Category Archives: Play Recent

NicheMTL’s signature column rounding up the city’s latest avant-garde.

Play Recent

Trick Rider

Sonya Derviz, Hover, Bradley Ertaskiran, 22 January – 7 March 2026

Sonia Derviz, Near, 2025. Oil and Charcoal on Linen, 200 x 240 cm. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.
—I Peter 5:8

Ghosts don’t have to be dead to haunt us.

The OED’s earliest definitions of the verb “to haunt” have nothing to do with unseen or immaterial forces. The first listed Middle English meanings, dating from around 1230 to 1588, simply denote: “To practice habitually, familiarly, or frequently; to use or employ habitually or frequently.”

Consequently, our habits haunt us. The things we use, consume, ingest, imbibe, and inhale haunt us. Haunting is a variation of recognition and frequency that helps us navigate the world.

Especially breath is associated with ghosts. One of ghost’s many synonyms, the word “Spirit,” is defined primarily as, “the animating or vital principle in humans and animals; that which gives life to the body, in contrast to its purely material being; the life force, the breath of life.”

Ghosts are merely traces, either material or immaterial, that evoke some living presence. Any persevering impression can be ghostly. A hair in the sink. The smell lingering on a pillowcase. A shadow. An echo. A tendril of smoke hovering in thin air. That which is irresolute and unresolved; that which is sensed but cannot be grasped; that which is stubbornly persistent; that which is more than nothing, but barely; that which is discerned and cannot be ignored.

Ghosts frequent and use and practice haunting in order to cheat death and endure.

Betty Pomerleau, Half Hitch, Pangée, 29 January – 7 March 2026

Betty Pomerleau, gallery view, Pangée. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Haunting, then, can be construed as a failed mourning. It is about refusing to give up the ghost or — and this can sometimes amount to the same thing — the refusal of the ghost to give up on us. The spectre will not allow us to settle into/ for the mediocre satisfactions one can glean in a world governed by capitalist realism.”
—Mark Fisher, “Not Giving Up the Ghost”

A possible future sliding out of view is an example of a living ghost. A broken promise. A missed opportunity. Unused potential. Unrealized immanence. We mourn some and celebrate others.

Because there are infinite lost futures, we live constantly amongst their ghosts. Frayed strands and knotted threads, they accumulate like clusters of dust and periodically must be swept away.

But still, some traces remain.

Totem Électrique XIX, Salle Bleue | Edifice Wilder, 29 January 2026

Jean-François Laporte performs at Totem Électrique, Espace Bleue | Edifice Wilder, 29 January 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“This rhythm is your world. It is the world as you contract it, almost in the sense in which you contract a condition, and exactly in the sense you contract a habit.”
—Brian Massumi, “Tell Me Where Your Pain Is”

The oscillations of resemblance and change that our world undergo constitute our experience of time. Think of the alternating periods of power of opposing political parties in the United States.

The modern neoliberal era began with Ronald Reagan’s ascension to the White House, followed by George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, and the first Trump tenure. Democrats Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden provided a contrapuntal sense of forward momentum otherwise known as progress to these Republicans’ periodic backward-facing impulses.

Trump’s slogan, Make America Great Again, is the most explicit appeal to a regressive cultural impetus, promising amelioration through reversal, better living through resurrection, the ultimate haunting. The problem is that the past cannot be reintroduced into the future without fundamentally rupturing both past and future.

Similarly in Quebec, the spectre of sovereignty in 2026 summons a noxious rhythmic nostalgia to 1980 and 1995, punctuated by gestures to Réné Lévesque, Jacques Parizeau, and Lucien Bouchard. I claim that Parti Québécois leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon’s suggestions of a third referendum are less about making Quebec independent and more about resuscitating a mythic history that never came to pass, moving into the future by rewriting the past.

That these oscillations are decreasing in frequency in Quebec and increasing in the United States suggests an arrythmia in the heart of global progress.

Matthew Feyld, Blouin | Division, 30 January – 21 March 2026

Matthew Feyld, Untitled, CP-04-26, 2025/2026, Acrylic and pigment on linen over panel, 20.3 x 20.3 cm. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Yet here’s a spot.”
—Lady Macbeth, The Tragedy of Macbeth

I once lived in a hundred-year-old house whose interior must have been repainted every ten or so years. In various places on the stairs, cracks and layers in the paint became visible. For instance, a pale pink gave way to whitewashed teal, and on top, a chocolate brown. Every decade was represented by a radically different choice in colour. My experience of time swelled whilst living in this house because I was constantly made aware of its history.

The house is gone now, demolished during Covid. And yet, I recall the thickness and specific order of these layers of coloured paint.

The Orchestra According to Duke Ellington and Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, Maison Symphonique, 22 January 2026

Hankyeol Yoon conducts the OSM at Maison Symphonique, 22 January 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“And if you’re on a horse trick riding in the mud and rain,
Can’t expect me to watch or ask me to explain.”
—Gord Downie, “Trick Rider”

It is no secret that I was once an unrepentant drinker of alcohol and drug user. These habits I imagined constituted fundamental facets of my personality. I used alcohol and drugs to assert my selfhood in opposition to the status quo. Normal, I thought, was boring. My experience of reality unfolded parallel to the experiences and realities of sober people. These substances were undoubtedly spirits that haunted me, although it is debatable whether I was the ghost or its nightly host.

Whenever I contemplated giving up drugs and drink, I feared that I would at once lose my singular sense of character, that I would suddenly become less interesting, more uniform, less unique. ‘How will I ever be able to socialize / be creative / stand out from the crowd without intoxicants?’ I wondered to myself.

Now that some distance exists between me and those habits, I ask myself the opposite question: How was I ever able to socialize / be creative / stand out with them?◼︎

Thank you for inviting NicheMTL to your thing. Please get in touch at the about page.

NicheMTL is Montreal’s independent not-for-profit source for this city’s most niche arts and culture. If you love what you’re reading, please consider buying a yearbook and subscribing.

Cover image: From left: Megan Bradley, Tiffany Le, and Jean-Michael Seminaro documenting Sonya Derviz’s Hover at Bradley Ertaskiran, 23 January 2026.

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Play Recent

King of the ‘Z’s

Dexter Barker-Glenn, First Water, Centre CLARK Room 2, 16 January – 28 February 2026

Patrons visit the vernissage of Dexter Barker-Glenn’s First Water at Centre CLARK, 16 January 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“It is all the more necessary to talk about art now that there is nothing to say about it.”
—Jean Baudrillard, “Art… Contemporary of Itself.” (2003)

In the 2016 BBC documentary film HyperNormalization, director Adam Curtis profiles the businessman and performance artist Vladislav Surkov, who between 2013 and 2020 acted as something of a mafia consigliere to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Curtis notes that Surkov’s tactics were designed to deceive and inveigle western leaders and even Russian citizens into questioning their veracity.

Surkov “will fuel conspiracy theories,” suggests Curtis in an interview with The Guardian, “but that’s not new. His particular genius has been to let people know that is what he is doing. So, whatever you see in the news: you just don’t know if it is ‘true’ or not.”

In an era characterized by an insatiable appetite for information, it is important to underline that information and truth are not commensurate.

The cynical endgame of Surkov’s strategy was to sow the seeds of confusion and engender a feeling of fragility both abroad and at home. A populace that doesn’t know what their government is doing, the logic goes, still possesses more agency than a population that does but doesn’t understand how or why. Disorientation as state policy is a more effective social control mechanism than repression by force.

Emanuel Ax Plays Beethoven, Maison Symphonique, 15 January 2025

Emanuel Ax performs with the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal at Maison Symphonique, 15 January 2026. ©️ Robert Torres for the OSM.

« Soyez réalistes, demandez l’impossible »
—Attributed to Bernard Cousin, 1968.

When François Legault this week announced his resignation as leader of the political party he founded, observers quickly pointed out that the timing of the move, but not the move itself, was the surprise. With approval ratings hovering below 25 percent — less than half of Justin Trudeau’s when he resigned as Canadian Prime Minster — Legault was widely expected to concede the race before October’s Provincial elections. But as recently as 10 January, four days before he abdicated the throne, The Montreal Gazette’s Robert Libman reported that Legault insisted that he planned to remain.

It may be a stretch to envision Legault taking a page from Surkov’s playbook. Likely it was more Legault himself and not the general public of Quebec that was unsure of his next moves. But the results are the same. Saying one thing and doing the exact opposite disorients us and undermines public trust in our leaders and institutions. It also allows Legault himself to spin the narrative around his legacy in his favour.

Rather than accept a democratic loss, Legault has engineered a despotic sacrifice, falling on his proverbial sword, a victim rather than the perpetrator of circumstance. History favours the winners. But it also looks more generously upon those who didn’t lose.

Paul Nadeau, Like You, 5455 av. De Gaspé, 16-18 January 2026

Gallery view of Paul Nadeau’s Like You at 5455 av. De Gaspé. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“It is precisely when nature philosophy becomes politically useful that it ceases to be itself.”
—Brian Massumi, “Too-Blue: Color-Patch for an Expanded Empiricism.”

The 1982 cult comedy short entitled King of the ‘Z’s, written and directed by NYU students Karl Tiedemann and Stephen Winer and starring Calvert “Larry ‘Bud’ Melman” DeForest, who would all go on to work for the late night talk show host David Letterman, was a mockumentary predating Rob Reiner’s This is Spinal Tap that depicted Vespucci Pictures, a fictious Hollywood movie studio that succeeded in making the best worst movies. In the tradition of The Producers, Vespucci turned a profit from making flops. Some of the film’s classic adages include, “Save a buck, make a buck,” and “Where money is king and art is no object.”

There is perverse virtue in setting a goal to fail and achieving it.

Quinton Barnes with Fiver, Casa del Popolo, 10 January 2026

Quinton Barnes performs at Casa del Pololo 10 January 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

It matters less to powerful actors who is really in charge than to be reassured that power always is. Political leaders are like gun parts — interchangeable and infinitely replicable and deadly when assembled.

Not Conformed: Four Women Carving Time, SBC Gallery, 15 January – 7 March 2026

Gallery view of Antonietta Grassi’s Modulations at SBC Gallery, 15 January 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Nothing haunts this eternal instant, no ghosts rattle their chains.”
—Grafton Tanner, Foreverism

The mood of a post-modernity governed by machines is several orders beyond the dystopian sense that no alternative exists to the neoliberal socioeconomic order. Capitalist realism has given way to capitalist surrealism, capitalist horror, capitalist absurdity, capitalist tragedy, and paint-by-numbers-capitalism, among other subdivisions of genre.

The notion that collective control trumps individual intervention seems quaint in today’s world where we have acknowledged that Artificial Intelligence has assumed command of vast and sweeping decision-making processes. A sensation of powerlessness ensues as we witness the human agents to whom we have entrusted power handing what remains over to fad gadgets.

This has happened before. In 1940, IBM, an American company that ostensibly opposed the fascist rise taking place across Europe, established a subsidiary in Holland called Watson Bedrijfsmachine Maatschappij. In 1941, IBM in America sent Holland 132 million punch cards. In a Hollerith facility, those cards were punched and sorted, effectively condemning Dutch Jews to deportation, and ultimately, for extermination. The subsidiary’s expenditures, according to IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black, amounted to $522,709.03, nearly $11.5 million in today’s dollars, and was merged into the company’s New York ledger under the heading of “Other.”

The contemporary opening of A.I. to military applications reiterates this history and is the subject of a new book by Nick Srnicek called Silicon Empires: The Fight for the Future of AI. “Our period is characterized by competing hegemonic visions between a neoliberal globalization on the one hand and Manichean visions of the global order on the other hand,” writes Srnicek, “and we are in desperate need of alternatives.”

However, our imaginings of what those alternatives might look like have been systematically suppressed — not least by a retreat into immersive entertainment. It is easier to imagine the finnisage than the end of capitalism.

The bureaucratic banality of genocide obscures its shock value. But its rebranding as art aestheticizes it.◼︎

Thank you for inviting NicheMTL to your thing. Please get in touch at the about page.

NicheMTL is Montreal’s independent not-for-profit source for this city’s most niche arts and culture. If you love what you’re reading, please consider buying a yearbook and subscribing.

Cover image: Gallery view, Dexter Barker-Glenn, First Water, Centre CLARK.

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Vibe Code: NicheMTL’s top eleven albums of 2025

Since launching NicheMTL in 2022, a number of people have asked why we don’t publish straight-up album reviews. The simple answer is that in the age of digital reproduction, when anyone can access any record at any time, there is no reason to spill ink (itself an anachronistic phrase because who actually spills ink?) describing the obvious, locating the ubiquitous.

NicheMTL functions more like an awards show in which it is an honour just to be nominated. If it is included on our website or in print, you can assume and rest assured that it is worth investigating. Like everyone, we have our favourites. But to rank them would be crass.

Tastes are unscientific. There may be aesthetic or formal criteria that inform them. But ultimately, you either like something or you don’t. Suffice to say, there is more likeable — lovable, even — made-in-Montreal culture than we have the time or resources to showcase.

Nonetheless, we try our best to create a niche to highlight some of the outstanding work that Montreal’s artists produce, a space to shed light on the underrepresented and the underground.

NicheMTL’s in-house criteria loosely fall into two categories: what is interesting and what is important. Interesting is an aesthetic, qualitative judgement, and important is a formal, ideological, and quantitative one. We love artists who make art that engages in some ongoing conversation while standing apart from it. We additionally love artists who have some kind of vital statement to make. It doesn’t have to be grand. The personal is always political.

With this in mind, we are pleased to present NicheMTL’s second annual unranked list of our favourite albums produced in Montreal over the past 12 months. And rather than the customary top ten, this year, as an obvious nod, the list goes up to 11.

Alicia Clara, Nothing Dazzled (Self-Released)

As delicate as a fawn on ice or a new love, Clara’s voice set against soft distorted guitars and dreamy acoustic shoegaze is an antidote for contemporary life’s often uncompromising cruelty.

Alicia Clara features on the NicheMTL Compilation CD that accompanies our 2025 yearbook.

Fine Food Market, I’m afraid to be in love with someone who crashes their car that much (Arbutus Records)

The effervescent weightlessness of a melancholy pedal steel haunts this album of sonic still-life pop portraits and propels Sophie Perras’s youthful compositions to stratospheric heights.

Fine Food Market is spotlighted in the August 4th, 2024, edition of Play Recent.

Nikolas L.B., Tales from the Balance Wheel (Self-Released)

The skilful songwriting and familiar harmonic vernacular of Nikolas L.B.’s recordings are modern and timeless simultaneously, both startlingly fresh and reminiscent of some distant history.

Nikolas L.B. features on the NicheMTL Compilation CD that accompanies our 2025 yearbook.

Boutique Feelings, Shwaya, Shwaya (Mothland)

Recombinant plunderphonic textures characterize Karim Lakhdar’s debut solo album and revise an ambitiously progressive new musical form of hybrid Hip Hop, Funk, and Northern Touch Soul.

Read the NicheMTL interview with Karim Lakhdar.

Quinton Barnes, Black Noise (Watch that Ends the Night Records)

Barnes possesses the ability to assemble the community’s best and brightest, weaving together a tapestry of Montreal’s most innovative musicians while casting himself as the throughline.

Read the NicheMTL interview with Quinton Barnes, who performs at Système x NicheMTL 26 March 2026.

Egyptian Cotton Arkestra, Time & Place (Watch that Ends the Night Records)

Attempts to face up to our colonial history too often manifest in hollow gestures and over-planned tokenism when an improvisatory approach might prove more apropos and effective.

Egyptian Cotton Arkestra features on the NicheMTL Compilation CD that accompanies our 2025 yearbook.

Jessica Moss, Unfolding (Constellation Records)

Jessica Moss trades in uneasy anticipation and mourning future loss with beautiful and troubled results that at once agitate and assuage the gnawing responsibilities of witnessing this moment.

Read the NicheMTL interview with Jessica Moss.

Nadah El Shazly, Laini Tani (Backward Music)

Encounters with strangers engender fascination and fear, neither warranted nor rational, until the exotic experience is naturalized and intwined with domesticity and accepted custom.

Nadah El Shazly is spotlighted in the March 24th, 2024, edition of Play Recent.

Esse Ran, Off Program (Humidex Records)

The trancelike state of ecstatic dance to miniscule modulations in rhythmic repetition has long been known to insulate human subjects from corporeal corruption and vibrational decay.

Read the NicheMTL interview with Félix Gourd.

Corporation, Tableaux du doute (Danse Noir)

Directional movement animates societal change and prompts the rejection of nostalgia and hyper-static inertia, coaxing evolution into novel and unanticipated cultural territories.

Corporation features on the NicheMTL Compilation CD that accompanies our 2025 yearbook.

Orchestroll, Corrosiv (29 Speedway)

Acerbic wit is an effective strategy and has not until now been persuasively deployed to counter Leviathan control society and the Artificial Intelligence dystopia that our tech overlords proffer.

Choose life.

Read the NicheMTL interview with Orchestroll.◼︎

Thank you for inviting NicheMTL to your thing. Please get in touch at the about page.

NicheMTL is Montreal’s independent not-for-profit source for this city’s most niche arts and culture. If you love what you’re reading, please consider buying a yearbook and subscribing.

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The Immediate Data of Consciousness

Solitary Dancer, “Mi Sueño,” SDIII (Y-3000)

“The parts of our duration are one with the successive moments of the act which divides it; if we distinguish in it so many instants, so many parts it indeed possesses; and if our consciousness can only distinguish in a given interval a definite number of elementary acts, if it terminates the division at a given point, there also terminates the divisibility.”
—Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory.

What is ‘now?’

The question more accurately formed might be, ‘when is now?’ Or, even more precisely, ‘how long is now?’ When does the present turn into the past? At what point does the future become ‘now?’ And how long does ‘now’ last?

Can ‘now’ change history?

These might seem like merely speculative questions. But the implications of contemplating them and the partiality of their possible answers reveal profound consequences. It is not just semantic.

Quantifying ‘now’ is the genesis of our notion of time. Duration is what defines movement. Time is what determines value. And value is how we measure what is important.

Yuki Isami, Rives, Maison de la culture du Plateau-Mont-Royal, 29 November 2025

Yuki Isami performs at Maison de la culture du Plateau-Mont-Royal, 29 November 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“The things of this world, that seem so transitory to philosophers, are not continuous. They are composed of discrete atoms, no doubt Boscovichian points. The really continuous things, Space, and Time, and Law, are eternal.”
—C.S. Peirce, Reasoning and the Logic of Things.

Sigmund Freud in 1925 penned an essay on a newfangled contraption called the Mystic Writing Pad — essentially a rudimentary Etch A Sketch-like surface which could be written upon and erased ad infinitum. He found this device interesting for a few reasons.

The Mystic Writing Pad consists of a slab of wax resin with two sheets covering it: one made of celluloid, and the second of wax paper. The writer uses a stylus to imprint script onto the surface of the two sheets, leaving an impression in the resin rather than a trace on its surface. The two sheets can be detached from the resin slab whenever the writer wants to erase the Pad’s contents.

Freud notes that writing on paper in ink exhausts the capacity of the writing surface. Before long, as the writer takes more and more notes, pages and books and volumes are filled, and the writer needs to acquire new pages, books, volumes upon which nothing has yet been written.

The Mystic Writing Pad, however, offers Freud an “unlimited receptive capacity” for the extension of memory into the present. If the note you took is no longer of use, or you desire to discard it, you can simply wipe it away and start anew.

Freud uses the Mystic Writing Pad as a metaphor for perception consciousness.

“The unconscious,” writes Freud, “stretches out feelers … towards the external world and hastily withdraws them as soon as they have sampled the excitations coming from it.” The frequency with which our conscious mind erases experience, just as the writer detaches and thus erases the Mystic Writing Pad’s pages, is, for Freud, “the origin of the concept of time.”

However, Freud notes that even when the two surface sheets are raised, the wax resin layer retains a permanent trace of the writing. The more the writer writes on the pad, the deeper and more chaotic and palimpsestic these inscriptions become.

Traces & Returns, Galerie JANO, 3 December 2025

Pascale Jean, “If I Could Hear Your Texts.” 2024. Oil on Canvas. 30 x 40″. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Fact and past are not interchangeable, nor is their relationship primarily one that points from the writer’s present into the object’s past.”
—Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other.

We all have both subjective and objective experiences of time. Sometimes time appears to drag. At other times, time leaps ahead as if some unseen force spurs it on.

Time when we are young seems comparatively slow because we have lived less time against which to compare new time. As we age, time seems to fly by as the experience of time and our familiarity with its passing accumulate.

The clock empirically measures out time, apparently reminding us of our faulty perceptive faculties when set against mechanical and digital rhythms. And while time may go on forever, we are all aware that we do not. And so, time as it passes becomes more valuable in its increasing scarcity.

Quatuor Molinari, Rhythmes canadiens, Conservatoire de musique de Montréal, 5 December 2025

Quatuor Molinari perform at the Conservatoir de musique de Montréal, 5 December 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“…the smallest unit of matter is the fold, not the point. Each fold, being connected to the entire plane, has a point of view on the whole…”
—Laura Marks, Enfoldment and Infinity.

Time is the operating system upon which our lives unfold.

The hyper-capitalist obsession with time management and leisure time indicates that time is no longer money; time is far more valuable than any monetary currency. We cannot reliably exchange our labour time for money anymore since the work bubble has burst rendering labour practically worthless.

Time has subdivided into such infinitesimal units as to give the illusion of continuity.

Corporation, “Sa dent douce à la mort,” Tableaux du doute (Danse Noir)

“…the method of intuition owes everything it is to duration.”
—Valentine Moulard-Leonard, Bergson-Deleuze Encounters.

Two polarities of temporal progression exist in tension: one based upon the concept of causality, and the other upon free will. At one end of the spectrum, events occur in succession because of an arbitrary but causative link. This and then that.

At the other end, some form of conscious agency acts as the causal force encouraging progress and fashioning outcomes according to intelligence and design. That because of this.

Intelligence deploys a number of strategies. Natural selection implies that the most successful of these strategies become standard.

Rationality as a strategy seems to have worn out its usefulness, though, given that ostensibly rational will brought us to this moment. Intuition succeeds rationality as a radical alternative, cleaving causality and free agency into arrays of chance.

Only time will tell. But given more time, time inevitably tells another story.◼︎

Thank you for inviting NicheMTL to your thing. Please get in touch at the about page.

NicheMTL is Montreal’s independent not-for-profit source for this city’s most niche arts and culture. If you love what you’re reading, please consider buying a yearbook and subscribing.

Cover image: The McGill Islamic Studies Library. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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Galaxy Brain

Grand Concert Anniversaire UdeM x SMCQ, Salle Claude-Champagne, 15 November 2025

Artist Véronique Girard and the composer Maxime Daigneault. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Is not Rome still Rome
Is not Los Angeles still Los Angeles
Are these really the last days of the Roman Empire
Is not beauty still beauty
And truth still truth
Are there not still poets
Are there not still lovers
—Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Time of Useful Consciousness

In advance of the publication of my first book, Mad Skills, my publisher Repeater Books and I devised a promotional campaign of publicity, ads, and memes to be deployed across social media. To that end, we designed a take on the popular “Galaxy Brain” meme, in which text captions accompany four image panels depicting increasingly illuminated human craniums.

The first caption read, “Discussing People;” the second one, “Discussing Events;” the third, “Discussing Ideas;” and the final galaxy-brain panel declared, “Discussing MIDI.”

2001: A Space Odyssey, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, Maison Symphonique, 19 November 2025

Ben Palmer conducts the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal in performance of the score for 2001: A Space Odyssey, 19 November 2025. Antoine Saito for the OSM.

According to film historians Robert P. Kolker and Nathan Abrams, an earlier and much more explicitly absurd treatment for Stanley Kubrick’s black comedy masterpiece Dr. Strangelove set the movie’s beginning in outer space, recounting the story from the perspective of an alien species that discovers Planet Earth shortly after a nuclear holocaust has exterminated all human life. Had this version of the picture been made, the first title card to scroll onscreen would have read: “Nardac Blefescu Presents … A MACRO-GALAXY-METEOR PICTURE,” a nod to Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.

Kubrick had originally titled the film The Delicate Balance of Terror, pilfered, apparently, from a paper of the same name that the American political scientist Albert Wohlstetter wrote in 1958 for the RAND Corporation. Kolker and Abrams note that Kubrick, regarded widely as a genius, had doodled a number of alternate titles for the film before registering Dr. Strangelove with Paramount Pictures — foremost among them, The Secret Uses of Uranus. Kubrick would incorporate these Sci-Fi Easter eggs into not only 2001, but also the ending of the 2001 film A.I. Artificial Intelligence, a story which Kubrick gifted to his friend and protégé Steven Spielberg.

Pulse Mag Issue #2 Launch, Cardinal Tea Room, 20 November 2025

NicheMTL publisher Ryan Diduck and Pulse Mag co-editor-in-chief Eva Rizk reading each other’s magazines. Photographed for NicheMTL.

The zombie apocalypse is not to be taken literally, as if the world should end up like a scene from some George A. Romero film, with the resurrected roaming the earth eating brains and defying death. Rather, the zombie apocalypse is a metaphor for capitalism, in which a non-living entity — capital — feeds on the planet’s life force, growing ever more powerful with the lives that it devours. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Anti-Oedipus refer to this as a “post-mortem despotism,” where an entity that has long-since died continues to exert authoritarian force over the living.

However, capital is not so much undead as it is never-having-lived and therefor can never be killed. Capital, like one of the all-time great cyber-zombie movie villains, on the order of the T-1000 in Terminator 2: Judgement Day, or the HAL-9000 in Kubrick’s 2001, has to be unplugged from its networks of command and control, neutralized. To execute capital, humanity will have to invent and implement radical economies of alternate value and exchange and slowly replace capital as our global operating system. Furthermore, we need to do this without capital reading our lips.

Impedance of the hyper-capitalist economy requires relentless activity in absence of a product, not destruction but non-production.

Hannah Claus, tsi iotnekahtentiónhatie (Tiohtià:ke), Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery, 19 November 2025 – 7 February 2026

Hannah Claus, Watersong (2025). Photographed for NicheMTL.

Outsmarting A.I. is a fruitless strategy because we created Artificial Intelligence to mimic the human mind. The fact that there is an inherent competition between us and our progeny is indicative of the fundamental conflict present in the human dramatic narrative.

We are born to fathers and mothers whom we will replace, and neither side is entirely comfortable with the arrangement. We self-organize in the form of states and immediately rebel against authority. The authoritarian ruler is not free either, because he is condemned to subdue his subjects. Though capital is not alive in any biological sense, neither is it free. It is, in effect, a slave to its own slaves.

To prevail in the conflict against an artificially intelligent adversary requires becoming-beast, a return to an unsentimental, irrational, and savage, operative mode. The antidote to Artificial Intelligence is not human intelligence, but rather, animal instinct.

M For Mothland with Brainwasher, Boutique Feelings, Mulch, Yoo Doo Right, and Annie-Claude Deschênes, 21 November 2025, La Sala Rossa

Boutique Feelings performs as part of M for Mothland at La Sala Rossa, 21 November 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

There is a brief scene early on in Kubrick’s 2001, a seemingly throwaway shot in which a cougar attacks one of the apes. The simian is unsuspectingly drinking at a shallow pond when, out of the blue, the wildcat jumps from an elevated cliff and assaults the hominid, provoking it into mortal combat. Kubrick cuts the scene before the audience sees an outcome to this battle. But it must be assumed that the ape loses.

Ostensibly, this might be Kubrick’s way of reminding the film’s viewers that humans were not always, and may not be again, at the top of the food chain, without natural predators, safe in our domination over the animal kingdom. On a deeper level, it may signify the order of chaos and possibility that the monolithic object directly opposes in its geometric and determinate perfection. The monolith for Kubrick is undoubtedly no less violent than the wildcat, cast down from above onto its innocent victims.

The monolith of 2001 is not a screen. It is not an antenna. It is not a tablet. It is not a commandment. It is not a repository. It is not an archive. It is not a mirror. It is not a machine. It is not a product.

The monolith is pure machine, pure repository, pure product. It represents order over chaos, the ultimate, the infinite, the real structure of violence. That is why it fascinates and terrifies the apes.

It is not the work of an alien. It is a symbol of alienation, alienness.◼︎

Thank you for inviting NicheMTL to your thing. Please get in touch at the about page.

NicheMTL is Montreal’s independent not-for-profit source for this city’s most niche arts and culture. If you love what you’re reading, please consider buying a yearbook and subscribing.

Cover image: Antoine Saito for Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal.

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Dead Cities

Poolgirl with Shunk, G String, and Niivi, Bâtiment 7, 1 November 2025

Poolgirl performs at Bâtiment 7, 1 November 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

In December 2006, Ben’s De Luxe Delicatessen, a landmark restaurant serving Smoked Meat sandwiches and French Fries in an historic Art Deco building at the corner of Metcalfe and de Maisonneuve, permanently closed its doors.

Ben’s had been a Montreal staple for 98 years. Scenes from the classic 1965 National Film Board documentary Ladies Gentlemen…Mr. Leonard Cohen were filmed there. Celebrities like Liberace and Bette Midler had been welcomed as guests. Pierre Trudeau was a regular, as was Jacques Parizeau. It was a place where federalism and separatism fell away, where the two solitudes could put aside their differences and come together over a Cherry Coke.

The staff at Ben’s, many of whom had worked at the deli for over 50 years, joined the CSN union federation in 1995, and went on strike for what would be the last time in the summer of 2006, demanding higher wages and better working conditions. The strike drew on through autumn, and as winter fell, the restaurant’s owner and manager, Jean Kravitz, took the decision to sell the building to SIDEV Realty Corporation.

Following a number of efforts to declare it an historic edifice, Ben’s was demolished in November 2008, and the developer constructed a 16-storey hotel on the site. The restaurant in Le St-Martin Hotel Particulier has been closed for more than a decade.

A Musical Journey with Tawadros and Beethoven, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, Maison Symphonique, 5 November 2025

Joseph Tawadros performs with the OSM, 5 November 2025. Gabriel Fournier for the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal.

Strikes are effective only when they affect everyone equally. If nurses strike, access to healthcare is restricted for all. If teachers strike, education across the board is denied.

When public transportation employees strike, however, it is only those reliant upon public transportation who suffer. Moreover, those who take public transportation are not in any position to deliver on striking workers’ demands. Rather, through direct and indirect means, Opus cards and taxes, we are the ones who pay the costs for public transportation — costs that have been steadily increasing for services that are in rapid decline.

Metros are constantly delayed or go out of service altogether. Refuse and graffiti litter stations. And at most of them, security seems nonexistent. Violent crime in the Montreal metro system increased 80 per cent between 2022 and 2023. Three men this week were charged in the stabbing death of a 42-year-old victim at Place St. Henri. And a woman was allegedly assaulted inside a metro car in October.

STM Board Chairman Éric Alan Caldwell earlier this year lamented the lack of provincial funding for Montreal’s public transit authority, sentiments echoed by then-mayor Valérie Plante. The STM received $258 million less than expected in the CAQ’s most recent budget.

However, Quebec Transport Minister, Geneviève Guilbault, doesn’t rely upon — and consequently isn’t required to care about — Montreal’s public transportation system. If anything, Quebec City politicians privately rejoice when Montreal’s bus and metro-riding population is distressed.

Quebec conceives of Montreal as its economic engine. Perhaps that’s why the province is more intent upon building highways out of it than maintaining trains within it.

If the unions representing bus drivers and maintenance workers want their job actions to be effective, they should interfere with policymakers’ ability to do theirs.

Quatuor Molinari, Musique à voir, Fondation Guido Molinari, 2 November 2025

Quatuor Molinari performs at Fondation Guido Molinari, 2 November 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

If there is one silver lining to the transit strike — or of an event like the wave of flight reductions at U.S. airports — it is that it necessarily enforces a slower pace upon modern life.

Traffic is the impeding power to the futurist ideal of speed, the unrestrained id. Cities are regulated by a circulatory rhythm that accelerates, slows down, and fluctuates at various intervals, depending upon the flows of traffic — on foot, in cars, in transit, in flight.

The transfer of one form of traffic into another upsets the metropolitan temporal equilibrium and imposes a different timetable upon urban space. Time thickens when we are forced to throttle our maximum velocity.

Angela Grauerholz, La femme 100 têtes, Blouin|Division, 8 November 2025

Patrons gather for the launch of La Femme 100 têtes by Angela Grauerholz, 8 November 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Labour unions so far have failed to anticipate or reorient themselves towards the real threat to workers: automation. It cannot be long before city bus and metro drivers will become entirely unnecessary, as driverless alternatives exceed human beings in efficiency and reliability.

Waymo, the autonomous driving technology company that Google developed, has doubled in size in the past year, and delivered more than 200,000 paid rides per week in 2025 in Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Austin, according to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai.

Autonomous taxis have other advantages. You don’t have to tip or make small talk with the driver. They are not prone to road rage and will never harass a passenger. And robots don’t go on strike. The degeneration of human behaviour is the biggest argument for the embrace of artificial intelligence.

David Altmejd, Agora, Galerie de l’UQAM, 6 November 2025 – 17 January 2026

Gallery view of David Altmejd, Agora, Galerie de l’UQAM. Photographed for NicheMTL.

It is possible that human beings, in our arrogance, will drastically reduce our own usefulness, if not strike ourselves out of existence. We have operated, for the past century at least, under the assumption that the future, benefited by the acceleration of technological advancement, would be indisputably better, and have been disappointed and despondent when it hasn’t. The question, however, is, for whom should the future improve?

If it is for human beings, then me might do well to recalibrate our expectations and ameliorate some of our manners, towards ourselves and one another. This could mean resisting the capitalist impulse to maximize exploitation; to accept less-than-peak profit and speed; to reallocate and share rather than colonize and contest our limited spaces.

The seemingly likelier and more deserving beneficiary of a better future, though, is non-human. Flora and fauna warrant superior living conditions far more than unionized workers of any occupation. Organic matter merits the right to prosperity in excess of the new class of corporate tech bros.

We will be judged by our treatment of wilder things.◼︎

Thank you for inviting NicheMTL to your thing. Please get in touch at the about page.

NicheMTL is Montreal’s independent not-for-profit source for this city’s most niche arts and culture. If you love what you’re reading, please consider buying a yearbook and subscribing.

Cover image: Joseph Tawadros photographed by Gabriel Fournier for the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal.

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Amethyst Deceivers

Esse Ran, “Mind Scanner,” Off Program (Humidex Records)

Félix Gourd aka Esse Ran performs at Parquette, 11 October 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Dreams are today’s answers to tomorrow’s questions.”
―Edgar Cayce

“Don’t let the little fuckers generation gap you.”
―William Gibson

Sooner or later, newer iterations will replace everyone.

The next generation has traditionally been understood as a de facto improvement upon its predecessors. But other than The Godfather Part II and Fletch Lives, what sequels have exceeded the quality of their originals? The film franchise of the American presidency is a case-in-point that 2.0 does not indicate a progression towards perfection.

The inevitability of replacement is cause for perennial concern as we fret over posterity. Fortunately, the future of techno, still the most forward-oriented musical form, seems to be in capable hands.

Irene F. Whittome, I am Here, Fondation Guido Molinari, 9 October – 10 December 2025

Irene F. Whittome « Histoire naturelle » (detail). Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Let your mercy spill
On all these burning hearts in hell
If it be your will
To make us well.”
—Leonard Cohen, “If It Be Your Will”

Recognizing patterns is a fundamental survival strategy. Remembering, for example, where food is found, or what the air smells like before a storm, can guide and protect us. All of life fits some pattern; there is no such thing as a random event. Zoom out far enough and you will see that what we perceive as chaos or chance is in fact divine design.

Daniel Lanois, Théâtre Maisonneuve, 5 October 2025

Daniel Lanois performs at Théâtre Maisonneuve, 5 October 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Flesh is the surface interface of a complex and messy machine known as the body. It at once conceals and reveals what lies beneath it. Being our largest organ, skin is the site upon which corporeal operation is located.

We conceive of and make our machines accordingly, knobs and buttons functioning as smooth superficial control panels for intricate and impenetrable devices. Who knows what goes on beneath an iPhone screen?

The only time carnal and machinic background processes rupture the exterior is when they malfunction. The glitch is a confrontation with restless activity and existential agitation.

Brahms & Dvořák: The Splendour of Romanticism, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal with violinist James Ehnes, Maison Symphonique, 25 September 2025

James Ehnes performs with the OSM at Maison Symphonique, 25 September 2025. Antoine Saito for the OSM.

And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes;
And there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying,
Neither shall there be any more pain:
For the former things are passed away.
—Revelation 21:4

On a recent trip to Prague, I had the opportunity to visit the tomb of Antonin Dvořák. It is located at Vyšehrad Cemetary, a short walk from the Basilica of St. Peter and St. Paul, an impressive neo-gothic edifice constructed in the late 19th century, which the Bohemian King Vratislaus II founded 800 years earlier. The grounds of Vyšehrad are immaculately manicured, evidence of attention to detail over the course of millennia.

In North America, we simply don’t have that kind of history. Ours is really Indigenous history, which Europeans sought to obliterate when they arrived on this continent roughly 400 years ago.

Indigenous history was never intended for preservation. Native Americans were largely nomadic and their monuments, like Totem poles, for instance, were deliberately imagined to fall back into the earth. Eternity is a European concept, whereas Indigenous people favoured infinity.

Observing Dvořák’s grave inspired me to theorize why we commemorate the dead, especially those whom we revered in life. Vyšehrad Cemetery contains a large population of notable Czech interments. Somehow, even though I failed to recognize most of the names on the list, this knowledge filled me with an extra sense of reverence.

In the Christian tradition, the conception of Purgatory defines the intermediate state between the death of the physical body and the soul’s salvation. Purgo, the Latin verb, means to cleanse. Purging is a form of purification, and also, when taken to extremes, a compulsive disorder.

Prayer for the dead implies a belief in resurrection, or at least in some kind of afterlife. Almost every culture in the world implicitly assumes that death is not the end. It follows, then, that our universal understanding of time is cyclical. How life after death might occur is a matter for the imagination.

We might rise from the grave like some cheesy zombie movie. Or we might live on in other organic forms, transubstantiating into another kind of matter: flesh decaying into soil; soil nourishing a flower; nectar feeding bees; and honey sweetening someone else’s imminent cup of tea.

Pay your respects to the vultures for they are your future.

Autechre with Nixtrove and Mark Broom, Société des arts technologiques, 24 October 2025

Autechre performs at the SAT, 24 October 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“During the paleotechnic period,” wrote the American historian of technology Lewis Mumford in his foundational book Technics and Civilization, “the increase of power and the acceleration of movement became ends in themselves: ends that justified themselves apart from their human consequences.”

What human consequences could Mumford have imagined from generalized acceleration?

The clock measured time and thus transformed it into an arbitrary unit of exchange.

The railroad enabled movement through space in a condensed period of time, quickening a passenger’s arrival in a new place, thus altering the natural experience and rhythms of travel.

Automated factories sped up the pace of production of consumer goods like cotton and sugar, bronze and steel, oil and gas, regulating the inventory of these commodities in the modern marketplace, thus making their value subject to temporal manipulation.

In the 21st century, we don’t remember or even consider a time before the evaluation of time. We only experience hints of organic duration in the form of unignorable biological cycles. After a period without food, we grow hungry. After a term of pregnancy, new life appears. After a season, snow falls.

The rest of the time, the railway, the factory, and the clock standardize time with increasingly granular precision, producing power by time’s spontaneous creation, and call attention to what Mumford described as the “maladjustment of function.”

More than autumn leaves or breaking glass, nothing makes you aware of the passage of time quite like a ticking metronome.◼︎

Thank you for inviting NicheMTL to your thing. Please get in touch at the about page.

NicheMTL is Montreal’s independent not-for-profit source for this city’s most niche arts and culture. If you love what you’re reading, please consider buying a yearbook and subscribing.

Cover image: Félix Gourd photographed for NicheMTL.

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