Category Archives: How Do You Spell Holiday?

NicheMTL’s travel and events guide, featuring new shows, exhibitions, festivals, and interviews.

How Do You Spell Holiday?

Porte-parole: in conversation with Elle Barbara

The Montreal-based multidisciplinary artist and community organizer Elle Barbara meets me outside a tiny café at the peak of Montreal’s July heatwave. It is one of those blindingly hot summer afternoons, with pockets of sunlight cresting over the flower beds in a little square just off Maguire Street. She is dressed in light linens, her eyes smiling at me from behind a pair of oversized butterfly-framed glasses as we shake hands.

Word On the Street was released through the Celluloid Lunch label in late June and features collaborations with local names like Markus Floats and Mitch Davis. With influences ranging from Ravel’s Boléro, to Prince’s Purple Rain, to early Public Enemy, and even Celine Dion, Word On the Street is doubtless a generically varied effort. A honeyed brew of ‘80s Pop, Prog, and Classic Funk, with dashes of Jazz and Euro-dance, Barbara’s music resists easy categorization.

“Shout out to Renny Wilson,” she praises the Canadian producer who recorded, engineered, edited, and mixed the record. “The first takes of the album were just skeletal drum, synth, and bass takes that had to be manually quantized, so shout out to him for putting in the time and energy to do that manually.” It is the handmade touch that makes Word On the Street such a singular and honest album.

I ask about the inspiration behind the album, and she reveals an affinity for the work of André Serouille, the Montreal street artist. “I didn’t know his name when I first discovered his writings. I kept running into these little cardboard pieces, like ‘anti-Kraft foods’ and other propaganda pieces, and felt really drawn to them because of how they looked graphically. I was mystified.”

This faceless man, whose paranoid scriptures are strewn throughout the streets of the city, is foundational to the creed of Word On the Street. Barbara has meticulously curated Serouille’s graffiti, which comment on everything from the alleged corporate offences to various crimes committed by the psychiatric community. She pulls a small stack of papers from her purse.

“There’s something clearly conspiratorial about it,” she says, showing me various items that she has collected. “But there’s also something artistic about it. And I use the word ‘artistic’ as a euphemism. I don’t think that his gospel has to be written off on the grounds of him being potentially mentally ill, because there’s also a beauty in what he says.”

The gospel she speaks of is one rooted in anti-surveillance and anti-consumerist attitudes. Barbara believes that the casual introduction of AI into everyday interactions is evidence of a significant overhaul to our collective unconscious. These are the days of pioneering tech-dystopian filmmaker David Cronenberg’s “new flesh” realized, of bodies and desires transformed by cheap access to an infinite content channel. Doubtless, we are indeed witnessing a weakening of our physical senses. As Barbara sings on “Your Favourite Meal,” a track that distills Serouille into song form, “I bet you’ll think to yourself, ‘Oh my why it tastes so good’ / in the end the taste of death will finally taste as it should.” 

However, the advent of digital technology has had some positive consequences which even ardent technophobes would be remiss to dismiss out-of-hand. The democratization of information through internet access, the rejection of the Western-centric canon and conservative interlocutors, and the growing mainstream interest in intersectionality as a political practice are all revolutionary. The internet has enabled a radical confluence of perspectives. The problem is the medium itself, the form, a tool for the billionaire class.

In such a climate, the decision to include Word On the Street on streaming services rather than limiting its distribution to physical media has been the cause of some trepidation for Barbara. “Our relationship to what we consume has changed significantly because we’re in an attention-driven economy,” she says. “I initially didn’t want to release my album on these platforms, and the label that I partnered with convinced me to do it, and I kind of regret it, to be honest. On the one hand, it certainly allowed me to be exposed to more people than I initially would have. But at the same time, I believe that those people are just as easily probably going to forget about my record because there’s so much music being released.”

A formless, atomless digital archive of music is the graveyard of artistic recognition. This anxiety is treated with laser-like focus in the music video for one of the LP’s standout tracks, “BBQ All Dressed.”

“I’m so proud of that video,” she says. “It really tells a story about the relationship we have with art and music as humans. There’s two queer-dos at the start, outside a club, waiting to ambush me. We get into an altercation. Afterwards, there’s a whole voodoo witchcraft ritual where they dip their masks into a pool of my blood, and it’s basically a metaphor. They kill the artist and connect to my essence. It shows how easily you could do away with the artist. Once you connect yourself to those systems of mass consumption, you don’t have to buy the album anymore. You might as well just kill the artist and connect yourself to the matrix.”

“Pop is not just about music.” —Elle Barbara photographed by Nico Stinghe.

Technology at one time blurred the line between reality and facsimile. To quote Professor Brian O’Blivion of Cronenberg’s film, Videodrome, “The television screen has become the retina of the mind’s eye.” Word On the Street is an exploration of our media-synapsed sense of perception and connection.

Barbara’s relationship with Serouille is one she refers to throughout our conversation as a symbiosis, one person’s work directly inspiring and intertwining with another. Such devotion to probing the cannibalistic practices of AI and urbanity combined with a high degree of respect for the language of queer art is what differentiates Elle Barbara in Montreal’s Pop culture landscape. “I’ve historically been a big fan of Pop music, and I find that Pop is not just about music; it’s about aesthetics; it’s about politics, fashion, and performance. It’s such a holistic artform.”

Barbara is on a strong trajectory, having opened for U.S. Girls at Pop Montreal in September, and sharing the stage with Madonna on the Montreal stop of her Celebration tour. Perhaps this record, which is quickly becoming a niche classic, will provide a defining retrospective on a decade overwhelmed by despotic tech’s simultaneous obsession with content, and contempt for creativity. Heat, in the creative world as in the climate, is determined by the seasonal zeitgeist.

“I know it’s just not going to be a Billboard-charting hit because I don’t have those resources,” she concedes. “It’s just not my socioeconomic reality. But I’m confident that I make music that is unique and will stand the test of time, of that I am sure.”◼︎

Word On the Street is out now via Celluloid Lunch Records.

Cover image: Nico Stinghe

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How Do You Spell Holiday?

Vapours & Spectre: notes on Les Vespérales de l’orgue du Sacré-Cœur

The first things Adrian Foster draws my attention to as he welcomes me into the Église Sacré-Cœur-de-Jésus in Montreal’s Centre-Sud on a late summer evening are the bells.

When the church’s bell tower renovations were deemed unfeasible in 2021, its five bells were lowered. But choir director André Pappathomas had them installed on wooden plinths on either side of the church’s pews.

While the appearance of the bells is striking, they’re not here just for looks. The bells, which vary in size and pitch, and the heaviest of which weighs several tons, have begun a new life as concert instruments for Les Vespérales de l’orgue du Sacré-Cœur, the experimental and ambient concert series Foster launched in Summer 2024.

“Performers have found their own ways to play them and to bring out their textures,” Foster tells me as we approach the largest bell.

He strikes it in various spots to produce different sounds. “When you have all five of these bells going, you can even make melodies,” he says.

“You can also use the clapper.” I’m intrigued.

Foster gets under the bell and lightly taps the uvula-like sphere hanging within against the bell’s inner lip. “Sometimes after a concert someone will start swinging it, and I have to run over and try to stop them,” he laughs. “They would instantly regret it. It probably risks shattering the windows, it’s so loud.”

“How can we keep this space alive?” Brandon Patitucci for Les Vespérales.

The bells are emblematic of what makes Les Vespérales so special. While they couldn’t retain their sacred function of calling the faithful to prayer, the bells have been repurposed by artists who love them to serve a new, largely non-religious audience drawn to their ethereal resonance.

Les Vespérales excels at creating aesthetic experiences that blur the line between the secular and the sacred. Even its pay-what-you-can philosophy seems like a nod to the Sunday mass donation plate, albeit via the inclusive ethic of grassroots concert organizing.

For Foster, reimagining the sacred is not just abstract but a question of preservation.

“There are fewer people going to church, and there are churches all over Montreal closing all the time, and this would typically be a church that would be at a high risk of being closed,” he says. “So, it’s important in this kind of case to ask: what value can we bring to this building that has been an important part of the community here in the Centre-Sud that maybe its religious vocation no longer can do alone? How can we keep this space alive?”

Les Vespérales is one answer to this question, and central to its offering is its unique marriage of sound and space. “What we’re developing here is not just a space to hold any kind of music events, which many churches already offer,” Foster emphasizes. “What we’re really focusing on is new musical creation by artists who are creating new music in this space, for this space.”

A case-in-point is Esther-Ruth Teel, who arrives partway through our conversation to rehearse for Sirens, an audio-visual collaboration with composer Gavin Fraser. Sirens revisits Greek mythology and reimagines the creatures as survivors rather than as agents of sexual violence.

“I’m a little nervous,” admits Teel. In addition to performing the organ and vocal parts live, Teel’s poetry and performance work feature heavily in the piece’s visual component.

“In some of the footage I’m standing on rocks draped in a cloth, but not modest, and so the alarm bells in my head are going off,” they tell me. “But I think there’s something exciting about portraying and reclaiming your body within a church where female-associated bodies especially haven’t been celebrated.”

Like most Vespérales de l’orgue du Sacré-Cœur concerts, Sirens showcases the series’ titular organ, a 1928 electro-pneumatic Casavant Frères whose pipes take up the better half of the gallery above the church’s main entrance.

If the bells are the heart of a church, then the organ is its lungs.

“One of my favourite things about the organ is this kind of acousmatic listening experience.” Brandon Patitucci for Les Vespérales.

Teel tells me that what initially drew them to the organ was its powerful ritualistic purpose. “Like, at a funeral, if you’re playing something beautiful that’s meaningful to the family, then you’re integrating with their lives in a way that classical concert music doesn’t do in the same way. You’re guiding an experience,” Teel says. “And I feel like this series is really doing that. You’re actually doing something important for people, bringing them on a journey.”

Once we make our way up to the organ loft, Foster admits that he’s never heard a recording that really does the organ justice. “There are some instruments where you can listen to a recording and feel like you’re hearing the instrument pretty well and getting a good re-creation,” he says. “But I find organ recordings are almost always disappointing compared to hearing it in the room. I think it’s because there’s so much about the way that it interacts with the space that speakers can’t capture.”

Sound registers differently throughout a church. Individuals make their own choices about how to make use of these spatial dynamics.

For example, Vespérales’ yearly Winter-Solstice Ambient Night seats listeners directly in the organ loft to create a more direct and intimate experience of the organist. Speakers are also mounted on either side of the gallery, and performers can live-treat sounds from the pipes through effects if they so choose.

“One of my favourite things about the organ is this kind of acousmatic listening experience where you don’t see the music being played but hear this disembodied sound which is coming from this massive instrument that is part of this massive space,” Foster says.

His interest in acousmatic sound transformation and non-traditional use of the organ has also led him to commission the creation of a new experimental organ that will eventually become a fixture of Les Vespérales.

“Les Vespérales sounds cool. It evokes night and mystery and the religious element without being overtly religious.” Brandon Patitucci for Les Vespérales.

Created by the organist Alexander Ross, the LIMINARE, as it is known, is a unique hyper-organ whose pipes can be directly manipulated by performers as they play. While traditional pipe organs are built with a particular wind pressure in mind so their pipes produce stable tones at intended pitches, the LIMINARE organ is microtonal, and its wind pressure can be dynamically adjusted live.

“As you increase the wind pressure more than the pipe is voiced for, it starts to overblow, and when it’s overblowing it will jump to different harmonics and the timbre will change.” Foster demonstrates as LIMINARE’s reeds squawk something like a mad duck.

“This is an instrument that I commissioned that I want to make music with, but it’s here in this space and will be an integral part of this series with other artists coming to explore it on their own and find their own way of making music with it.”

As the sun sets and twilight enters the dimly lit church, a hush descends upon the space.

I think that it would be a good moment to ask Foster about the name of the series. He says that Pappathomas suggested it.

“Les Vespérales sounds cool. It evokes night and mystery and the religious element without being overtly religious, because this isn’t a religious series. André says that when we’re doing these organ and electronics performances there’s this kind of cloud of sound around here, and he feels like the sound is like little prayers floating around in the vault of this space.”

I tell Foster and Teel that even the English word “vespers” sounds to me like a portmanteau of “vapours” and “spectre.” It recalls midnight mass when I was a kid, the excitement associated with church at night — smoke, incense, fog.

“I like that,” says Foster. “It makes me think of the ghostly traces of everyone who has filled this space.”◼︎

Cover image: Brandon Patitucci for Les Vespérales.

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How Do You Spell Holiday?

Dirty Boulevard: Montreal vs. New York City

The life of the working artist is often romanticized, a mythology that centers on passion over profit, creativity over comfort, and the willingness to risk everything for art. The great artist, we’re told, knows no other way.

Behind this romantic notion lies a complex web of economic choices, geographic constraints, and class dynamics that determine not just who gets to pursue art full-time, but where they can afford to do it.

To understand how location shapes creative practice and artistic possibility, I spoke with working artists in New York and Montreal, two of North America’s most culturally vibrant cities.

Alex Wolfe is a New York-based artist, writer, and educator who uses walking as a generative tool to explore memory, place, and the overlooked spaces of American cities. Willow Loveday Little is a writer, language instructor, and Montreal native who remains enamored with her city’s artistic culture. Gavin Sewell is a visual artist who lived most of his life in NYC before moving to Montreal, offering a unique perspective on both scenes. And Markus Lake (aka Markus Floats) is a musician and my neighbour. After commiserating about our landlord’s latest rent increase, we dove deep into what it really costs to make art.

“I’ve never owned a car,” Markus Floats tells me from his Montreal apartment down the hall from mine. “I eat a lot of rice and beans. I walk everywhere.” His small space is packed with the essentials: music equipment, books, records, and graphic novels. “There are certain things that I just don’t think will make my life that much better. And maybe they would, but I’m going to keep it simple and find happiness in that.”

For Floats, like many artists, money isn’t about acquiring things; it’s about freeing up time and energy to create.

“A lot of the sacrifices I’ve made are just so that I have free time. I like to sleep in. I get up around 11, 12 most days. I go to bed at 3. I go for a night walk every night.” He pauses. “But I realize that it’s unsustainable in that I don’t make any money doing those things. But those things allow me to make music.”

The idea for this article emerged from a hallway conversation between Floats and other neighbours about organizing against a rent increase, a reminder that even in Montreal, creatives are grasping onto the remnants of cheap rent. This tension between financial stability and creative freedom became a central theme across these conversations.

“People listen to your vision because they want to understand it.” Willow Loveday Little photographed by Gustavo Salinas.

“There’s something just so magical about Montreal,” says writer Willow Loveday Little. “It’s the same thing that makes people visit once and get that almost glassy look in their eye. They’re hooked.”

Little and I sit in Parc La Fontaine on an idyllic summer day as she describes a recent conversation with a first-time Montreal visitor who noticed something distinct about the city’s arts scene. “Where he’s from, artists attend each other’s events because it’s a formality of the social contract. Here, there’s a lot more genuine curiosity and engagement. People listen to your vision because they want to understand it.”

This supportive atmosphere extends to the competitive dynamics, or lack thereof. “No one really believes they’re going to write a bestseller and buy a house from that money,” Little observes. “So why be competitive?”

Floats, who moved from Calgary 15 years ago, puts it more bluntly: “Montreal’s strength is just having a lot of weird shit going on. Completely unmarketable music.”

The contrast with New York couldn’t be starker. Originally from Maine, Gavin Sewell lived most of his adult life in NYC before relocating to Montreal. When he first moved to the city in his early twenties, he planned to become a playwright but quickly realized his fantasies were rooted in an era that no longer existed.

“When artists hang out in New York, we usually talk about money,” Sewell explains. “Who found a cheap studio space or a dealer that actually paid on time. You’re talking about scarce resources. In Montreal, when artists hang out, they actually talk about aesthetics, theory, art, which is really lovely.”

Alex Wolfe, currently based in New York, confirms this observation: “The downtown art scene is very tight knit, but I still find it kind of alienating. In New York, the capitalism dial is turned up quite high, which leads to a lot of networking. You go to a party and it’s people asking where you’re showing.”

The funding landscape differs dramatically between countries. “In the United States, you basically only get grants at the point where you no longer need them,” says Sewell. “In Montreal, your chances of actually getting money that can allow you to live and work for six months to a year are way higher.”

Floats received a Canada Council Grant recently. “I was living on Easy Street for six months,” he says. “Going to Jean Talon Market, getting fancy protein, fancy cheese. Those brief periods take a huge mental load off. But there’s no retirement plan.”

“When you don’t have money, everything is money.” Markus Floats photographed by Stacy Lee.

Both cities are transforming in ways that threaten their artistic communities. Floats reminisces about Montreal fifteen years ago, when rooms cost a few hundred dollars and venues were abundant. “People played in terrible bands their entire lives, paid cheap rent until they finally made it. You need that scrappy infrastructure.”

Sewell, having witnessed New York’s transformation into a playground for the ultra-wealthy, sees disturbing parallels. “It’s very sad to me, having watched hyper-gentrification in New York, seeing it replicated in Montreal. Montreal’s amazing cultural richness, that laid-back quality — it’s a very sad thing to see threatened.”

Luckily, he doesn’t think Montreal’s art scene is at risk of disappearing entirely. “To me, hyper-gentrification doesn’t mean there won’t be art anymore,” Sewell reflects. “But it means the artistic voices will mostly come from the upper middle class and above. What gets lost is room for working-class voices.”

Perhaps most telling were the artists’ definitions of success. “I think last year was the first year I was above the poverty line in ten years,” Floats shares candidly. “Home ownership is not in the cards. I’ve resigned myself to making $20,000 to $40,000 a year for the rest of my life. I’m not making popular music. I’m not going to make it big.”

The weight of living at or under the poverty line takes a toll. Floats gives examples like just being able to go to the grocery store and buy whatever you want without worrying.

“When you don’t have money, everything is money. And that sucks.”

Sewell, despite decades of comparative professional success, faces new challenges. “I thought over time it would get easier, but the middle class has constricted, which means I depend more on a small base of wealthier collectors. Individual sales feel much more high stakes now.”

What emerges from these conversations is a portrait of artistic life shaped as much by geography and economics as by talent or vision. Montreal’s affordability and supportive culture create space for experimentation and community, while New York’s intensity and expense demand constant hustle but offer unparalleled opportunities.

The artists I spoke with have found ways to navigate these realities, whether through strategic compromises, community building, or simply accepting that the romantic notion of the starving artist is both outdated and unsustainable. Their stories reveal that modern day art making requires not just creativity, but also economic literacy and community support.

As costs rise in both cities, the question becomes: how do we preserve space for the “weird shit” that makes culture vibrant? The answer may lie not in individual resilience, but in collective action — supporting public funding for the arts and building the infrastructure that allows diverse voices to flourish.

After all, as Sewell reminds us, “Being an artist doesn’t remove the obligation to join your local tenants’ union.”◼︎

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How Do You Spell Holiday?

Questions In a World of Blue: in conversation with WE ARE WINTER’S BLUE AND RADIANT CHILDREN

Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. —William S. Burroughs, “Soul Killer”

Turning power against itself has always been a useful form of resistance.

Donning the enemy’s flag and uniform has historically been deployed as a consistently successful strategy to confuse and infiltrate any opposing army. American Delta blues artists like Skip James and Robert Johnson confronted the misery of the Great Depression by singing sad songs. The legendary Montreal post-rock record label Constellation in the early days of the corporate internet posted to its website a manifesto proclaiming, “THE WORLD HAS NOT CHANGED. THE WORLD REMAINS THE SAME. THE END OF THE WORLD WILL NEVER COME. WE ARE ALL GUILTY.”

It is befitting, then, that more than two decades later, Patch One, the Portland, Maine-based artist and musician, the experimental guitarist and synth player Jonathan Downs, Efrim Manuel Menuck, a founder member of Godspeed You! Black Emperor and numerous offshoot bands, and I meet via Zoom, the technology platform that came to fame most notably during the coronavirus crisis, to discuss their latest collaboration, a battle-weary go-screw-yourself forthcoming on Constellation Records, squarely aimed at state power, entitled NO MORE APOCALYPSE FATHER.

“Fuck this app,” Menuck ceremoniously exclaims from behind a mountain of beard and hair as he flickers onscreen.

The four of us are gathered virtually on the day that the last remaining North American university campus protest against Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, at McGill, is bulldozed. It’s a stark local coincidence that underscores the simultaneous urgency and ambience of apocalyptic global events, as well as the necessity for artists to continue making art in the face of it all.

“I think ‘contribution’ is a key word,” says Patch in response to the question of how music can stimulate social change. “I can pretty quickly talk myself into a corner and think that this is nothing, this is fucking stupid that I’m doing this right now. But I don’t actually believe that. That’s what the powers that be are telling me to think. There is a lot to be said for putting things out into the world.”

WE ARE WINTER’S BLUE AND RADIANT CHILDREN sleeve drawing. Patch One.

“For me, making stuff is a compulsion,” Menuck insists. “As far as I can tell, the responsibility of an artist is to address whatever reality they’re living in in the moment in a way that’s truthful. And there are a bunch of different truths. I think the four of us in the band share certain types of truth that lead to the record that we made.”

NO MORE APOCALYPSE FATHER clearly originates from a post-punk infused worldview, and a post-rock inspired aesthetic: shimmering, lurching, distorted dirges that harken to Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra’s catalogue, as well as that of Big|Brave guitarist and collaborator Mathieu Ball, with whom I caught up a few weeks later at a gig at Ateliers Belleville.

“I don’t know how this album came together,” Ball admits. “It just did.”

Although Patch and Downs are American, Montreal’s zeitgeist comes to the fore with WE ARE WINTER’S BLUE AND RADIANT CHILDREN.

“Like every bigger city in the world,” observes Ball, “with the cost of living continuously increasing, I do find it slightly harder to continue pursuing creative endeavours. It’s becoming more difficult to find a studio and workspace. But the creative community in this city will not anytime soon cease to exist.”

The album was recorded over an intense week with the foursome hunkered down at Hotel2Tango, the studio which incubated some of Montreal’s most enduring recordings, including Fly Pan Am’s N’écoutez pas, Arcade Fire’s Funeral, and Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s debut, F♯ A♯ ∞.

“Patch and I drove up to Montreal at the end of last August,” Downs recalls. “Efrim knew how we played and asked us to be a part of it. He thought we’d fit in. He and Mathieu had worked out some jams beforehand, and Efrim had sent us all some skeletal structures — some ‘songs,’ you might say. It was all kind of loose and we listened to the songs over the PA speakers and just put more into them and built them up.”

That layered approach produced an encrusted and profoundly moving LP that primarily invokes the despair of observing savagery from a safe distance whilst being unable to intervene. This theme is ever-present, even metaphorically, for instance, on the song entitled “Dangling Blanket from A Balcony (White Phosphorous)” which grapples with the shock of watching Michael Jackson suspend his son out of a hotel window for the apparent bemusement of the paparazzi.

“I think that sometimes people make the mistake of thinking that having empathy or feeling pain watching something happen is a productive human value,” says Menuck. “It’s a reflex, and it’s a good reflex. But the reality is that it doesn’t do anything on its own.”

“Not that there’s not always horror and war in the news,” Patch chimes in, “but since we recorded this, I’ve thought a lot about how people use social media and post things on the internet. Everyone that I look at on the internet is just showing me all this shit and it’s like, what does this mean for the people? Are you trying to do this just to show me something about what’s happening, or to show me something about yourself? I don’t blame people because it is a thing, and I’ve been that person, too. You want to feel like you’re fucking doing something while you’re just sitting there at home or whatever.”

“The big problem,” adds Menuck, “is that the way to disseminate these images is all owned by huge sketchy companies that are really just data-scraping endeavours. Who owns these companies? I feel like there has been stuff on social media that’s made a change. But what that change leads to, I don’t know. What people do with that horrible feeling of being stuck just witnessing is what matters. Just the witnessing doesn’t matter.”

WE ARE WINTER’S BLUE AND RADIANT CHILDREN back cover photo. Efrim Manuel Menuck.

“I wonder,” muses Downs “what other moments in history would have been like with everyone having a smartphone, or a camera, and being able to connect information from those devices to a lot of people? I think it has made more people aware with a lot more people looking at it. The more people tear away from the mainline story of what’s happening, the better.”

The media landscape within which WE ARE WINTER’S BLUE AND RADIANT CHILDREN emerged, however, is unique, even in a world that seems to interminably reiterate atrocity. There are now multiple wars raging, with no end in sight, and a panoply of viewpoints on every aspect of daily life. There is no question that art contributes to producing more positive conditions, if even to offer a soothing tune in troubled times. But how that occurs is difficult to describe.

“I think a melody with words attached that have some sort of meaning does get into people’s heads” Menuck explains. “But at the same time, we’re not making popular music. So, it’s just a few people at a time.”

Now Menuck starts second-guessing himself.

“If one song changes…” he pauses mid-thought. “No, if one song opens someone’s mind… No, that’s way too heavy. If one song gets a certain idea… No, that’s heavy, too.

He exhales a plume of smoke and reorients himself in front of the camera eye.

“Mostly the world is going to change based on small things like the conversation we’re having with each other. That stuff does ripple out. It’s not enough. It’s really not enough. But it does play a part. We live in an organic system, and all these small things interweave with each other. And all these tiny little accidents are what make change at the end of the day. It’s not a glorious thing or a heroic thing. It’s just trying to contribute to something that’s better than this.”◼︎

NO MORE APOCALYPSE FATHER is released via Constellation Records 13 September 2024.

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How Do You Spell Holiday?

All In The Family: in conversation with Kiva Stimac

Pre-Christian festivals traditionally marked the turning of the seasons, celebrating solstices, equinoxes, the planting and harvesting of crops, and other sundry natural cycles.

Festivals nowadays are largely symbolic of such seasonal celebrations, centering more upon common interests and activities like film, theatre, dance, and music.

The festivalization of cultural industries in the 21st century has meant that patrons more often than not expect a curated round-up of events rather than any stand-alone experience. There are such things today as “festival circuits,” a secondary calendar upon which cultural products and producers travel and tour year-round.

Without doubt, one of Montreal’s most interesting springtime festivals is Suoni per il Popolo, currently entering its 24th iteration.

Founded in 2000 by the artist, printmaker, and chef, Kiva Stimac, Suoni, for short, has become a much anticipated and lovingly lauded launch pad for those with big ears for experimental sounds.

“Montreal is at its most beautiful right now,” Stimac observes as we chat over the phone on a sunny late May morning. “And the festival this year — I’m very proud of. We made it so we’re going to have challenging, revolutionary, good times.”

“Montreal audiences are very enthusiastic.” Kiva Stimac for Popolo Press.

Stimac and Godspeed You! Black Emperor bassist Mauro Pezzente have collaborated since the festival’s inception on booking bands at Casa del Pololo and La Sala Rossa, twin venues that they started nearly a quarter century ago, which have become go-to stages for local and international musicians, and venerable institutions for Montreal’s music aficionados.

“We had a very deep love for music of all kinds,” Stimac says of the impetus behind Suoni’s founding. “But we noticed that bands were skipping Montreal. People would play Boston, Toronto, but they would skip Montreal. For instance, Arab Strap wasn’t playing Montreal. So, we booked them a show at Casa, and it sold out in 10 minutes.”

Originally called Artichaut, the venue that now houses Casa del Popolo in 2000 was “more like a hippie space,” Stimac remembers.

“At that time, this part of St. Laurent was very desolate, uninhabited,” recalls Stimac. “The rent was affordable enough that we signed a lease. And everybody started coming in while we were trying to renovate, trying to get our permits and stuff, saying, ‘hey, I was supposed to play a show here next week, or ‘I was supposed to do something here in a month from now.’ So, we just started saying ‘okay’ to people.”

Quickly, demand for these live happenings coalesced and Stimac realized that she could invite artists of her own choosing, renting the Spanish Cultural Center across the street soon afterward and transforming its upper level into La Sala Rossa.

“Montreal audiences are very enthusiastic,” Stimac notes. “From the first year of the festival, everybody that we called and asked to play said ‘yes.’ And to come and play an artist-run, small venue, not necessarily knowing us, once they showed up and it was a family vibe, and we cooked them food, and gave them advice on the sound, even though these were small spaces, with the vibe of the audiences, everybody was really enthusiastic.”

A singular aesthetic is Suoni’s hallmark, but the festival is recognized for curating artists from diverse genres — from punk to funk, classical to jazz — and across various demographics, too. It is not a youth-oriented or fashion-specific affair.

Some of this year’s highlights include No Hay Banda on June 13th performing a commissioned piece that Sarah Davachi composed; the Swedish vocalist and electronic composer Erika Angell on June 17th, and industrial-rap superstar Backxwash, aka Ashanti Mutinta, on June 21st.

“Having our final show be Anthony Braxton and Wolf Eyes is a pretty big deal,” Stimac remarks. “That’s the elder free-jazz experimenter hero, and then the noise-making trickster Detroiters, also heroes, coming together and making a sound that is really special.”

For the first time, day passes will also be sold this year for $45, allowing patrons to attend every event on any given day.

“Sometimes, it’s challenging,” Stimac admits, regarding programming Montreal’s premiere avant-garde festival. “A lot of times, it’s problematic. It’s not like, oh my God, we’ll play Kumbaya and everybody’s going to come together. Oftentimes it forces people apart or sets people into scenes, like ‘oh, I can’t interact with this or that scene.’ So, having multiple intergenerational interracial scenes here, that is very important to me.”

While the city’s bigger festivals like Osheaga, Pop Montreal, or the Jazz Fest court corporate sponsorship and attempt to attract higher-profile star power, Suoni deliberately remains committed to showcasing the best underground artists from Montreal and internationally. Stimac believes that a strong sense of community and solidarity through struggle is at the heart of Suoni’s ethos.

“We want to sell these shows, but also be true to who we are as people.” Kiva Stimac for Popolo Press.

“I didn’t create this thing as a business,” says Stimac, “or even as a festival. I created this as a family situation. Family isn’t just blood, either. It’s chosen family, too. The outsiders, the misfits, the queers, the punks — we’re all an international family. How do we exist in a world that’s so tragic and horrific?”

Stimac answers her own question: “I think making music and art of all kinds — dance, theatre, visual art — is an important connecting point to get to the next step of, hopefully, creating something different in this world.”

Montreal and music’s independent scenes have changed significantly since Stimac conceived of the festival. Covid and its restrictions were particularly difficult on the arts and one of Stimac’s performance venues, La Vitrola, was forced to close its doors.

The cost of mounting major events like Suoni increased three and four-fold as artists and their surrounding industries attempted to make up for lost revenues. Even though her festival has thrived for more than two decades, Stimac seems acutely aware of wanting to share the wealth as ethically as possible.

“When you’ve been around for 24 years, and you have some funding, a lot of times you’re also seen as ‘the man.’ We want to sell these shows, but also be true to who we are as people. That’s the hustle,” Stimac explains.

At twelve days, this edition of Suoni is leaner and more focussed than previous years, with fewer shows programmed against each other, leaving more room for audiences to discover the depth and diversity of Stimac’s vision. Still, she is generous to give credit where it’s due. From ancient fairs and feasts to modern festivals, the central theme of any seasonal celebration has always been a spirit of communion.

“I’m not looking to be the curator of the entire festival anymore,” says Stimac. “I’m doing this with over 25 different co-presenters from all different backgrounds. I just do what I can do with my own hands. So, I make the posters, I make the food, DIY. But hopefully we’re figuring out more how to DIT — do it together.”◼︎

The 24th edition of Suoni per il Popolo runs 12-23 June 2024.

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How Do You Spell Holiday?

Home Grown: in conversation with Rose Naggar-Tremblay

“I am a very, very local-based artist,” says the Contralto Rose Naggar-Tremblay one recent Wednesday. “I did all my studies at UQAM, at CEGEP Saint Laurent, at McGill. I was grown here.”

It is one of the charms of the rhapsody in two languages that is everyday life in this city: little traductions infidèles like this one. Naggar-Tremblay likely meant something like “born and raised,” but being neither above nor below a pun, “grown” seems apt enough to me — for a woman named Rose.

Verily, this Rose was grown in Montreal.

Although wandering is the theme of Naggar-Tremblay’s forthcoming recital at Bourgie Hall, entitled The Women Who Leave, a performance inspired in part by the artist Marisol, whose retrospective is currently on exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Particularly, Marisol’s world travels — at a time when the romantic notion of artist-as-wanderer was reserved mainly for men — resonated with Naggar-Tremblay.

“In the year before, I had been thinking a lot about moving, or wandering, or travelling women,” she says. “Just the ability of woman to be free in her movement. Marisol went travelling and came back with a completely different style of sculpting and painting that really embodied the notion of movement. I was a little bit stuck home during the pandemic, like everyone else. Actually, being stuck at home was for me the motivation to say, ‘no, I can’t spend my whole life missing opportunities.’”

Over the past two years, Naggar-Tremblay has been doing nothing but wandering, with stints working in Europe, singing the lead role in Bizet’s Carmen at the Edmonton Opera this past October, and returning home to perform with the OSM after winning top honours in their 2021 Concours competition. “It was extremely inspiring to work with Rafael Payare,” she says. “It was something very special. It was also evocative of travel.”

Naggar-Tremblay’s parents both immigrated to Quebec, her mother originally from Egypt, and her father born in Germany, the son of a military man. “I was raised with stories of abroad and of travel. Adventures. That was part of my imagination. Being drawn to travel, to the sea — those are things that I strongly identify with.”

In her preparatory explorations for writing The Women Who Leave song cycle, Naggar-Tremblay participated at the Museum in controlled mediation activities with groups of elderly women.

“We didn’t just appreciate Marisol visually;” she explains, “we also tried to use the same media that Marisol used to create our own little sculptures and paintings. And after these experiences, we would have a circle of discussion to evoke what she brought up inside of us. How we received her body of work and her tools of artistic expression. After these conversations, the poetry really wrote itself.”

“The biggest danger is to stop listening to your little voice.” Rose Naggar-Tremblay, photographed by Tam Lan Truong.

At only 31, Naggar-Tremblay has already achieved admirable accolades. And she has done it her way. In addition to successes at the OSM, Naggar-Tremblay won the prestigious Georges Enesco Competition in Paris, came in second place at the Prix d’Europe, and was named Radio-Canada’s Breakthrough artist of 2022.

“Wherever I work, I always get rehired,” she beams, “and that’s a very special thing. I can make myself valuable to a house. But that is based on who I always was. I’m not trying to please anybody. For the couple of years that I did try to please, I was extremely unhappy, and I was unsuccessful.”

Naggar-Tremblay grew up dreaming of becoming an artist of some sort. But it took time to land on opera. “When I was a kid, I was doing everything,” she recalls. “Dance lessons, and singing, and piano lessons, and choir. As soon as I could, I joined theatre in school. I feared free time. I wanted to be busy, and I wanted to be doing things. Then I channeled that into opera because it’s an all-encompassing artform, where all of my skills could be used.”

The Classical repertoire was a large part of Naggar-Tremblay’s early musical influence. But more recently, she has embraced a Pop sensibility that manifests in her singer-songwriter side, on a recording called Je me souviens à toi.

“It’s a completely different use of my voice,” she explains. “I’ve always had this duel between being a Classical musician and wanting to be a singer-songwriter. I discovered Pop as an adult and I fell in love with it. Now I listen to Lady Gaga and Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift, like everyone else. But when you’re a young Classical musician, you grow up in an obsessive bubble and there isn’t space for anything else. You train so hard. And then you open yourself up to everything else in the world and you think, ‘oh, I was so naïve.’”

I ask Naggar-Tremblay what advice she might give to her fifteen-year-old self. “I would say find your five-year-old,” she laughs. “The biggest danger is to stop listening to your little voice. To me, as a five-year-old, I was extremely creative, and I loved a lot of different things. That is what gave me the career I have now. I was very positive and curious. What makes you unique,” she states, “is also what’s going to make you find your niche.”

Undoubtedly, Naggar-Tremblay has found hers in spreading joy throughout the world with her voice. Naturally, she will be travelling again after her performance at Bourgie Hall, spending five months in Europe, doing a Strauss production in Toulouse and Wagner’s Das Rheingold in Germany, before returning to Canada to sing Verdi’s Requiem in Toronto. “It’s the longest stretch that I will be away from home,” she says.

Right now, though, Naggar-Tremblay is excited to present The Women Who Leave in Montreal.

“Marisol gives us the inspiration to create movement in our lives, maybe in smaller ways,” she tells me.

“It doesn’t have to be living on the other side of the world. It can just be, ‘maybe I’m going to do one thing for myself today, and that’s going to be my escape.’”◼︎

Rose Naggar-Tremblay performs The Women Who Leave December 13th 2023 at Bourgie Hall, 1339 Sherbrooke St West.

Cover image: Brent Calis

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How Do You Spell Holiday?

Resolving Power: in conversation with Claude-Philippe Benoit

Abstraction resonates so deeply in modern art because it illustrates our everyday incongruity: capital is incommensurate with value.

Time is not money, to contradict an old adage. Time and money are like the frames of an image that arbitrarily circumscribe certain realities, and zoom in or out as would a camera lens, depending upon interfering and vibrant impulses. Markets. Labour. Fashion. Nature. These variables give the abstract shape, rendering the air solid, freezing time.

The Montreal artist Claude-Philippe Benoit intuitively grasps abstraction — as a concept, and historically, as a tradition.

“Artists have the responsibility to be knowledgeable, to be informed,” Benoit tells me from across a table in the back room of a pop-up gallery set up in the Insurance Exchange Building on Saint-Jacques Street, strictly to showcase his newest work. “It’s a duty for me.”

For nearly four decades, Benoit has been recognized primarily as a photographer. His sequences of melancholy images — of disused movie theatres and depopulated urban landscapes — have exhibited internationally, across Europe and in America. But the publication of his life’s work as a monograph in 2016 spurred a return for Benoit to painting, the subject of this latest show.

“I felt a kinship with the Düsseldorf School of Photography,” Benoit explains. “But all along, I always kept an eye on what was happening in Abstract painting. And when I visited galleries, like in Chelsea and SoHo, I was always most attracted to exhibitions of Abstract painting. That’s where I had the most pleasure as a viewer. And it also became research material, keeping me updated with what was being done.”

After Kazimir Malevitch, the 20th century Ukrainian Avant-Garde artist, Benoit refers to his current oeuvre as “Les carrés noirs.” Extreme movements characterize these paintings, with deliberate and often repeated brush strokes producing chunky and textural images that Benoit squares, quite literally, on paper and canvas.

Left: st8488 (2022). Right: st8448 (2021). Les Carrés Noirs.

The resulting work is a maximal exercise in minimalism — or vice versa — extending each minute physical gesture into monumental proportion, and wringing out extreme meaning from the abstract.

“It was Expressionism 2.0,” Benoit quips. “I was working in a gestural kind of painting. It takes your whole body. In any kind of art media, you have to invest yourself.”

Growing up in the Gatineau region and settling in Montreal in 1990 to pursue a career as an artist, Benoit has dedicated his entire life to creative practice. “I took classes of painting outside of school with a friend of mine,” Benoit recalls, “doing still-life paintings for my mom. And I forget how, but at a young age, I came across a book about Surrealism. And I read that book, and I was like, ‘oh my God.’ I was really astounded. I realized how extensive art could be.”

Benoit later attended Algonquin College, in Cinema, but was constantly drawn to the persistence of the still image. “I realized that the kind of life, being a contributor in film, was not for me. Sixteen-hour days. Plus also realizing that the creative input in a film was not noticeable enough for me. So I started working more in photography. And I was very conscious at that time that I wanted something to be a starting point. I didn’t know what was going to come next. So cinema theatres was that.”

Left: Réf. 44. Right: Réf. 3. L’envers de l’écran, Un Tourment Photographique, (1982-1985)

Benoit’s most famous series, entitled “L’envers de l’écran,” produced between 1982 and 1985, focusses upon the other side of cinema: behind the screen; the emptied-out theatre; the projection booth — those spaces normally occluded from film’s audiences. Benoit’s camera captured cinema’s eerie essence of ideology and myth with these images, and eventually granted him access to seats of power on another order.

“I was showing in New York,” Benoit recalls, “and while I was there, I somehow got permission to visit the U.N. Today, you understand, you would never get access. I was accompanied at the beginning by a security agent who was following me through. And I wanted to photograph these rooms empty of people, because I wanted it to be about these rooms, which for me were very coded, because we saw these rooms on the news. After half an hour or so, he went off and I was by myself. I could roam around, go from one room to another, open a door, ‘Oh, there’s a meeting here, sorry!’ Close the door. And I quickly realized that these places were about power.”

Those photographs formed the second chapter, “Ô-NU,” in his cycle, “Les Lieux Maîtres,” and led to another epiphany for Benoit about how to choose the subjects of his images. “If you want to photograph interiors, or landscapes, and there are people there,” notes Benoit, “there’s some kind of phenomenon that happens where, very quickly, it’s not about that interior, or that landscape. It could be one tiny person in the whole picture. But the viewer is drawn by that person.”

For his next series, “Société de Ville,” Benoit burrowed his lens into his favourite urban muse: Montreal.

“I used Montreal to photograph the urban landscape,” reveals Benoit, “but I didn’t want to photograph the iconic places, like Old Montreal, or the Olympic stadium. I only wanted to photograph as if it was discovered by someone, say, living in the woods all his life, and all of a sudden he comes out of the woods and discovers there’s a city. I wasn’t born in Montreal, but Montreal is certainly my home. It’s my home in my mind since I was a young boy. My parents brought me to Expo ’67, and I was amazed by the cityscape, and the autoroutes, and the Metro. I fell in love. And at that point, secretly, in my mind, I thought this is where I want to live. This is where I wanted to be.”

“I wasn’t born in Montreal, but Montreal is certainly my home. It’s my home in my mind since I was a young boy.” Claude-Philippe Benoit photographed for NicheMTL.

From runs of black-and-white photographs to enormous diptychs painted in cadenced waves, a curious theme emerges throughout Benoit’s works: capital, power, time, labour, leisure, language — these abstract concepts, like the image, elicit no intrinsic interpretation.

“I don’t think a lot about the meaning more than I want my work to have meaning,” Benoit emphasizes. “Because I can see a meaning in any of these photographs, but is that meaning going to come through for the viewer? That’s a pretty difficult task that mostly fails anyway. But to have meaning, that’s possible.”

The abstract vacuum of human form paradoxically unites Benoit’s photography and painting. Yet, he has no intention of choosing one practice over the other. “When my book was being produced, I got into painting to keep me busy, creatively. But then I liked what I saw. And voilà!”

Benoit motions to walls of framed canvases. “People started asking me, ‘Does this mean you’re not going to work in photography?’ No. Just because you start something doesn’t mean you have to abandon something. This show is a witness to that. The two of them can live together.”◼︎

Claude-Philippe Benoit Photographies et peintures continues at 276 rue Saint-Jacques through 28 October 2023.

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