Category Archives: Play Recent

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

Play Recent

Monkey Warfare

No Hay Banda, BEAM SPLITTER with Anne-F Jacques & Ryoko Akama, La Sala Rossa, 29 September 2025

Anne-F Jacques & Ryoko Akama perform for No Hay Banda’s 10th season premiereat La Sala Rossa, 29 September 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

The 2006 Canadian film Monkey Warfare, starring the Torontonian writer-director Don McKellar and his late partner Tracy Wright, centres on an ageing couple of radical political militants who spend their days smoking pot, listening to The Fugs, foraging for antiques to peddle online, and ruminating over their heyday committing soft acts of left-wing domestic terrorism.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s most recent feature, One Battle After Another, displays remarkable similarities to McKellar’s film: handlebar-moustached male leads with flawed personalities and difficulties maintaining relationships; attempting to outrun previous misdeeds; the hope bestowed upon a new generation of notably female operatives.

Although their politics align, these films’ ultimate morals could not be further apart. The necessity of violence is the definitive subject at the heart of every revolution.

Don Giovanni, Opéra de Montréal, Salle Wilfrid Pelletier, 30 September 2025

The cast of Don Giovanni take a bow at Salle Wilfrid Pelletier, 30 September 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“…the more consciousness a man possesses the more he is separated from his instincts (which at least give him an inkling of the hidden wisdom of God) and the more prone he is to error. He is certainly not up to Satan’s wiles if even his creator is unable, or unwilling, to restrain this powerful spirit.” —Carl Jung, Answer to Job.

We are constantly at war — evidently with each other, but more frequently with ourselves. We fight to resist our base impulses. We struggle to transcend our animal instincts and become human. Foregoing indulgences and pleasures of the flesh is an archetypal fight. It is not only a moral but furthermore an existential conflict. We battle our inner demons which seek to lead us astray from the straight and narrow path.

Consciousness, then, is an archetypal paradox: consciousness is necessary to discern the difference between what is wrong and what is right; but it is also consciousness that sensibly represses nature’s divine intelligence.

POP Montreal presents Do Make Say Think with Kee Avil, Rialto Theatre, 28 September 2025

Patrons spill out onto the street to perform a “Cellphone Symphony” following Do Make Say Think at the Rialto Theatre, 28 September 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

The problem of why we repeat is a fundamental philosophical question. Once something is done, why bother to do it again?

There are a number of answers, including, but not limited to, compulsion, addiction, and inevitability.

I might be compelled, say, to have lunch even though I had lunch yesterday because food keeps me alive and I love life. I might drink a cup of coffee even though I drank a cup of coffee a few hours ago because caffeine is a habit-forming substance and I am a creature of habit. I might go out to see a beloved band perform again even though I have seen them perform before because I am opportunistic and cannot avoid exploiting any occasion to do so.

Our impulse to repeat is at odds, though, with the longing for novelty and the desire for freshness of experience. And so, we disguise our repetitions. We have a ham sandwich for lunch today because we had a tuna fish sandwich yesterday. We order an espresso in the morning and an allongé in the afternoon. And our favourite bands subtly alter our favourite songs in order to inject them with a sense of surprise, even though we know very well the verse and the chorus.

“We do not disguise because we repress,” writes Gilles Deleuze in Difference and Repetition, “we repress because we disguise, and we disguise by virtue of the determinant centre of repetition.”

Ensemble Urbain, Origines, La Sala Rossa, 21 September 2025

Ensemble Urbain perform at La Sala Rossa, 21 September 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

I have often wondered why, if there is so much vacant space in the world, people feel the need to occupy the same zone.

Humans congregate in cities like magnets draw metal shavings. Everyone wants to live in Paris or London or Berlin or Moscow or Montreal. Fewer people are drawn to Saint-Joseph-de-Sorel.

“New York City,” said the departed comedian Phil Hartman, “is a testament to man’s desire to be stacked on top of other men.”

Africa Fashion, McCord Steward Museum, 25 September 2025 – 1 February 2026

Dr. Christine Checinska introduces Africa Fashion at the McCord Stewart Museum, 24 September 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

A fool’s mouth is his destruction, and his lips are the snare of his soul. —Proverbs 19:7

Beauty, wisdom, virtue, justice, and truth seem to be the predominant preoccupations of the world’s religious doctrines.

About a decade ago, we entered into an historical era that the media dubbed “post-Truth,” in which objective facts took a supporting role to individual opinions and emotional appeals. This new epoch coincided with the first election of the Orange Cheeto in the United States and Britain’s exit from the European Union across the pond.

The universality of truth is implied by its most frequently used form, in the singular. We don’t instruct our children to tell multiple truths. Rather, we implore them to tell the truth. One.

Conversely, falsehoods are plural. Lies. Practically infinite iterations.

Monotheism is the creed that there is only one God. The concept developed in opposition to polytheism in which adherents worshiped multiple deities that governed various aspects of nature and reality. The term originates from the mid-1600s when Henry More, the English theologian, devised it to designate preferential religions and reject substance dualism.

In the 21st century, we tend to perceive and interpret reality through a series of interconnected actors, actants, and networks. This perception encourages an assumption of complexity that the understanding of a singular truth bypasses entirely. The austerity of one truth, one God, and one administration of justice has an inherent and minimal beauty to it. But it does not reflect the structure of the organic world around us, and particularly the world we have constructed.

Multiplicity characterizes technological postmodernity and diversity represents biological fortitude. Both of those assertions are observably true — and they seemingly contradict the world’s religious doctrines.

The notion of multiple truths presupposes that facts are a little different for everyone, like a universal version of Rashomon. Reality has apparently bifurcated exponentially since the turn of the millennium, and those divisions have accelerated following Trump, Covid, and Trump 2.0.

Are we never ever getting back together?◼︎

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 of Elvis, part of Africa Fashion at the McCord Stewart Museum. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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Gratitude

Suzy Lake, Distilling Resistance, Bradley Ertaskiran, 11 September – 1 November 2025

Suzy Lake, Distilling Resistance, Gallery View, Bradley Ertaskiran. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Wise words from the departing
Eat your greens, especially broccoli
Wear sensible shoes
And always say “thank you”
Especially for the things
You never had
—Coil, “Broccoli”

We often conceive of gifts as those things we receive in a state of gratitude, like presents we are given or give to others on special occasions, or special qualities or skills acquired through practice or bestowed upon us by some benevolent force. The words ‘talented’ and ‘gifted’ are used interchangeably to denote an abundance of capability, as in a talented artist or a gifted musician. Universally, we think of gifts as desirable.

But the truly valuable gifts are the ones we received and never asked for, or asked for and never received, or received and never desired. The experiences in life that teach us the most are those we would have never chosen for ourselves.

Josèfa Ntjam, swell of spæc(i)es, Centre PHI, 9 September 2025 – 11 January 2026

Josèfa Ntjam at Centre PHI. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“I’m not a beggar… I’m just a man passing through.”
—The Way of the Pilgrim

Some things we do over and over again in life and seldom have any memory of the individual events. Try to remember what you had for lunch two Sundays ago and it will likely be difficult because you have lunch every day.

Other things, we do only once and remember forever. Traumatic events, for instance, tend to stick with us, to mark us deeply, embedded in memory. Some things we spend a lifetime trying but failing to ever forget.

And some traumas, like bondage or genocide, live on in ancestral recollection, persisting across continents and generations. One lifetime isn’t long enough to heal these wounds.

Marlon Kroll, Travailler ensemble, Galerie Eli Kerr, 13 September – 25 October 2025

Marlon Kroll, Hard Drive, 2025. Pine, manilla paper, rabbit skin glue, nylon, motor, electronics, hardware. 80″ x 74″ x 330″ Photographed for NicheMTL.

And the Lorg God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him.
—Genesis 3:18

“I’ll be what I am
A solitary man”
—Neil Diamond, “Solitary Man”

In 2007, Sean Penn attended the Telluride Film Festival with his directorial feature, Into the Wild, a rather silly picture based upon the 1996 true story of the same name by Jon Krakauer.

In it, main character Chris McCandless, also known as Alexander Supertramp, abandons his family and relinquishes his worldly possessions to travel to Alaska to live an ascetic life. Because he is woefully ill-equipped, Supertramp promptly dies from starvation, but not before arriving at the profound realization that happiness in life is only meaningful when it is shared with others.

The joke amongst the staff that year was that Into the Wild and Soylent Green had the same moral: it’s people.

Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, La damnation de Faust, Maison Symphonique, 17 September 2025

Rafael Payare conducts Andrew Staples, left, and Sir Willard White, right, at Maison Symphonique. Antoine Saito for the OSM.

What’s gonna’ set you free
Look inside and you’ll see
When you’ve got so much to say
It’s called gratitude, and that’s right
—Beastie Boys, “Gratitude”

Everybody spread love (gimme some more)
If you want it, let me hear you say it (gimme some more)
—Busta Rhymes, “Gimme Some More”

Goodness is usually measured by two criteria.

The first is the ability to achieve another desirable outcome. For instance, it is good to work hard because you will in turn make money and in turn be able to afford a comfortable lifestyle, which is good. The goodness of the first action is determined by the functional goodness of the result. We might describe this as pragmatic goodness.

The second type of goodness is goodness for its own sake, goodness for no discernible purpose other than to be good. This type of goodness is often defined in absence of an action — not necessarily doing something good but rather not doing something that might not be good.

When someone cuts you off in traffic, for example, you have the capability and maybe even the right to honk your horn and give the other driver the middle finger. But there is an inherent goodness to not doing those things, a goodness that does not achieve the desirable outcome, such as retribution or revenge, a goodness in absentia, goodness for goodness’ sake. We might describe this as gracious goodness.

As the omnipotent force in the universe, God, or whatever you want to call the law of nature, has the power to strike us down at any moment. But it is good that it usually doesn’t. We might cultivate and practice gracious goodness in our own lives, beginning with ourselves and moving outward into the world at large, doing good by simply not doing.

Elisabeth Perrault & Marion Wagschal, Constantly Shedding, Perpetually Becoming, Pangée, 18 September – 1 November 2025

Marion Wagschal, Colossus, 2016, Oil on canvas, 81″ x 65″ Pangée. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“The real world is not this world of light and colour; it is not the fleshy spectacle which passes before my eyes.”
—Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception

O Give thanks unto the Lord, for he is good: for his mercy endureth forever.
—Psalm 107:1

What is natural might also be described as what is familiar.

Mark Fisher devoted a book-length study to differentiating the weird from the eerie. Neither of these phenomena seem natural to us, and thus they appear unfamiliar. The uncanny, however, is that which is either weird or eerie but also familiar and therefore comparatively natural.

We fill our time with attempts to perceive and interpret space and the things that occupy it, and ourselves in relation to these variables. We judge ourselves and each other upon arbitrary standards that are constructed socially and culturally and are subject to historical change.

One is known by the company one keeps, an age-old adage espouses. So, too, one is identified by their surroundings, the space that they occupy, the things that share that space, and the activities that transpire therein.

This is why gratitude and grace are of utmost importance. Whom or whatever is our company is that which reflects and shapes and constitutes us, that by which we recognize ourselves. And there is no greater gift than self-knowledge.◼︎

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: Suzy Lake, Distilling Resistance, Gallery View, Bradley Ertaskiran. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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Joy & Pain

Alicia Clara, Daydream, Nothing Dazzled (Self-released)

“…dreams are the commonest and universally accessible source for the investigation of man’s symbolizing faculty…”
—Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self.

The year was 2003. I had enrolled for a second time as an undergraduate in university, believing that returning to school and obtaining a liberal education would be the ticket to my success. It was an honest mistake.

I had signed up for a semester-full of introductory courses: Sociology, Latin, Cinema Studies, Symbolic Logic, and Psychology. And it was during one of our first Psych lectures that the young female instructor presented a history of dream interpretation to the class. Our dreams, she said, were viewed differently by various philosophers and psychoanalysts throughout history.

Sigmund Freud, for example, believed that dreams were a combination of repression and wish fulfillment. Carl Jung thought that they served a highly symbolic function, which could only be deciphered through a complex series of relational and interpretational associations.

Or possibly, a cigar was just a cigar, and dreams could simply be the random cataloguing of the day’s conscious events as a librarian might reshelve a stack of unrelated books. One thing was certain, though: dreams undeniably possessed some causal link to current occurrences in everyday life.

Attempting to engage a more-or-less disinterested lecture hall of juvenile scholars, our instructor petitioned us by suggesting things that we might have recently been dreaming about. For instance, a conversation with a friend, or a dispute with a family member. But no one raised their hand.

She then tried to conceive of something more universal that maybe a majority of the class had encountered in our nocturnal reveries. As the United States under its worst president to date had just then invaded Iraq, she suggested that a number of us must have been dreaming lately about war in the Middle East. But again, not a glimmer of sympathy from her audience.

“Come on!” she said incredulously. “You mean to tell me that nobody in this room has been dreaming about Bush?”

Slowly, the class began to erupt in laughter as many of us silently thought, “well, actually…” Indeed, equally as many in attendance might have also been dreaming about Bush’s second in command, Dick.

The Voice of Nature with Beth Taylor, 5ème Salle, 17 August 2025

The mezzo soprano Beth Taylor performs at 5ème Salle with the OSM’s Virée Classique, 17 August 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“The soul of man is like water. First, it comes down from heaven, then it ascends into heaven; and again it must go down to earth in eternal change.”
—Hans Schwarz, On the Way to the Future.

The tension of history is that between a dialectical or upward-and-forward progression and a cyclical or sinusoidal up-and-down succession.

We know from observation and experience that nature passes through seasons in a circular momentum — summer becomes fall, fall winter, winter spring, and eventually summer returns.

But we also hope that the next season, the next year, the next century, will be markedly better in measurable ways — that progress will improve our lives, that technological advances will benefit humanity and unburden us from such antiquated incumbrances as labour and conflict, inequality and injustice.

Or, we look with nostalgia to precedent seasons, years, centuries to lament how much worse life has become, how we appear to have deteriorated and descended from some idealized age.

The disproportionate obsession with either the future or the past always seems to be strongest when the state of the present is at its weakest.

Karma Glider with Shunk and Poolgirl, Casa del Popolo, 5 September 2025

Guitarist Peter Baylis and vocalist Gabrielle Domingue of Shunk perform at Casa del Popolo, 5 September 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

As summer turns into autumn, the tendency is to revert to melancholy retrospection, re-examining the previous season’s satisfying times. There is an equal measure of pleasure and pain to this exercise, one in gratitude for agreeable experiences, the other with a sense of loss and longing for things passed.

“God whispers to us in our pleasures,” writes the theologian C.S. Lewis, “speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”

~Ondes~, Frotae with Ivy Boxall, White Wall Studio, 27 August 2025

Frotae perform at White Wall Studio, 27 August 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

The only constant is change. This is the paradox that confronts us continuously. The steady hum of electricity is merely an artificial distraction from life’s natural chaotic state. The desire to fix events in time — through recording or photography or cinematography or the written word — neglects the obvious and unavoidable truth that we ourselves are different every time we consult these texts. Not only do we never step in the same river twice; each time, the river fails to recognize our feet.

Organ Intermezzi with David Simon, The Church of St. Andrew & St. Paul, 28 August 2025

Organist David Simon performs at the Church of St. Andrew and St. Paul, 28 August 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Images of war saturate our media to such an extent as to desensitize the observer.

We are regularly bombarded with depictions of starving children clamouring to fill a dented metal receptacle with a ladleful of mushy gruel as if viewing this scene one more time will be enough to finally shock those of us fortunate enough not to be on camera into singlehandedly stopping these atrocities.

Of course, none of us want this — independently nor collectively — and none of us enjoy these images or condone them, and none of us can stop them alone. We are condemned, then, to watch them over and over with an increasing feeling of indignant vulnerability and survivor’s guilt. And yet, in order to survive and carry on with our lives we must, to a certain extent, ignore escalating atrocities and implicitly, in doing so, overlook them.

The American critic Susan Sontag in her 2003 essay Regarding the Pain of Others quotes Leonardo da Vinci at length, offering formulaic instructions for painting battle scenes:

Make the conquered and beaten pale, with brows raised and knit, and the skin above their brows furrowed with pain … and the teeth apart as with crying out in lamentation … Make the dead partly or entirely covered with dust … and let the blood be seen by its color flowing in a sinuous stream from the corpse to the dust. Others in the death agony grinding their teeth, rolling their eyes, with fists clenched against their bodies, and the legs distorted.

These could just as easily be directives given to war photographers from brazen if-it-bleeds-it-leads news producers in 2025.

It is relatively easy to portray physical pain. Representing the misery of helplessly witnessing it on an apparently endless loop, not so much.◼︎

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: Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, 27 August 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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Big Shiny Tunes

Sloan with Econoline Crush, Peachfest, Penticton BC, 9 August 2025

Sloan perform in Okanagan Lake Park, Penticton, BC, 9 August 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“The archive has always been a pledge, and like every pledge, a token of the future. To put it more trivially: what is no longer archived in the same way is no longer lived in the same way.”
—Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever

I spent some time in English Canada this summer and in doing so had the opportunity to see a band I’d never seen, Sloan, the celebrated Canadian alternative outfit that dominated MuchMusic throughout the bulk of the 1990s.

I was surprised, despite having never owned a Sloan recording, that I was able to identify hit after remarkable hit. Apparently, these earworms had made an indelible impression upon my memory merely from hearing them over and over. In a time before the internet, before streaming became the dominant way of consuming cultural products, repetition worked.

The archive of the internet in many ways erases or at best flattens memory. Just because every record ever made is available to access at any given second does not mean that we do. And if and when we do, we seldom remember them in the same ways we did during the physical media age.

There exists a theory, Freudian in origin, that archiving is the subconscious reaction to a morbid fear of death. But what to make of the impulse to archive without the intention of ever accessing the archive? Imagine the sheer volume of music that nobody ever listens to filed away on the web. In the record-store days, we called it dead stock. On the internet, let’s call it zombie inventory.

What good is preservation without repetition?

Orchestre Metropolitain at the foot of Mount Royal, 30 July 2025

Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts the OM at Parc du Mont-Royal, 30 July 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“…the music of a well-ordered age is calm and cheerful, and so is its government. The music of a restive age is excited and fierce, and its government is perverted. The music of a decaying state is sentimental and sad, and its government is imperiled.”
—Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game

Gustav Holst, The Planets, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, 15 August 2025

Rafael Payare conducts the OSM at Maison Symphonique, 15 August 2025. Antoine Saito for the OSM.

Many cultures believe that the world was created with sound.

“In the beginning was the word,” the Apostle John writes in the opening to his Biblical Gospel. Notably, it wasn’t nature’s noise that heralded all of Creation. It wasn’t a clap of thunder or an explosion. It was a human sound.

But neither was it a grunt or a cry. It was a word. And it wasn’t just any old word; it was the word. Word itself.

Words imply meaning. And thus, according to John, the beginning of the universe was also the beginning of language, frequency, harmony.

Christian Richer with Lowebrau, La Chapelle | Scénes Contemporaines, 2 August 2025

Christian Richer’s musical equipment setup at La Chapelle, 2 August 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

If we are to read any era by its music, then surely conflict and chaos must characterize the present one. There is no dominant set of aesthetic criteria to describe contemporary music as there has been in nearly every preceding generation.

We can listen back to almost any historical time and say with relative confidence that this style or that theme characterized its day’s music. Romantic, baroque; pop, punk, &c. Even during the so-called postmodern period, postmodernity exhibited some consistent defining characteristics: assemblage, palimpsest, irony.

We are living in an age when everything and nothing is true — facts are contested; falsehoods are simply data — and therefore everything and nothing characterizes our post-postmodern music. Music today is ambient in the truest sense — it is omnipresent, a constant hum that emerges to the fore only when it is observed, like a fridge that seems to start buzzing when you notice it.

In addition, today’s music is ambivalent, of multiple traditions, hybrid, non-binary. However, cultural production that advances in simultaneous directions does not imply a lack of direction. And the speed with which music manifests ex nihilo, almost spontaneously, indicates more about the present era than any aesthetic measures.

Forwards or backwards, we’re going nowhere fast.

VISIO & Orchestroll with Cecilia and Samuel Gougoux, Société des arts technologiques, 14 August 2025

Cecilia performs at the SAT, 14 August 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

They flutter behind you your possible pasts
Some bright-eyed and crazy, some frightened and lost
A warning to anyone still in command
Of their possible future to take care
—Roger Waters, “Your Possible Pasts”

There’s a common assumption, generally unchallenged, that the past is behind us and cannot be altered, whereas the future is in front of us and can. This might not be correct. I’m not just making some clever semantic argument here, either. I am, rather, talking about fundamental ways in which the past can be materially reformed, and the future is a foregone conclusion.

When you dwell on the past, it constitutes your future. Every morning is greeted with history. The past becomes the medium in which life is lived — like water for fish or air for us humans. If there is nothing that we can change about the past, then it is pointless to ruminate over it. And yet, the contemplative impulse exists. Why?

I claim that it’s because the past can be changed, has been changed, is changing constantly.

The further objects are away in space, the more slowly they appear to move. It’s called parallax — the apparent position of an object in relation to its line of sight. This also holds for objects in time. Our memories of things morph and mutate with each passing day, sometimes appearing clearer, sometimes disappearing completely.

The future, on the other hand, is something that the forces of capital would prefer to set in stone. “Futures” in financial terms, for instance, are standardized contracts that can be bought and sold.

Markets function on predictability. One way to reliably produce predictability is to induce instability. Therefore, anything that ensues following a period of disorder looks comparatively stable, in part because of the parallax effect. In this way, the past is broken, and the future is fixed.

If we repair the past, perhaps the future will again become unknowable.◼︎

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: Rafael Payare photographed by Antoine Saito for the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal.

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Hang a Larry: notes on The Globe & Mail’s 101 Canadian Albums list

Assembled with expert input from some of the nation’s most prominent music critics, The Globe & Mail last month published their list of 101 essential Canadian albums, recordings that represent the country as a whole and tell a story about what it means to be Canadian.

Lists are perennially enjoyable — to celebrate, scrutinize, and debate — and the Globe’s panel did a fine job, I think, selecting a collection of albums that sonically communicate Canadian-ness to us and to the world. The 101 entries are intended to round up Canada’s most iconic albums, neither the most obscure nor fan favourites but the biggest and best that we’ve offered so far.

As with any list, there were some surprises (two Arcade Fire records!?) and a few discoveries (Allison Russell.) They got a lot of things right, for instance, including artists like Nomeansno and Godspeed You! Black Emperor. The paper also published a readers’ feedback list of missed opportunities that corrected a few omissions. Skinny Puppy and SNFU were obvious oversights.

But the problem with lists is that, by necessity, they must exclude more than they can possibly include. And lists imply a hierarchy, even if only chronologically speaking in the Globe’s case.

Aiming for diversity and political correctness also made for some awkward missteps. Embracing Simply Saucer but neglecting Buffy Sainte-Marie is a case-in-point. Possible pretendianism does not negate that Sainte-Marie made a lot of records that rippled at the time throughout the Canadian cultural fabric. And although some of Canada’s foremost rock snobs have championed Simply Saucer of late, it is flat-out revisionist history to put them in the same league with Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen. Nobody should ask, “who?” when they read a list like this.

Nationalism can be problematic, especially when it tips into jingoism. But asserting our unique identity in the face of aggressive economic and cultural threats from an increasingly unhinged America is a timely and worthwhile project. As well, acknowledging Canada’s roots as a multicultural mosaic distinguishes us above the yanks and in opposition to their homogeny. What does being Canadian mean? There are over 40 million answers.

There has always been a sense that products of Canadian culture were only praiseworthy if an international audience approved of them. Yet, Canadian arts and culture are not “just as good as” their American counterparts. We possess a distinctive pool of deeply significant musical artists that exist independently from the United States’s entertainment complex. Canadian music stands on its own, regardless of American or transnational endorsement. The Tragically Hip proved that being overwhelmingly beloved within our own borders was more than enough.

While The Globe & Mail certainly scored some necessary points for the “Bye American” zeitgeist that our southern neighbour’s despot brought upon himself by waging an unprovoked trade war and threatening our national sovereignty, there were still at least ten albums that I felt went curiously forgotten by both the publication and its readers.

These were enormously popular releases as well. So, this list is a little off-brand, but comparatively niche — and essential to include on a revised and unranked compendium of honourable mentions within the Can Con canon.

Les Sinners – Sinnerismes, Jupiter Records (1967)

French Freakbeat found its footing in Quebec while psychedelic rock was dominating England and America. Les Sinners, formed in Outremont in 1965, exemplified Quebec’s independence from France, as well as from English Canada, and epitomized our raucous resistance to the encroaching Americanization of modern media and culture.

Bachman-Turner Overdrive – Not Fragile, Mercury Records (1974)

Recording the chorus to your next single as an inside joke to tease your stuttering brother is the perfect Canadian combination of hardy cruelty and familial adulation. The song reached number one because Americans thought it sounded like The Who’s “My Generation.” The fact that it became a classic rock radio standard speaks volumes for our twisted sense of humour.

Trooper – Thick as Thieves, MCA Records (1978)

Raising only a modest amount of hell smacks of Canadian judiciousness. Raise not enough hell and you mightn’t have bothered raising any hell at all. But raise too much hell and you risk all hell breaking loose. A dive bar jukebox anthem if ever there was one, Trooper has likely soundtracked innumerable heavenly revelries.

Bob & Doug McKenzie – The Great White North, Anthem Records (1981)

Pete and Joey, Wayne and Garth, Terry and Deaner, Ricky and Julian — the “hoser” archetype of Bob and Doug best characterizes the Canadian male condition vis-à-vis our American cousins. The tendency to sit around, drink beer, and smoke cigarettes instead of applying one’s ambition is itself among our proudest national ambitions. If you don’t try, you can’t lose.

André Gagnon – Impressions, CBS Records (1983)

There would likely be no Alexandra Stréliski or Jean-Michel Blais were it not for André Gagnon. Impressions manages to skate on the thin ice of melancholy nostalgia without falling through to the treacherous waters of saccharine sentimentality. There is something both beautiful and sad about the desolate Canadian landscape, and this album captures it.

Corey Hart – Boy in the Box, Aquarius Records (1985)

Before MuchMusic and Big Shiny Tunes, there was Video Hits, a half-hour long CBC broadcast of music videos hosted by Samantha Taylor that introduced audiences to a mélange of Canadian and international musicians. It was important that Bryan Adams be given equivalent weight to U2, and Madonna and Bruce Springsteen should rub shoulders with artists like Corey Hart.

Mitsou – El Mundo, Isba Records (1988)

There is an amusing scene from Don McKellar’s T.V. series Twitch City that casts Molly Parker and Callum Keith Rennie as convenience store clerks who dance around to “Bye Bye Mon Cowboy” whilst restocking shelves with tins of soup. Mitsou’s popularity in Toronto demonstrated that Canada’s two solitudes were never really that far apart.

Maestro Fresh-Wes – Symphony in Effect, Lefrak-Moelis Records (1989)

Hip-Hop emerged in full force in the 1980s as an urban cultural form. Cities in Canada provided the population, diversity, and infrastructure to support the domestic rise of an admittedly American artform. Nonetheless, Symphony in Effect was not just a Canadian imitation of rap, but rather an original text that helped to cultivate a thriving culturally specific scene.

Tom Cochrane – Mad Mad World, Capitol Records (1991)

The metaphor of life-as-highway reflects Canada’s expansive geography and invokes our last great nation-building project, the Trans-Canada Highway. Cochrane positioned himself as both tour guide and interpreter of Canada’s acquiescent position within a world that seemed to be gradually becoming less rational at the dawn of the 1990s and has devolved ever since.

Love Inc. – Love Inc., BMG Music (1998)

Chris Sheppard was the entry point for many Canadians into the world of electronic music at a time before A.I., when an air of utopian promise still surrounded new technologies. The earnestness of naming a band as both a corporate entity as well as the most benevolent human emotion illustrated Canada’s innocent sincerity and naïve confidence in human dignity.◼︎

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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Meet Every Situation Head On

Confrontation, Toninato & Lecours, Homeostasis (Self-Released)

“It’s useless to wait — for a breakthrough, for the revolution, the nuclear apocalypse or a social movement. To go on waiting is madness. The catastrophe is not coming, it is here. We are already situated within the collapse of a civilization. It is within this reality that we must choose sides.”
—The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection

Canadians have long enjoyed an international reputation for being nice. Niceness can encompass a variety of favourable characteristics: kindness, positivity, honesty, fairness, good faith. These are admirable traits to attribute to our sense of national identity.

But niceness can also manifest as toxic avoidance — submission in response to violent aggression, deference in the face of unreasonable conflict. We would rather be agreeable than confrontational, even when it means acceptance of, or even complicity in, injustice.

A recent Leger poll found that Quebec is Canada’s happiest province and Montreal the country’s second happiest city. That so many local residents would examine the state of the world — ongoing genocide, economic disparity, environmental collapse — and the plight of our own metropolis — crumbling public infrastructure, astonishing cost of living, linguistic and cultural hegemony — with such relentless positivity is a testament to our congenial cognitive dissonance.

On old adage espouses that the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. But the best time to sow the seeds of discontent amongst a comfortable Quebec citizenry is right about now.

Place Publique with Alex Tatarsky and Gui B.B., Fonderie Darling, 18 July 2025

Alex Tatarsky performs at Fonderie Darling, 18 July 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“If the guy was running Dairy Queen, he’d be gone. This guy couldn’t work at The Gap.”
—David Letterman on Donald Trump

The biggest threat to Donald Trump in the 2015 U.S. election was not the Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, nor Jeb Bush, nor any of the other potential Republican nominees running against him. Trump’s most worthy adversary was the late-night talk show host David Letterman, the man who in the 1980s made Trump a media personality in the first place. It seems like a lifetime ago and a million miles away, but until 2015, late-night talk show hosts held more sway with American popular opinion than did Trump.

On October 1st, 1986, Donald Trump appeared for the first time on NBC’s Late Night with David Letterman in an on-the-street-style segment in which Letterman visited Trump’s offices in midtown Manhattan, joking about how he must have had nothing better to do. Dozens of subsequent appearances across the next three decades and two networks prepared Trump for his ascent from cutthroat blowhard New York City real-estate tycoon to international celebrity.

Donald Trump on Late Night With David Letterman, 1 October 1986. Video courtesy of Don Giller.

Letterman was the only talk show host on equal footing with Trump, at times giving him the edge and at others eviscerating him, as in their year-long feud after Letterman accused Trump on-air of racism for demanding that Barack Obama produce his birth certificate. Trump subsequently refused to appear on Letterman, denying him his favourite guest. Recall, the best that Jimmy Fallon could muster was tussling Trump’s hair to determine if it was really attached.

David Letterman frequently remarked that the path to the White House went straight through The Ed Sullivan Theatre. Trump must have felt that a righteous kicking from Dave would surely have revealed any political aspirations Trump might have held for exactly what there were: first as tragedy, then as farce.

When David Letterman signed off as host of CBS’s Late Show in May 2015, it cleared the last remaining hurdle for Trump to announce without a hint of irony his bid for the Republican party nomination — which he did precisely one month later — and ultimately, to win the United States presidency that November. In effect, David Letterman ushered Donald Trump into the public eye and then vaulted him in absentia into the world’s highest office.

Sikutsajaq, Mary Paningajak, Centre Sanaaq, 15 May – 23 August 2025

Mary Paningajak, There is a pandemic around the world Masks must be worn to avoid getting COVID-19, (2021) Drawing on Paper. Atautsikut. Photographed for NicheMTL.

The Building Canada Act was passed on 26 June 2025 to fast-track the approval of major infrastructural projects deemed to be in the national interest. While the government has not produced a list of prospective projects, it is likely that it will include pipelines for fossil fuels to traverse the country. It seems improbable, however, that a wall along the 49th parallel is in the works.

In addition to insulating ourselves from an increasingly threatening southern neighbour, it would be advantageous if some of those major projects benefitted Indigenous communities, and not just financially. Building with an eye to the seventh generation will assuredly serve us all.

Fall and Spin, Bradley Ertaskiran, 17 July – 20 August 2025

Gallery view of work by Ben Gould at Fall and Spin, Bradley Ertaskiran. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“I don’t want knowledge, I want certainty.”
—David Bowie, “Law (Earthlings on Fire)”

We reap what we sow.

In my experience, I have found this to be one of the most dependable truths. The only thing separating the seeding and the harvest is time.

There is seasonal time and there is epochal time. In many instances, the fruits of our labour don’t grow immediately or discernibly. Or they can grow overnight when we’re neither prepared nor in need of their bounty. Wisdom like fruit seems to arrive frustratingly in abundance or not at all.

Faith is more than the power of positive thinking. It is the authority of indifferent inevitability.

“The Lord is good unto those that wait for Him,” says Lamentations 3:25, “to the soul that seeketh Him.” Waiting is challenging in our artificially accelerated and instant-on age. “The world would not be moving so fast,” write The Invisible Committee, “if it didn’t have to constantly outrun its own collapse.”

Organ Intermezzi with Áron Sipos, The Church of St. Andrew and St. Paul, 17 July 2025

Organist Áron Sipos shows onlookers the organ console at the Church of St. Andrew and St. Paul, 17 July 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

The Spirit of God has made me; the breath of the Almighty gives me life.
—Job 33:4

It occurred to me this week as I was offered a tour of the largest organ on the island of Montreal, an instrument with more than 7,000 pipes, that the biological body is composed of organs, and the mechanical organ comprises a living body.

More than any other element, air is the most divine. It is what binds and completes the Holy trinity. It is at once invisible and material, immediate and eternal.◼︎

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: Mary Paningajak, Untitled (2013), Linocut Print, Avataq Cultural Institute Collection. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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The Part You Throw Away

Alicia Clara, Blame it on the Moon, Nothing Dazzled (Self-released)

“Men seek for seclusion in the wilderness, by the seashore, or in the mountains — a dream you have cherished only too fondly yourself. But such fancies are wholly unworthy of a philosopher, since at any moment you choose you can retire within yourself.”
—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

It seems at times that there is no refuge from life’s trials and tribulations, no vacation from the constant barrage of work and domestic labour that doesn’t get done unless you do it, and no respite from the onslaught of information and incessant media — most of it utterly inconsequential — that assaults us on a daily basis.

Summer is supposed to be the season to relax and recharge, and many of us remember holidays taken at this time of year, a break from school or a pause from work, endless idle and expendable expanses of indefinite duration unspooling like rolls of toilet paper launched mischievously into a neighbour’s tree.

There is no time to do nothing these days, every waking moment filled with a sense of urgency and purpose, each day regardless of its calendrical station beckoning us to make something of it, as if everything unproductive was necessarily a waste, a casualty of capitalist ideology. Throwaway days are a thing of the past.

Time waits for no one. There is no escape within time or without it.

T. Gowdy with Nennen, Ky Brooks & Mat Ball, and Elizabeth Anka Vajagic & Steve Bates, Casa del Popolo, 28 June 2025

Tim Gowdy performs with the Suoni per il Popolo festival at Casa del Popolo, 28 June 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“A force like capital does not exist in any substantial sense, yet it is capable of producing practically any kind of effect.”
—Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie

In troubled moments, I return over and over again to the thinkers who influenced me most. And re-reading them — certain Biblical passages and scholars thereof, William S. Burroughs, Mark Fisher — never fails to reveal something new, something that clarifies and distills their ideas.

This process provides some comfort, some sense of stability in an increasingly destabilized world, a world in which natural cycles have been broken, natural progressions interrupted, natural continuity ruptured, and progress apparently set in reverse.

I am amazed, for instance at Fisher’s crystalline thought processes in defining the subtle distinction between the weird and the eerie. Everyone has an understanding and an experience of these two designations, and on the surface of it, they don’t seem particularly dissimilar or necessary to distinguish. But still, Fisher forges on churning the cream into butter by describing weirdness as the presence of something that shouldn’t be present, and eeriness as the absence of something that should.

And in an instant, those definitions seem foregone and essential. A disembodied voice is eerie. Whereas, say, a renaissance instrument in electronic music invokes the weird.

As most of the forces that exert agency in the world remain mysterious to us, we live in predominantly eerie times.

Nonetheless, it is weird that there is a clown holding the office of the United States presidency, or that there exists widespread plague, war, famine, and death in an age in which technology, diplomacy, and prosperity should have diminished all of these things.

Tautologically, weirdness is a condition upon which the eerie persists. The survival of that which should be absent produces a failure of absence.

Renée Condo, One Who Shatters Particles, One Who Smells Flowers, Blouin|Division, 26 June – 23 August 2025

Gallery view of Renée Condo’s exhibition at Galerie Blouin|Division. Photographed for NicheMTL.

We tend to believe that humans bring order into the world. We attribute organization to the Anthropocene. But ours is an era of manufactured chaos.

Nature is the law. Humanity is lawless.

Kara-Lis Coverdale with Noam Bierstone & Daniel Áñez, and Beast, Sacré-Coeur-de-Jésus, 30 June 2025

Kara-Lis Coverdale performs with the Suoni per il popolo festival at Sacré-Coeur-de-Jésus, 30 June 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

A friend loveth at all times, and a brother is born for adversity.
—Proverbs 18:17

We live in a spiritless society. Idols of worship have been replaced not by other gods or even people, but by lifestyles that ultimately rely upon accumulation and waste, exploitation and submission, complicity and silence, labour and leisure in appropriate measure, status and celebrity, a hierarchy of comments and likes that makes the Angelic order look as simple as a game of snakes and ladders.

The question of morality — the matter of a universal right and wrong — is so repressed as to be inverted: the absence of a moral code is itself the new morality; nothing is true, everything is permitted.

But the basic truths of bygone moralities hold true: karma is real, and she’s a bitch. What we do to others we also do to ourselves. And what we do not do for others, we also cannot expect in kind.

In an ironic twist, not stopping ourselves from amoral acts is what constitutes damnation under late capitalism. We desperately need to start speaking again in terms of what is universally right and what is unequivocally wrong.

For instance, violence is wrong. Genocide is wrong. Upsetting our planet’s delicate balance and making it uninhabitable for future generations is absolutely, undeniably, definitely wrong.

God doesn’t require us to believe in a god. Or even to worship a god. Whether or not “god” exists is independent of human faith or lack thereof. But a religious education and a sense of doctrine are invaluable to reconstructing the kinds of morality that will be necessary to solve the earth’s mounting existential crises.

We must become shepherds, our brothers’ keepers, leading by example, bringing light to the darkest corners of consciousness, gently walking on.

no cosmos, Pub Molson, 2 July 2025

no cosmos perform at the Montreal International Jazz Festival, 2 July 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL

“The thing you long for summons you away from the self.”
—C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

I’d rather have a line than a point.

A point only takes one second to make. Or conversely, you could be stuck making the same point for years. Points are easy to miss. Points mean stasis and death, whereas lines mean movement and change and life.

Don’t have a point. Draw a line and defend 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 of Renée Condo’s exhibition at Galerie Blouin|Division. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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