Category Archives: Massive Lectures

Massive Lectures

Reattach to Love: notes on interdependence

“On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone.”
—John Perry Barlow, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, 8 February 1996

In a recent New York Times op-ed, the columnist David Brooks notes with concern the widening happiness gap between those who feel love and those who don’t. Throughout the past 50 years, lots of us living in the West have progressively chosen personal autonomy over partnerships, preferring the independence that social detachment brings to the interdependence that accompanies, say, a spouse or children.

Since the 1960s, family ties have gradually come to represent an outdated and unfashionable lifestyle, as the more implicitly contemporary values of career advancement, financial stability, and self-determination increasingly replaced traditional life goals.

Nevertheless, our modern autonomy has led to alarming levels of disparity in self-reported happiness, Brooks finds. The University of Virginia sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox wrote in an email to Brooks claiming that those who were married with children were 30 percent more likely than unmarried and childless people to report that life was enjoyable most of the time — a significant and remarkable difference.

This statistical inconsistency is counterintuitive to many of us for whom the term ‘family values’ was synonymous with oppressive conformity. Shouldn’t liberated people be happier? What once might have been considered a trap paradoxically sets us free, believes Brooks.

Attachments signify interdependence. And yet, forging loving attachments is not the example that major world powers are setting for us on a daily basis. Russia, for example, is not pursuing loving attachments with its neighbours by colonizing Ukraine. The United States is deliberately destroying loving attachments by instigating trade wars with its closest allies and illegally attacking its perceived adversaries.

Therefore, the message that we receive at the quotidian level is that attachments, loving or otherwise, are a luxury to be selected or rejected for the already comfortably independent. Love doesn’t motivate the cultivation or annihilation of attachments today. Power does. And power is based upon dependence, not interdependence.

As an observer of technology, I find metaphors in our technological interfaces and the actual physical connections between our devices. In my research into the history of MIDI, aka the Musical Instrument Digital Interface, I discovered an anomaly in the world of digital connectivity in which a standard protocol for literal attachment amongst digital devices defied obsolescence for more than 40 years. Was this because MIDI was the best interface? No. Was it more likely because a consortium of musical instrument manufacturers convinced an industry to accept a compromise that benefited all of them? Yes.

The Glenn Miller Orchestra performs at Maison Symphonique 21 December 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

MIDI provides one model that might correspond to Brooks’ pragmatic argument about loving attachments. That is, stick with the traditional convention, flawed as it may be.

The other more common model is the planned, rapid, and frequently accelerated obsolescence of connective ports. For nearly a century, RCA cables have remained the standard for wiring hi-fi equipment. In the digital world, though, it is rare that any cable survives the obsolescence cycle for more than a few years. How many dead old dongles do we have in our junk drawers, these intermittent connectors that we buy and just as quickly discard when their periods of usefulness expire? The narrowing window of compatibility for technical standards must on some level reflect the deteriorating criteria for compatibility between people.

Is it any wonder that we tend to treat human relationships, so-called loving attachments, just as disposably? There will always be a new connection with the promise of enhanced compatibility and the sheen of novelty just around the corner.

Of course, the logical conclusion of the interconnectivity wars is to have no physical connections, to be networked wirelessly to everything all the time. Ultimately, this type of connectivity is exclusively vulnerable to control. It is just as easy to connect as it is to disconnect digital devices and thus disenfranchise the people who use them from this vast web if we don’t submit to the protocols of attachment. No love lost.

Again, this kind of model indicates dependence and not interdependence. If you want to attach headphones with your new iPhone, but there is no more headphone jack, then you have to submit to another form of loving attachment.

The internet was conceived as a space independent of traditional governance just as post-modern social space was conceived as independent of traditional family constraints. “Our identities have no bodies,” John Perry Barlow announced in his 1996 Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. “Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.”

We now understand, however, that matter alone undergirds the virtual world — think of the 1.46 square kilometre Apple Park in Cupertino, California, or the vast water-cooled A.I. server farms that are hastening the demise of the world’s most precious natural resource. We would do well to attend less to the myth of immateriality and more to the attachments that matter — those between us.

Over the holidays, I experienced the most meaningful connections not through technology but at two consecutive live events that required no technological connectivity whatsoever.

The first was the OSM’s presentation of Le traditionnel conte des Fêtes with the Quebec raconteur Fred Pellerin. In this performance, Pellerin quixotically unfurls his signature yarn about the fantastic history of his hometown, Saint-Élie-de-Caxton. The story is recounted in dialogue with romantic Classical interludes that underscore the vitality of storytelling as a musical form, and music as a form of storytelling. And although there were technical aspects to the spectacle — lighting and scenography cues that likely require constellations of technologies — the show relied solely upon the human connections between performers and audience.

I was even more heartened the following evening by the Glenn Miller Orchestra’s performance at Maison Symphonique. Comprised entirely of wind, brass, strings, percussion, and voice, this orchestra has performed together in some configuration since 1938 — no amplification required, no obsolete cables necessary. Just the loving attachments of the musicians onstage who clearly enjoy their jobs and each other’s company enough to perform upwards of 200 concerts per year.

Likely I attend that many shows annually in my capacity as a journalist and was not expecting to be so astonished by this one. But I had not felt as present or connected all year as I did that night. These events were about cherishing relationships, appreciating family, and enduring attachments.

Despite their potential for connection across space and time, nothing makes me feel more isolated than digital interfaces. If you aim to create distance between us sitting in the same room, just insert a screen. Should you desire to destroy a sense of unity and community, nothing works better than some device that is predestined to become obsolete. Cyberspace was, is, and always will be the space that divides.

“If you want to lead a fulfilling life,” David Brooks argues, “fill it with loving attachments.” These emotional ecosystems indeed constitute the necessary path forward toward more rewarding lives. But our attachments must be independent of the power dynamics that technology under capital impose.

To reconnect, unplug. To love, reattach.◼︎

Cover image: Fred Pellerin and the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal conducted by Kent Nagano perform at Maison Symphonique, 20 December 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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Massive Lectures

Rolling In the Deep: notes on the immersive turn

“We are thrilled to present the next listening series,” reads a recent press release from Centre PHI, “featuring ambient music legend Brian Eno and conceptual artist Beatie Wolfe in our immersive listening room.”

“Kosmos Klub is about deep listening without boundaries,” trumpets another promotional email for a Bandcamp subscription service. “Each month, curator Ajay Saggar selects an immersive album from the outer edges of sound.”

Lorna Bauer, the Montreal-based artist and 2021 Sobey Award finalist, “transforms space into a contemplative, poetic, and immersive place,” according to a bio from Fonderie Darling.

The nehiyaw interdisciplinary artist Tyler Houseman’s work, touts a PR briefing from La Chapelle | Scènes Contemporains, “embraces ephemerality, ranging from immersive interactive installations to multimedia live video performance events.”

Without a hint of irony, the website for a 3D Virtual Reality exhibition currently on offer at Place Bonaventure reads, “Titanic: An Immersive Voyage tells the story of the RMS Titanic like never before.” It must have been immersive to strike an iceberg and descend the depths of the sea.

Doubtless, 2025 was the year we drowned in immersion.

From curated playlists to culinary experiences to all-encompassing and participative journeys, ‘immersive’ was the inescapable contemporary buzzword that characterized the packaging and promotion of everything intended to captivate our attention and convey a sense of currency in the local arts and cultural scenes.

Which got me thinking: why now is the term ‘immersive’ so pervasive? What about this moment makes us want to be purposefully inundated? Do you ever get that sinking feeling?

‘Immerse,’ according to my 1987 print edition of the Oxford English Dictionary — published before there was such a thing as V.R., U.X., A.I., or other such hyperbolic tech-dystopian acronyms — means: “plunge, (in liquid); cause (person) to be entirely below surface of water, esp. baptize thus; bury, embed, (in); involve deeply, absorb, (in debt, difficulties, thought, etc.)” The term originates from the Latin, mergere; mers- meaning ‘to dip.’

Consequently, the only accurate use of its traditional adjective form from the above-noted examples is the ill-fated 1912 Titanic expedition — a truly immersive experience if ever there was one. However, the new meaning of ‘immersive’ that Google wants us to use is, “virtual reality technology that gives the user the impression of being fully enclosed and involved in the simulated environment.” Although the two definitions are not far off.

One of the most glaring parallel virtual realities with real-world consequences exists south of the border. When Donald Trump reassumed the White House in January and rocked the proverbial boat by announcing a spate of crippling tariffs on Canadian goods, our consumer price index spiked from 1.9% to 2.6%, a marked escalation from the chaos Trump instigated during his first term. Just the announcement of tariffs, never mind their implementation, resulted immediately in rising costs for food, clothing, transport, and shelter — the most basic necessities which none of us can afford to forgo, yet none of us can seem to afford.

Increased costs under capitalism translate into increased borrowing. And incremental decreases in Canada’s lending rate only partially offset the soaring demand for credit. The money that we borrow is virtual. The interest we pay back is real. Predictably, by year’s end, Canada’s six biggest banks posted record profits that far surpassed financial experts’ estimates, immersing us deeper in economic uncertainty, while financial institutions immersed themselves in liquid cash.

With everyone drowning in debt, mired in financial difficulties, and deep in thought about how to keep our heads above water while the obscenely rich got even richer, 2025 might have been the most overwhelmingly lean year for most of us since the Coronavirus crisis. And yet, entertainment expenditures and the experience economy outpaced all other categories of consumer spending, rising more than ten percent in 11 months.

No wonder immersion in virtual and simulated environments appeared to throw us a lifesaver. Going deep seemed to be the subconscious reaction to being spread too thin. Still, how deep down the rabbit hole have we gone?

A generation ago, the common indictment of the early internet was that all this scrolling and vapid search-engining would make us shallow. Easy access to a broad field of information meant that each of us could boast a superficial knowledge about a wide variety of subjects. However, “to remain vital,” said the American historian of technology Nicholas Carr in his 2010 book The Shallows, “culture must be renewed in the minds of the members of every generation.”

Knowledge for Carr encompassed more than what the horizontally distributed internet could possibly contain. There are deeper forms of memory irreducible to encoding and digital storage. Muscle memory, for example, is not the sort that we can download or stream. It has to be exercised and cultivated over deep time. Durability implies durational ability.

Today’s internet, which we nowadays access evermore on mobile devices, in a state of constant distraction, encourages the opposite of sustained attention. If we don’t immediately recognize whatever appears on our screens, we swipe it away to move onto something more engaging, ostensibly to save precious time. And yet, over the course of a year — or two, or ten — we discover that we’ve spent a significant amount of time immersed in identifying insignificance, the antithesis of depth.

By HyacintheLuynes – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33551991

Twenty years ago, the burgeoning constellations of digital connective technologies sought to capture our attention through immersive sensory stimuli like simultaneous sound and vision, innovations that seem quaint in comparison to today’s drive for wholistic engagement. The video game Second Life, released in 2003, promised an alternate physical existence inside a virtual playing field. The conundrum of this contract was that total freedom in the virtual world entailed total immersion in an adjacent reality. It is noteworthy that the conversation at that time centered on whether or not playing games like Second Life contributed to a fragmentary experience of reality.

“What such video games and design programs lack,” wrote the anthropologist Tom Boellstorff in his 2008 book, Coming of Age in Second Life, “is social immersion. At the intersection of place and time, social immersion comes into being as the constitutional ground for homo cyber.”

An important difference exists between being immersed in a media environment at home, playing a video game whilst sat alone on the couch, or being saturated in immersive experiences out in the world, in the company of other people. We might have assumed previously that domestic immersion fragmented us and being together didn’t. But social immersion may fragment us even more. We construct our digital selves relationally, with digital others, with reckless abandon for the physical implications.

No doubt, looking back, platforms like Second Life were cultural preparation for the kinds of immersive environments that are increasingly intruding upon the shared social experience today. In the confines of Centre PHI’s immersive listening room, or the immersive Titanic voyage at Place Bonaventure, it has never been simpler to spend time both alone and together, to isolate amidst a lonely crowd. “It is easy to become so immersed in technology,” said the American sociologist Sherry Turkle, “that we ignore what we know about life.”

“Separations cut away from continuity,” wrote the philosopher Brian Massumi in his 2001 essay entitled Tell Me Where Your Pain Is, “into separations from it.” The destabilizing potential for immersive separation via technical means has terrifying implications for collective experience, continuous thought, and co-operative action. In 2025, we experienced a durational state of disintegration and deconstruction. We became social subjects immersed everywhere in media and separated from unmediated sociality.

Why did we not heed the warnings of thinkers like Massumi, Carr, and Turkle two decades ago? The short answer is that descending into immersion became more comfortable than rising to the challenges of navigating quotidian reality. And developing the technologies to keep us perpetually immersed became too profitable for the prospectors of the digital age to refuse. We prefer the confines of our little hideaways beneath the waves rather than risk venturing out into the desert of the real.

The terror of confronting real problems might seem too overwhelming to attempt. So instead, we immerse ourselves in artificial worlds, diving deeper into virtual dreams that distract and delight us. Are we all just marinating in immersive experience? And if so, how do we climb out of the soup? A word of warning: a drowning person will instinctually drown everyone around them. Some of them want to immerse you. Some of them want to be immersed by you.◼︎

Cover image: Persistent Worlds, Alice Bucknell, Kunsthalle Praha. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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Massive Lectures

Soldiering On: notes on nostalgia versus tradition

“It is because nothing is equal, because everything bathes in its difference, its dissimilarity and its inequality, even with itself, that everything returns.”
—Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition

“I don’t have any recollection of that at all.”
—Delbert Grady, The Shining

At this time of year, many of us are likely consumed with traditions.

For instance, hosting holiday parties and baking cutout cookies and sipping rum-spiked eggnog whilst wearing ugly sweaters and spinning Phil Spector’s Christmas album on vinyl have outlasted the ultrahip disdainful stance once held against these perennially problematic traditions.

Old-fashioned entertaining is hot again. So hot that an original shrink-wrapped copy of Martha Stewart’s 1982 debut book, Entertaining, was recently listed on eBay for $1,784.99. It seems as if the traditional decorating of yuletide evergreens is, well, evergreen.

Young people today appear more willing than previous generations to overlook, say, tree-hugging, or the Christian church’s misgivings, or Martha Stewart’s stint in prison for felony conspiracy, for the sake of revelling blissfully in the comfort of seasonal traditions.

And I’m here for it. I, too, have succumbed in 2025 to a host of holiday traditions that I once considered a tad naff.

What is it about traditions that are so ambivalently repellant and attractive? Why now is there a marked turn back toward them? And what is the difference between tradition and nostalgia?

Rafael Payare conducts the OSM in a performance of Handel’s Messiah. Antoine Saito for the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal.

Nostalgia to me is a misguided strategy for enduring the unendurable. A challenging present is apparently rendered tolerable by escaping into a mythologized past.

Retromania and poptimism characterized the first two and a half decades of 21st century cultural production in which the relative safety of reconfiguring historical fashions was preferable to the risk of devising new ones. The nostalgic compulsion at once mourns the loss of a better future and replaces the utopian imagination. “Those who can’t remember the past,” writes Mark Fisher in Ghosts of My Life, “are condemned to have it resold to them forever.”

Close to home, we are seeing the resurgence of separatist sentiments in Quebec and Alberta, a local franchise of nostalgia’s troubling recurrences.

On the global stage, we have recently witnessed the acceptance of poisonous nostalgia writ large in the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where the nostalgic embrace of Soviet-era imperialism is proposed as the solution to the sprawling 35-year disarray surrounding the union’s dissolution.

Similarly, the “again” that punctuates the campaign slogan that the despot-in-chief south of the border adopted is evidence that a return to some idealized nationalistic standard is preferable to facing an unpredictable, unrecognizable future.

These political specimens invoke the most terrifying precedents in modern memory. Germany in the early 1930s was gripped by nostalgic hysteria that enabled unspeakable horrors. And fuelled by cultural nostalgia, Stalin concurrently engineered a famine-genocide that decimated Ukraine.

It is tempting to conflate nostalgia with tradition. Trump, like Joseph Stalin and Adolph Hitler, veils his reactionary ideologies in a mock defence of the latter.

Culturally speaking, the popularity in 2025 of, for example, the band Geese — a sevenfold throwback to The Strokes, and Television before them, and Iggy and the Stooges before that — could be considered an affirmation of traditional Rock & Roll when it is really more like skipping stones over lake nostalgia.

The recurrent subject of authenticity is moot as a marker of value, too: there is no doubt that both Rock and Roll and genocide are authentic. Tradition relies equally upon authenticity to produce its legitimacy. Still, nostalgia and tradition for me represent the opposition between security and freedom, the tension between control society versus genuine liberation.

Here, we must pronounce a distinction between nostalgia and tradition.

Consider these two polarities against the fight-or-flight instinct, the classic responses to stress triggers. Doubtless, the uncertainty of contemporary life is a source of significant stress. Yet, where nostalgia is analogous to flight, a retreat from the frontlines of progressive momentum, tradition represents the fight for some nonetheless forward-facing stance through social cohesion and historical continuity. Nostalgia withdraws, while tradition soldiers on.

The Nutcracker in performance at Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier. Sasha Onyshchenko for Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal.

Personally, I have three Christmas traditions that are less an expression of nostalgia for me, and more an articulation of stubborn perseverance.

The first involves attending a performance of Handel’s Messiah. This year, I accomplished this tradition twice, once at Maison Symphonique with the OSM conducted by Rafael Payare, and again the very next day with the Orchestre Classique de Montréal’s annual rendition in the crypt of St. Joseph’s Oratory. Although I have heard this Oratorio dozens of times, the tradition of it ironically immunizes me against menacing forces that lie beyond my control, insulating me from the interminable doomscroll.

My second holiday tradition is to see The Nutcracker, the ballet choreographed to Tchaikovsky’s renowned suite. I ticked this one off my holiday list on opening night thanks to a luxurious performance by Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal at Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier.

This tradition has its origins in early childhood, when my parents took me and I would inevitably fall asleep during the first half, the kaleidoscopic visual aesthetics and hypnotic sonic rhythms lulling me in my comfortable auditorium seat with abundant winter heating into near-narcotic repose. Now, it is a new Christmas tradition to watch other people’s children slumbering through the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy.

Third and likely counterintuitive is my annual screening of The Shining. More than It’s a Wonderful Life, Kubrick’s masterpiece is a Christmas movie par excellence. Don’t @ me.

Plus, this particular holiday tradition I realized just now speaks most directly to the concept itself of nostalgia versus tradition. “The nostalgia of The Shining,” writes Fredric Jameson in a 1981 essay, “takes the peculiar form of an obsession with the last period in which class consciousness is out in the open.” Jack Torrance is an avatar embodying the return of the repressed, now manifesting in the MAGA movement’s nostalgic preoccupation that in effect has underpinned capitalism’s violence in every one of its miserable iterations.

Through the exercise of tradition, I identify three important impulses: chemistry, preservation, and ritual. Chemistry precipitates a reaction and must be performed in a similar way every time to produce the desired result. Something like baking Christmas cookies. Preservation — words in print or music on vinyl — ensures the recognition of vital forms of sociocultural memory and the immediacy of material presence. And ritual, like decorating trees, is the irrational incantation of magic that serves to reorder chaos, just as the moon’s gravity reorders the ocean’s turbulence here on earth.

While pragmatic in function, these three impulses supersede logic and transcend analysis. And yet we analyse. Because it is tradition.

Instead of viewing nostalgia as a net negative, I prefer to interpret it as a harbinger of revolution. Nostalgia always precedes the triumph of the impossible. Traditionally, we tend to go back just before breaking through. Tradition is immanence anticipated. It resists melancholia, decline, failure. The antidote for simulation is reality, if even reality relived.

This is why I routinely revisit The Messiah, The Nutcracker, and The Shining — and Christmas baking and holiday entertaining and Martha Stewart. Not out of sentimentality for some bygone past, but rather, with a hope that the future, unshackled through chemistry, preservation, and ritual from the past, will once again achieve its traditional greatness.◼︎

Cover image: Bernardo Betancor photographed by Sasha Onyshchenko for Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal.

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Massive Lectures

The Underground City

“The underground press serves as the only effective counter to a growing power, and more sophisticated techniques used by establishment mass media to falsify, misrepresent, misquote, rule out of consideration as a priori ridiculous, or simply ignore and blot out of existence: data, books, discoveries that they consider prejudicial to establishment interest.”
—William S. Burroughs, 1979.

In 1995, a critic and academic called Paul Mann published an essay entitled “Stupid Undergrounds” in the May issue of the journal Postmodern Culture.

In it, Mann takes a caustic and distant view toward his objects of inquiry: scenes like “renegade churches, dwarf communities, no-risk survivalist enclaves, unfunded quasi-scientific research units, paranoid think tanks, unregistered political parties, sub-employed workers councils, endo-exile colonies, glossolaliac fanclubs, acned anorexic primal hordes.”

Mann’s list goes on. He proceeds with remarkable contradiction to at once lampoon and champion these subcultural epiphenomena, simultaneously attacking and defending the high-minded critical-theoretical fascination with them. “Why,” Mann asks sarcastically, would we “wade through these piles of nano-shit?”

An unkind but fair question.

The underground is a generic designation that we habitually take for granted to denote everything in contrast to popular culture. Underground to the majority of us characterizes minorities of us. Unpopular or underrated or misunderstood or underrepresented or deliberately unfashionable pursuits come under the aegis of the underground. The term goes back thematically a long way.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky in 1864 publishes the novella Notes from Underground which begins with the line, “I am a sick man…” The underground for Dostoyevsky symbolizes refuge, an oppositional and often dark place positioned in comparison to the bright, clean, and implicitly artificial superficial world.

Jules Verne’s novel of the same year, Journey to the Center of the Earth, chronicles Professor Otto Lidenbrock and his nephew, Axel, who embark upon an odyssey into a subterranean Icelandic world full of prehistoric creatures and perilous adventures. The underground for Verne is a fantastic and limitless expanse that stimulates and challenges the imagination.

Roughly a century later, Bob Dylan’s 1965 album Bringing it all Back Home features the song “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” which contains the lyric, “Better jump down a manhole / Light yourself a candle.” The underground for Dylan is a line of flight from the melancholy that begins to exemplify the 1960s counterculture’s response to modernity.

30 years on, The Prodigy’s 1994 album Music for the Jilted Generation opens with a sample from the 1992 film The Lawnmower Man, in which Dr. Lawrence Angelo, the mad scientist character whom Pierce Brosnan portrays, says, “So, I’ve decided to take my work back underground — to stop it falling into the wrong hands.” The underground for Angelo, and by extension for Liam Howlett, represents a site of resistance, a secretive space in which one can hone experimental pursuits without enemy infiltration and interference.

The contemporaneous science fiction film 12 Monkeys depicts a dystopian near future in which a deadly virus forces earth’s survivors to retreat underground. For Terry Gilliam, the filmmaker, the underground is a location that offers escape from peril and certain death.

For the past three decades, the underground has thrived in a zombie-like state, percolating while never boiling over as it did during the 1970s with punk, or the 1990s with rave — or the 1960s with psychedelia, or the 1860s with fantastic literature.

The task today of some artists is to grow up from the underground as seedlings flourish from the dirt. Others purposefully embed themselves underground to attain some ideal of legitimacy, rejecting conventional earmarks of success such as revenue and reputation. Ascension from the underground for the latter ostensibly requires an intolerable wager that sacrifices certain inalienable ideals like artistic freedom and authenticity, compelling corporate and political compromises, otherwise known as selling out.

To those corporate and political interests, the underground is most frequently viewed as a field to mine for surplus cultural and capital value. Enthusiasts of underground music and art tend to be more passionate and vocal than mainstream fans, becoming loyal advocates and lifelong supporters of their favourite musicians and artists. There is cultural significance to being an early adopter, just as there is financial advantage in purchasing stock in a fledgling company before it gains marketplace dominance. Treasure is buried underground, and one must only unearth it to extract and maximize its worth.

We must think beyond the underground’s traditional dichotomies of high and low, centre and margin, power and defiance to power. The antagonistic impulse that once chose to venture further out, and then further back, is now choosing to go further downward.

The question arises of whether a truly revolutionary underground can exist in the internet age when social media idealizes ever-increasing impressions, followers, likes, shares. Algorithms cannot understand nor correct for intentional niche-ness. It is counterintuitive for the underground press — a publication like NicheMTL — to attempt to shed light on underground artists as well as itself via these technical means while remaining underground.

A revaluation of value becomes necessary to perform the underground. In a post-capitalist framework, we must be careful not to reimpose the binary coordinates of success and failure, popularity and unpopularity, profitability and worthlessness. The measure of value in the underground is contradictory to its shallow analogue. Less is more.

The ultimate limit of the underground is, of course, the burial ground, the graveyard, not where life springs forth but where dead things are laid to rest. Underground is where we repress, discard, and recycle that which has outlived its welcome at surface level. As such, the underground is also where haunting originates. Perhaps this spectre subconsciously prompted Paul Mann’s scorn, preferring to reject undergrounds as stupid rather than accept them as sacred.

The underground is anti-mid. It is concerned only with life at its most nascent and very latest stages. Shoots emerge to break new ground. They inevitably wither and die and fall back into the soil and the cycle begins again. We wade through these gardens of nano-shit with delight.

Underground is a mode to embrace the fertile, the fundamental, the infinite.◼︎

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