artist to exist,” says Andrieux. “People were pushed out of their apartments because of their race.”

Detail of Black Summer ’91. Photograph originally published in The Montreal Gazette, Saturday 27 July 1991.

Andrieux chooses her exhibitions carefully and according to instinct. “It’s really for the space,” she says. “I like the dialogue with the space. It can be in an architectural way, but it can also be in a posture. For instance, the space is very brutal and dominant. And we found that work that is very delicate and almost invisible has a power in the space. It’s interesting to challenge the space, but not to confront it. More to respond in a yin-yang process.”

I ask Andrieux if she considers curation as an artform, and she demurs: “It’s less courageous than being an artist,” she believes. “Artists are really courageous. But to make choices is the foundation of being an artist, I think. So, we are close. I think the real creative process is to transform your being into a life.”

No doubt, Andrieux has devoted her life to cultivating Montreal’s creative scenes in profound, meaningful, and long-lasting ways. It is unclear, however, if the whims of transient politicians such as the premier presently in power will spell ruin for Fonderie Darling’s survival in its current form.

“Quebec’s budget is affecting us a lot,” laments Andrieux. “We don’t know yet how much it’s going to affect us, but for sure, it affects all the artists. It’s very difficult these days, with two wars and a government that is totally ignorant. But wealth is not always money,” she says, wisely. “It’s also inside, in our spiritual self.”◼︎

Black Summer ’91 runs 20 June – 18 August 2024 at Fonderie Darling, 745 rue Ottawa.

Cover image: Caroline Andrieux photographed for NicheMTL.

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Wait For It: in conversation with Sarah Davachi

Unlike an old-fashioned phone call, where there are potentially several rings for anticipation, Zoom meetings just start.

In a very binary, off-on fashion, suddenly, someone simply appears on your screen, which moments before was merely a blank space. Right on time this particular morning, that someone is Sarah Davachi, the celebrated artist whose durational musical works have captivated lovers of modern classical, ambient, and drone composition for a long while.

Reclining on a chesterfield in her living room, Davachi speaks to me in Montreal from her home in Los Angeles, where she is currently pursuing a Ph.D., on the occasion of the total solar eclipse, an auspicious if fleeting sliver of history. Behind her, a Black Sabbath poster is tacked to the wall, a trivial clue that speaks volumes to the depth and breadth of generic influences that have filtered over time into her work.

“My brother was born in the ’70s, so he listened to a lot of classic rock,” Davachi divulges.

“I got really into Metallica when I was in 7th grade. I remember listening to …And Justice for All on my discman and being so blown away by all the detail.”

If there is one thread that runs through all of Davachi’s compositions, it’s an acute attention to detail. Timbral detail; temporal detail.

“In order to hear overtones and things like that, you need to let a sound continue without moving to the next thing.” Sarah Davachi performs with the Podlasie Philharmonic, Białystok, Poland, September 2018. Photograph provided to NicheMTL by the artist.

“The music that I make is very minimalist in style,” Davachi explains. “It removes a lot of melody and rhythm. Part of that is to bring the focus to the texture of the sound and the harmonics that are happening in any given moment. The time aspect was a necessity to make that happen. In order to hear overtones and things like that, you need to let a sound continue without moving to the next thing. It needs that time to actually unfold.”

On the surface, it may sound to the casual listener in pieces like 2022’s single “En Bas Tu Vois,” or “Magdalena,” from her critically lauded 2021 recording entitled Antiphonals, that there is not that much happening.

But beneath their austere veneer, oceans of complexity begin to emerge in these works in the form of microtonal variations, resonant harmonics, and apparent temporal distortions. In the tradition of venerated composers like Gavin Bryars and Max Richter, Davachi has the rare and uncanny ability with her music to stretch out a listener’s perception of time.

“In my lifetime,” Davachi says, “it feels like there’s a lot of push for things to happen quickly — not even for things to be experienced but just glimpsed at. If you go to a museum or something, it’s very unusual for people to spend even a minute looking at a specific painting. You’re just walking through and not actually looking at anything. With durational music, it’s almost like showing a painting in bits as opposed to showing the entire thing all at once. You have this control over the listener, being able to slow them down deliberately and force them to go slow. It changes the way you hear things. It changes your brain. I think that’s important, psychologically, for people.”

It’s clear that Davachi meditates, perhaps obsessively, on her work, and specifically, about how her audience receives it. She began studying piano in the Royal Conservatory system as a child, and majored, appropriately, in philosophy and music as an undergrad at the University of Calgary. “The philosophical side was informing a lot of how I thought about music,” she says.

Davachi enrolled in an electroacoustic music class and soon became enamoured with the process of layering performances and mixing recordings. “For me, it made a lot of sense,” she says. “That got me really interested in composing.”

In 2007, Davachi began working at the National Music Centre where she was introduced to a museum-full of organs, synthesizers, and various other claviocentric instruments, which were capable of prolonging sound beyond the piano’s limitations.

“Discovering that way of making music opened the door to being able to do music in a way that I wanted to,” she recalls. “It was ironic,” she laughs, “because for me, music was the sensible alternative to doing a philosophy degree.”

“I learned how to make music in this electroacoustic way, and that still informs the way that I think about where my music exists.” Sarah Davachi performs at the Museum of Jurassic Technology, 2019. Photograph provided to NicheMTL by the artist.

After graduation, Davachi was accepted to the prestigious electronic music program at Mills College in Oakland, California, where noted musicians like Pauline Oliveros and Maggi Payne had served as faculty members. She divulges, “That’s where it started with the music that I make now.”

Early in her professional career, Davachi took the conscious decision to forgo a life of performing live. “I just hated the pressure,” she confesses. “In classical music, the performance is everything. You have to get it right, and you only get one shot. If you screw up, that’s that. To me, that’s not how I think about music.”

Instead, Davachi began devoting herself to the granular levels of control that the studio-as-instrument can afford. She feels closest to the creative process when she is “taking things and sculpting them,” she says. “I learned how to make music in this electroacoustic way, and that still informs the way that I think about where my music exists. A lot of it happens in the compositional phase.”

Davachi will be in Montreal for the Suoni per il Popolo festival in June to attend the world premiere of a new work entitled “Three Unisons for Four Voices,” which the experimental ensemble No Hay Banda commissioned. The piece is a 65-minute composition for violin, cello, trombone, bass clarinet, ondes Martenot, and percussion.

“It’s split into three sections,” she tells me. “One of the things that I’m interested in is this way of having a certain piece of melody that repeats itself similarly to how sound-on-sound tape delay works. It repeats and it keeps repeating until it slowly starts breaking itself apart. I’m trying to do that in an acoustic way.”

Just as Davachi graciously and all too briefly occupies my screen on our Zoom call, her sumptuous and profound compositional works expand to inhabit whatever sonic spaces they’re in. And though her pieces extend beyond what might be considered acceptable running times for popular or even avant-garde music, they seem to end too soon. Elongating beautiful moments in musical time has always been a central tenet of Davachi’s modus operandi, starting with her earliest days as a pianist.

“When I played something, like a chord, I remember thinking that I would like to hear that more,” she recollects. “You’re playing and you get to a chord, and you have to keep going, because that’s the nature of the piano. I remember being annoyed thinking, ‘that’s such a pretty cadence, or a pretty harmony.’ I just wanted to hear that more.”◼︎

No Hay Banda performs Sarah Davachi’s “Three Unisons for Four Voices” for the Suoni per il Popolo festival 13 June at La Sala Rossa, 4848 St. Laurent Blvd.

Cover image: Sarah Davachi photographed in Los Angeles in 2020. Provided to NicheMTL by the artist.

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