Tag Archives: casa del popolo

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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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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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Cause & Effect: in conversation with Susil Sharma

Tribal allegiance is a powerful impetus behind the construction of various cultural scenes.

Particularly within independent music communities, a sense of individual identity has historically been shaped as much by rejecting as embracing competing conventions. Dance music afficionados aren’t so much into guitar-driven rock and roll; rock and rollers snub hop-hop; rap kids don’t listen to punk, and so on. Or at least that’s how these communities were once constituted.

But nowadays on the island of Montreal, diverse scenes are less islands unto themselves and at least mutually aware if not entirely accepting of one another. This interpenetration arguably makes for more exciting, innovative, and genre-acrostic music in which unexpected influences overlap and bleed into each other.

This is the case for Karma Glider, the shoegaze-inspired, post-punk-tinged, pop-inflected project fronted by Fredericton-born and Montreal-based Susil Sharma. A Canadian of Nepalese descent transplanted from the East Coast and making a mutant form of Britpop in a French-speaking province is exemplary of Montreal’s multivalent cultural Venn diagram.

Karma Glider’s Mothland-released debut LP is the evocatively titled From the Haze of a Revved Up Youth. Sharma, 37, realized it together with producer and engineer Joseph Donovan, and Adiran Popovich of Tricky Woo fame, who now operate Mountain City, a studio located in N.D.G.

“I’ve been recording with them for years,” Sharma says. “They really feel like partners in crafting sound. At one point I went a little Kevin Shields studio madness energy, getting obsessed. I took all the guitar tracks down and redid some stuff. I favour recording a little more and increasingly I’m trying to savour the writing process.”

The LP skilfully traverses the landscape of Sharma’s most potent influences. “I love My Bloody Valentine,” Sharma tells me. “I’m really into Spiritualized and Jesus and Mary Chain. Primal Scream. Being 15 years old in 2003, The Strokes are woven into my musical genetics. The Velvet Underground, The Stooges, Patti Smith — a lot of that New York proto-punk scene is really important to me.”

Sharma relocated to Montreal two decades ago, “for school, on paper,” he explains, and quickly fell into a musical life.

“I went to McGill for one semester,” Sharma says, “but I dropped out right away and joined a band. It just felt like something else was happening. I was working at American Apparel at the time. Vice was the preeminent media. It felt like Montreal was the place to be for a young person trying to make art.”

From the Haze of a Revved Up Youth reflects on that era with a sentimental but not saccharine nostalgic sensibility. Its songs are concise studies featuring melodic riffs and hooks that gesture both back in time and forward at once and set Karma Glider apart from explicitly retromaniacal fare.

“I’ve got two older sisters,” says Sharma. “They’re six and 12 years older and they were showing me a lot of punk music. Grunge. They were around for Nirvana and stuff. They passed on Fugazi tapes and Sonic Youth tapes. I was absorbing all of that when I was 14 or 15. Everyone else was listening to Top 40, and being into counterculture felt like an identity, a special thing, like you belonged to something.”

Sharma took sporadic guitar lessons from a family friend, but is otherwise an autodidact, he tells me. “Both my parents are from Nepal, so we got a lot of Nepalese and Indian music. There wasn’t much common ground. Everyone in the family likes Neil Young, I guess.”

Attending all-ages gigs became a formative part of Sharma’s youthful musical experience. “There was a dead zone in New Brunswick, but there were cool bands coming from Nova Scotia,” he recalls. “I loved Sloan and all the Murderecords stuff. In Fredericton, there was mostly a lot of speed metal and a lot of jam bands. It felt pretty detached from what else was going on.”

“That’s success now — belonging to this community on the grass-roots level.” Susil Sharma photographed by Yang Shi.

In 2005, Spin Magazine published a profile on Montreal’s music scene calling the city the “next Seattle.” Bands like Arcade Fire and Wolf Parade were leading a new wave of rock coming out of the post-Referendum depression that began on the Plateau in the late 1990s.

“That was a huge reason why I moved to Montreal,” Sharma says. “There was an energy to Montreal at that point that probably drew me. Then 10 years after there was another wave. Now there’s another wave. It’s such a cyclical thing. Especially because it’s a city of expats and it’s always reinventing itself.”

This city’s celebrated cultural scenes have perennially been a draw for artists like Sharma looking to achieve a measure of success and satisfaction. Those measures have evolved over the decades, however.

“When I was young, it was all about making it in this industry-standard way,” Sharma declares. “Now, I play small shows in all these venues where I’ve known the promoters and the bartenders and the musicians for years. That’s success now — belonging to this community on the grass-roots level. In our world now, that’s lacking. We’re pretty lucky in Montreal to be able to bond over something that at its core is done from an authentic place. The romantic endeavour,” he admits, “rather than a commercial enterprise is what attracts me.”

Montreal more than other cities seems to thrive on an outsider ethos that relies less on algorithmic forms of discovery and favours more organic sensations. This may help to explain why artists like Sharma thrive here: Montreal is a delicate ecosystem whose constant pressures also ensure art’s perpetual survival, adaptability, and resilience.

“There’s demonstrable proof that some artists have really altered the cultural fabric for good,” Sharma suggests. “I’ve been considering art more through the roll of criticism of capitalism lately. I think being born when I was, my idea of what an artist should be was based on commerce. Selling things. But there’s really a crucial role to play in the community and the local scene. I think authenticity and good music and word-of-mouth will never be replaced. People are looking for something more real.”◼︎

Karma Glider launches From the Haze of a Revved Up Youth Friday 5 September 2025 with Shunk and Poolgirl at Casa del Pololo, 4873 St Laurent.

Cover image: Susil Sharma photographed by Yang Shi.

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Time & Free Will

Harik, SANAM, Sametou Sawtan (Constellation Records)

“Right now you’re reading about free will. You’re free to go on reading, or stop now. You’ve started on this sentence, but you don’t have to………finish it.”
—Galen Strawson, “Luck Swallows Everything” in Things That Bother Me

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about deliberation.

There are subtle pronunciation differences and yet no change in spelling in the two most common uses of the term ‘deliberate.’

First is the verb: to deliberate. This word is pronounced ‘deliber-8’ and means to arrive at some form of conclusion about a problem or question. For instance, to deliberate is what a jury does after hearing legal arguments and examining evidence before establishing a judgment.

Second is the adjective: deliberate. This word is pronounced ‘deliber-@’ and simply denotes an act performed with intention. For instance, a premeditated murder is deliberate homicide. Its connotation is often negative, differentiating the action from something unconscious or accidental.

The verb ‘deliberate’ implies the passage of time. Juries are usually sequestered and allowed a determined period to reach a verdict. However, the adjective ‘deliberate’ does not imply any time at all. A murderer can deliberately kill someone in a split second, no deliberation required.

The word ‘deliberate’ is derived from the Latin language. At its heart is Liber, meaning the god of male fertility, wine, and freedom. The suffix ‘-ate’ means ‘an abundance.’ Passion-ate denotes an abundance of passion; consider-ate implies an excess of consideration. Thus, liberate suggests a wealth of freedom.

But the prefix ‘de-’ in Latin means ‘apart from’ or ‘away.’ So, deliberate literally means far from an abundance of freedom. Consequently, deliberation seems to suggest the paradoxical absence of free will in the nonetheless conscious performance of an act.

When the Orange Cheeto, with reference to America’s involvement in military action in support of Israel against Iran, says, “I like to make the final decision one second before it’s due,” this implies the rarest and most dangerous case of deliberation — a deliberate act that is de facto void of temporal contemplation, intentional carnage in absence of any meaningful forethought.

No Bystanders, Frantz Patrick Henry, Fonderie Darling, 19 June – 17 August 2025

Gallery view of No Bystanders by Frantz Patrick Henry at Fonderie Darling. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“There are no innocent bystanders … what are they doing there in the first place?”
—William S. Burroughs, Exterminator!

Some people believe that we see what we’re looking for. This suggests that the world always meets our expectations. If you trust that people are generally inherently good, you will generally see the inherent goodness in people. If you think that people are generally inherently bad, generally, you won’t be disappointed.

Black Ox Orkestar, Matana Roberts, Erika Angell, and Sam Shalabi Septet, Théâtre de Verdure, 14 June 2025

Erika Angell performs at Théâtre de Verdure, 14 June 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Detonating the bomb is like pushing the button that takes the selfie. At that moment, the imaginary world is in charge, for the real world, with all its discrimination and hopelessness, is no longer worth living in.”
—Byung-Chul Han, “Torturous Emptiness,” in Capitalism and the Death Drive

War is the most perverse form of self-harm — the injury of the Other in order to encourage the Other to injure us in retaliation. Narcissism is the flipside of the self-harm coin and provides the impetus for national conflict. We love our identity to such a degree that we fear annihilation and therefor attack the Other to inspire vengeance, thus self-harming. By this logic, the aggressor is able to claim victimhood as a justification to attack.

In the 21st century, the U.S. rebooted this franchise with its pre-emptive strike on Iraq because of a supposed cache of weapons of mass-destruction that turned out not to exist. Israel’s insistence that Iran’s uranium enrichment capabilities will inevitably lead to a nuclear weapon is a subtler rationale and requires circuitous reasoning.

It is not logical to say that if Iran enriches uranium, it will use it to manufacture nuclear weapons. It is, however, logical to say that destroying Iran’s uranium enrichment capabilities will prevent Iran from producing nuclear weapons.

Rick Leong, The Night Blooms, Bradley Ertaskiran, 15 May – 5 July 2025

Gallery view of The Night Blooms by Rick Leong at Bradley Ertaskiran. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“This democracy thing is easy—you just vote for the guy who promises you the most stuff. An idiot could do it. Actually it likes idiots, treats them with apparent kindness, and does everything it can to manufacture more of them.”
—Nick Land, “Cross-Coded History,” in The Dark Enlightenment

The technical invention of cinematography in the late 19th century enabled the mass dissemination of images. It also revolutionized acting.

Prior to cinema, theatre set the standard for drama. And the conventions of theatre were to play to the back of the room, i.e. to overemphasize and enunciate and dramatize every movement, every line.

The motion picture camera, though, was able to capture and magnify the minutia of behaviour, recording every detail, every gesture. It took some time to figure this out, and consequently, the majority of early cinema by today’s criteria looks stagey.

I claim that the trajectory started to reverse with the introduction of television. The shrinking of the screenic image meant that actors once again had to overact to convey cinematic sentiment on a diminutive scale. There was a momentary détente during the so-called golden age of TV with productions like The Sopranos and other prestige fare. But the process redoubled in speed as screens shrunk to laptop and then to smartphone size.

The sitting U.S. president arose as an outsize television personality, achieving celebrity status on late-night talk shows and his own reality series. Today, he has honed his overblown persona for TikTok, going bigly-er than ever before.

Quinton Barnes, Black Noise album launch, Casa del Popolo, 19 June 2025

Quinton Barnes and friends perform at Casa del Popolo, 19 June 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“The idea of the future, pregnant with an infinity of possibilities, is thus more fruitful than the future itself, and this is why we find more charm in hope than in possession, in dreams than in reality.”
― Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will

‘Knowledge is power’ is a common adage. This axiom presupposes that the acquisition of knowledge — through higher education and life experience — will bestow upon the learner increasing measures of agency in the world.

But what if power is antecedent, not knowledge? That would suggest, rather, that information is produced by systems and networks that exert power in culture and society.

And what exerts power?

In today’s world? Money and violence are likely the most powerful observable culprits. But still, we have not quite located the precise root source of power. There is only one force capable of manufacturing ex nihilo money and violence and therefore knowledge, and that power is time.◼︎

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: Rick Leong, Spell of the Sensuous, 2025, Oil on canvas 182.9 x 182.9 cm. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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All The Things You Are

NicheMTL has an ambivalent mission.

On one hand, it endeavours to shed light upon cultural activities that receive little to no attention in other media. On the other, like any enterprise, it aims to achieve maximum popularity — clicks, likes, shares, stats, growth.

On one hand, it seeks to remain free to read. On the other, it is now also a luxurious magazine for sale at a near art book price point.

On one hand, it serves the artistic community by covering Montreal’s nichest events. On the other, it serves me and its contributors as a platform for our artform: the written word.

Raphaël Daudelin, left, and Anouk Pennel, right, of Studio FEED inspect their design work. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Ideally, NicheMTL is a circuit that gives back more than it receives, if only in the form of goodwill in absence of anything tangibly valuable.

NicheMTL has afforded me a wealth of incredible experiences. It is impossible to choose favourites, or to rank my most beloved days.

Nonetheless, the days listed chronologically below stand out, not just as some of the most enjoyable of 2024, but moreover, some of the most sincerely special days of my life.

Since the depths of the pandemic, I promised never again to say ‘no’ to an opportunity to do something out there in the world, together with people, in the public sphere. And so far, keeping this promise has not remotely disappointed me.

Thank you for a wonderful year. Thank you for inviting NicheMTL to your events. Thank you for sharing your gifts with us, with Montreal, and with the world.

What you do matters. It is interesting. It is important. It is beautiful. It is eternal.

Some people have asked me why NicheMTL doesn’t publish straight-ahead reviews — or previews — like other media forms. The answer, simply, is because it’s niche.

There are no prizes. It’s an honour just to be nominated.

—Ryan Alexander Diduck, publisher

Alexandra Stréliski with Patrick Watson, Salle Wilfrid Pelletier, 17 January 2024

Carolina Dalla Chiesa and Alexandra Stréliski backstage at Salle Wilfrid Pelletier. Photographed for NicheMTL.

After securing a coveted media ticket to the second of two sold-out concerts at Salle Wilfrid Pelletier, I was delighted to have been assigned a seat next to Carolina Dalla Chiesa, who is Alexandra Stréliski’s partner.

We became fast friends and hung out backstage after the show with Patrick Watson, who earlier in the evening treated the audience to a walk-on duet with Stréliski of The Cinematic Orchestra’s “To Build a Home.”

The house came down.

Sarah Davachi interview and Total Solar Eclipse, 8 April 2024

Everything under the sun is in tune, but the sun is eclipsed by the moon. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Immediately following a Zoom conversation with Davachi, I realized that there were precious few minutes until Montreal would bear witness to a total solar eclipse.

So, I scrambled past thousands of spectators to a secret spot adjacent to Silo no. 5 and perched myself amidst a group of stoner kids and some Quebecois old-timers who were listening to Pink Floyd and drinking tall cans of PBR.

There could not have been a better setting for this once-in-a-lifetime moment.

Emmanuel Lacopo and Ensemble Urbain play Julius Eastman, Casa del Popolo, 20 May 2024

Emmanuel Jacob Lacopo, Ensemble Urbain, and friends perform Eastman at Casa del Popolo. Photographed for NicheMTL.

The only other band that has ever sent shivers down my spine quite like Lacopo and company at Casa del Popolo was Godspeed You! Black Emperor at their reunion concerts in 2011.

I had the sense that I was observing something very special as this group of talented artists took to the stage at one of the venues that that legendary collective helped to establish — like the passing of the baton onto the next generation of Montreal’s musical mythmakers.

Black Givre with Jean-Sébastien Truchy and Preoptic Ridge, Ateliers Belleville, 1 June 2024

Preoptic Ridge perform at Ateliers Belleville. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Ateliers Belleville established itself as an important cultural space in 2024, presenting a number of unmissable vernissages, housing the studios for more than four dozen practicing artists, and hosting a handful of experimental music events entitled Échos.

With venues under threat from encroaching condos, and residents unamenable to the noise that accompanies Montreal’s renowned night-time scenes, workspaces like Ateliers Belleville have never been more vital.

Ambient Music in the Park + Shunk with Ahren Strange House Show, 11 August 2024

Left: Julia Hill and Adrian Vaktor of Shunk; Right: the audience gathers at Champs des Possibles for Ambient Music in the Park, 11 August 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Montreal’s do-it-yourself core came to the fore in two events that happened to coincide on 11 August: the first being one of NPNP Trio and Personal Records founder Jackson Darby’s iterations of Ambient Music in the Park, an impromptu gathering of electronic music’s outsiders at Champs des possibles.

Next, I headed north to a house show featuring NicheMTL darlings, Shunk, held atop the roof of an apartment on Boulevard St. Laurent and Beaubien.

Everyone passed the audition.

The Dears & Stars, Rialto Theatre, 28 September 2024

Torquil Campbell and Amy Milan of Stars. Photographed for NicheMTL.

2004 was an enormously momentous year for Montreal’s independent music scenes, with the release of internationally best-selling albums by The Dears, Stars, Wolf Parade, and Arcade Fire.

What was so special about Pop Montreal’s 20th anniversary Stars/Dears double bill was that it wasn’t just about invoking a sense of nostalgia; it was also about celebrating the longevity of these astonishing bands, which have always been capable of creating a vibe in the here-and-now.

FYEAR with Erika Angell, Centre PHI, 16 October 2024

Tawhida Tanya Evanson and Kaie Kellough of FYEAR. Photographed for NicheMTL.

FYEAR is a supergroup fronted by poet Kaie Kellough and saxophonist Jason Sharp, and including Kevin Yuen Kit Lo, Joe Grass, Josh and Jesse Zubot, Tawhida Tanya Evanson, Stefan Schneider, and Tommy Crane.

Watching this ensemble come together onstage at Centre PHI was the highlight of 2024’s cultural calendar and might be among my most transformative ever live musical experiences.

There is no greater power than a nonet firing on all nine cylinders.

NicheMTL Yearbook Launch, Ateliers Belleville, 19 October 2024

Yuki Isami, Emmanuel Jacob Lacopo, and Josh Morris perform at NicheMTL’s yearbook launch. Filmed by Amelya Hempstead for NicheMTL.

Everyone who attended the NicheMTL Yearbook launch was undoubtedly graced with exceptional musical performances.

However, the most unexpected gift came when Yuki Isami, Emmanuel Jacob Lacopo, and Ensemble Urbain’s Josh Morris spirited up a blissful sonic improvisation that they made look easy.

It was something like a Vaudevillian magic trick, with all the players having to promise the audience that they had never before performed together.

Tout geste est/et politique, Nadia Myre, Robert Myre & Molinari, Fondation Guido Molinari, 31 October 2024

Fondation Molinari director Marie-Eve Beaupré, left, and the artist Nadia Myre. Photographed for NicheMTL.

One of the reasons I write is to remember — what I did, what I experienced, how it affected me, sounds, colours, the mood of the room. Every word is more-or-less carefully chosen to convey and communicate as clearly as possible a feeling, an image, not just for readers but also for me.

Writing is a consciously political act because it orients an audience towards an idea. Words are naked as food crossing the threshold of our mouths, immanently transmogrifying into us.

Soul Manifest, Dexter Barker-Glenn, Espace Maurice, 30 November 2024

Dexter Barker-Glenn, Soul Manifest, Mycelium, ergot, pine, resin. 39 x 19 x 15 in. Photographed for NicheMTL.

There are no shortcuts to enlightenment. Certain things may act as catalysts. Meditation, exercise, diet, habit — all of these produce in the subject a disposition of consciousness that may be more conducive to illumination.

Drugs, of course, have been touted as vehicles for expanding consciousness, and I at times have succumbed to this prescription.

Still, nothing gets me higher than a great conversation. More than a tab on the tongue, it is true communion.◼︎

Thank you to NicheMTL’s contributors, Darragh Kilkenny-Mondoux, Rachael Rinn Palmer, and Zoe Lubetkin, and to our presenting sponsors, Akermus, Constellation Records, and État de choc.

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 view of Montreal from Mount Royal Chalet, 8 October 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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Beyond The Limits of Control

Midnight Train, Fine Food Market, Very Fine Records (2024)

During a recent conversation with friends, we eventually arrived at the topic of food.

“I like to eat,” someone said.

It seems like a given. But along with breathing and sleeping, eating is rapidly becoming a luxury that fewer can afford.

Ile de France, 31 July 2024

Ile de France. Photographed for NicheMTL.

The décor on the 9th floor of the recently refurbished Eaton’s Centre is as cinematic as a Stanley Kubrick movie location. The service from the staff, smartly uniformed in smocks and jeans, is impeccable. And the food is fantastic — and not outrageously expensive, either.

Hats off to Chef Liam Hopkins as well, who patiently explained the ingredients and preparation techniques of every single dish on the menu, and whether or not they could be prepared Vegan, and without salt, or without sugar, to my infamous dinner partner, Sally Albright.

Hwere, with Mue, Robyn Gray, and Personal Records DJs, Casa del Popolo, 30 July 2024

Mue perform at Casa del Popolo, 30 July 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

I didn’t know Mark Fisher. We followed each other on the social network formerly known as Twitter. We might have on occasion faved one another’s tweets. And Fisher co-founded Repeater Books with Tariq Goddard, the talented British novelist who commissioned, edited, and published both Mad Skills and The Limits of Control.

Now that Goddard is stepping down from Repeater, it’s high time to acknowledge that I half-owe them both a career, and feel it is incumbent upon me to at least attempt to carry on Fisher’s project of resisting capitalist despair and imagining an alternative to the neoliberal disaffection and consciousness deflation that ultimately claimed him. Although this project must be a collective one, Fisher bore its cross and crown of thorns more than most.

Resistance might not be the proper strategy, however. Because like Nicky Santoro, Joe Pesci’s character in Martin Scorsese’s Casino, capital one-ups every weapon, ending ultimately when all else fails with all-out war. America’s recent prisoner swap with Russia, an explicitly hostile superpower against which they have invested tens of billions in military aid, proves that no power is as super as capital.

If leaning out means non-participation and marginalization, and leaning in spells complicity with the system that enslaves us, then the best we can do is stand upright.

collectif9, Théâtre de Verdure, 1 August 2024

collectif9 perform at Théâtre de Verdure, 1 August 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

They can polish their medals and sharpen their
Smiles, and amuse themselves playing games for awhile.
Boom boom, bang bang, lie down you’re dead.

—Pink Floyd “The Fletcher Memorial Home”

Unpopular opinion: I don’t like fireworks. They frighten children and animals. They are a useless waste of capital resources. They trigger distressing memories for anyone who was ever a witness to war. And, perhaps least forgivingly, they disrupt outdoor concerts of sublime post-classical music which both audiences and performers had been anticipating for ages.

Big|Brave, with Spiritual Poison and Efrim Manuel Menuck, Bar Le Ritz PDB, 2 August 2024

Big|Brave perform at Bar Le Ritz PDB, 2 August 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

O Come, let us sing unto the Lord: let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation.

—Psalm 95:1

Immediately after 9/11, an undercurrent of seriousness and apparent philosophical sobriety pervaded Western cultural production, ostensibly abandoning the trivialities of post-millennium excess and the unself-reflexive approval of poptimistic currents such as The Spice Girls and The Backstreet Boys.

Suddenly, a self-conscious embrace of a spate of new and introspective Indie Rock bands like The Strokes and The White Stripes supplanted shameless pop culture.

A similar shift occurred following the early ‘90s recession and George H.W. Bush’s Gulf War in 1991. The rise of Alternative Rock, which Nirvana characterized, was poised in direct opposition to sickly sweet trends that the New Kids on the Block represented, or the hedonic bombast of, say, Guns N’ Roses.

A parallel rejection of frivolous pleasure-seeking took place concurrently in ostensibly Black American music as Gangsta Rap replaced the positively upbeat stylings of Young MC or DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince.

A generation earlier, the Beatles’ acrid acid-tinged 1968 single, “Revolution,” a direct response to the political protests around the Vietnam War, succeeded their bubble-gum, mop-top, Fab Four era. That decade ended not with the upstate-New York peace-and-love antics of Woodstock, but rather with the Hell’s Angels murdering a young Black man during a Rolling Stones performance at the Altamont Speedway in Tracy, California.

We can draw the obvious conclusion that traumatic economic, social, and geopolitical times compel artists, especially musicians, to harden their aesthetic sensibilities.

The reaction time taken to return to saccharine indulgence, however, is a tertiary bellwether, and worthy of consideration.

Carol King’s Tapestry, which won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year in 1971, signalled an end to the 1960s protest music movement and ushered in a new era of Easy Listening in American Pop.

Cooleyhighharmony by the American vocal group Boys II Men captured the Grammy Award for Best R&B Performance in 1992 and signalled the rise of Mariah Carey’s brand of apolitical balladry.

Kylie Minogue’s Fever was released less than one month after 9/11 — featuring the catchy-yet-innocuous “Can’t Get You Out of My Head,” her biggest-selling single — and continued winning Grammys until 2004.

And following the Covid crisis, the much-promised return of Punk never really materialized, the world instead ensconcing itself in the narcissistic comfort of Taylor Swift and Drake.

Now, as the conflict in Gaza surpasses its 300th day, and Russia has occupied Ukraine for more than two years with no end in sight, donor fatigue setting in, and an increasingly grim American election on the horizon, not a single song on the Billboard Hot 100 mentions much if any of this. The topic of conversation in music discourse continues to be whether or not 2024 was indeed the year of Brat Summer.

Global mass culture has seemingly run out of fight, leaving the heavy lifting to hyperlocal artists who are admittedly smaller in reach but far bigger on bravery.◼︎

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 subscribing.

Cover image: Efrim Manuel Menuck performs at Bar Le Ritz PDB, 2 August 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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How To Make A Small Fortune In Art

Black Givre with Jean-Sébastien Truchy, Fumerolles & Élément Kuuda, Ateliers Belleville, 1 June 2024

Jean-Sébastien Truchy performs at Ateliers Belleville, 1 June 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

There’s an old joke that takes aim at the drive for financial success, a joke that can be adapted to practically any pursuit, especially to art.

Q: How do you make a small fortune? A: Start with a large one.

The mythical U.K. punk band Crass famously emblazoned their albums with labels imploring listeners to “pay no more than £2.00” for this record.

Today, a pristine condition first pressing of the band’s 1979 EP, The Feeding of The Five Thousand, is listed on the aftermarket website Discogs for €300. Plus shipping.

If some suburban-born anarchist-turned-yuppie who washed his feet and got a job working at BlackRock wants to relive the days when he wore a padlock around his neck and a safety pin through his nose and paying €300 for a Crass record will scratch that itch, then Crass records are worth €300 now — for everyone.

The reality of value under capitalism is that things are worth what people will pay for them.

Death Tennis with Manny, Casa del Popolo, 5 June 2024

Booster Fawn films Death Tennis performing at Casa de Popolo, 5 June 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

If you go into an artistic pursuit to make money, you’ve chosen the wrong artform.

It doesn’t matter if you’re Andy Fucking Warhol, a human factory for the production of value and a living commentary on art in the age of its mass reproduction. It doesn’t matter if you’re Damien Fucking Hirst, an embodiment of ostentatious conspicuous consumption, artificial scarcity, and capitalistic overvaluation. It doesn’t matter if you’re Fucking Banksy, an anonymous and collective nonentity that reflects all of us back to us in ironic cartoon-strip fashion.

There is no artform that is more valuable than money. In fact, making money is its own artform — perhaps one of the highest arts there is. Verily, there is an art to transforming labour into capital, the reverse-osmosis process of Marx’s notion of ethereality, in effect, solidifying thin air.

That’s why forgery of currency is such a harshly punished crime. Who dares reproduce that art?

La Majestueuse Symphonie avec Orgue de Saint-Saëns, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, Maison Symphonique, 29 May 2024

Olivier Latry and the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal perform at Maison Symphonique, 29 May 2024. Antoine Saito for the OSM.

Quantifying experience is the new fashion to turn time into money, selling audiences occupied time. Still, there is no way to ensure that you’re going to have a good time, regardless of how much money you spend on this or that experience.

You might drop thousands of dollars on dinner and tickets to a show. But your date is in a bad mood, and doesn’t like the wine, and the air conditioning is too cold, and the hairdo of the woman sitting in front of you is too high, and her perfume is too strong, and there’s no intermission — or, there are two intermissions and that’s two too many.

Alternately, you might spend very few dollars and have the time of your life when you spontaneously stop into that little place you’d always been meaning to try, and it is just as cool as you thought it would be, and the bartender gives you an approving nod, the kind of simple and inconsequential gesture that validates you for weeks afterwards, an experience you can call up like a new favourite song to play on repeat when you need a psychic boost. And later, the symphony or the band or the DJ is right in the pocket, and your date glances over sideways at you and smiles, with teeth, because of course you somehow orchestrated this moment.

You never could have planned it, and you certainly never could have bought it. Remember: this fleeting instant is a gift. All that’s required is that you recognize it and understand its intrinsic value and quietly say thank you to God, or the Devil, or the four winds that blow for blowing it in your direction.

Saints, Sinners, Lovers and Fools: Three Hundred Years of Flemish Masterworks, Musée des beaux-arts, 6 June 2024

A patron photographs a painting at the Musée des beaux-arts, 8 June 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

When you see a beautiful face for the first time, you don’t want to forget it. You’re terrified to lose it. You just want to close your eyes and let persistence of vision take over and imprint that image in memory, or on the insides of your eyelids, forever. The impression of that face becomes a tangible thing, physical, a vision that you can’t and won’t unsee.

When you see the most beautiful face you’ve ever seen for the first time, you might as well tear your own stupid eyeballs out of their bloody sockets, because there is no chance that you will ever see anything so beautiful again. When you’ve seen something — someone — that beautiful, seeing itself becomes obsolete. No blossom in full bloom or priceless painting and certainly no other face is worth looking at twice, and you may even wonder to yourself if you should have ever even seen anything at all.

They say love is blind. The boldest love, though, is a witness to beauty’s smallest detail.

Kee Avil with Nadège Grebmeier Forget, Centre PHI, 30 May 2024

Kee Avil performs at Centre PHI, 30 May 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Beauty is in the beholder’s eyes.

But it is humankind that only sees outward beauty. It takes a special kind of perception to seek the true beauty within, the sort of beauty that’s actually worth a damn.

One could lose a mint on cosmetics and surgical intervention to preserve and prolong some ideal notion of physical beauty. Nonetheless, you cannot moisturize rose petals or Botox blueberries. When they start to rot, they assume another incarnation of splendour. There is magnificence, too, in decay.

Enormous fortunes have been wasted in vain attempts to maintain beauty, to capture it for posterity. Napoleon wilted under a heavyweight redingote while waiting for a portrait artist to capture his likeness. We are already nanoseconds older after the camera shutter snaps.

Blessed is the true judge, because justice is merely a matter of time. Fear of time is fear of God. Those who understand this benediction though they may be stricken with poverty and doubt possess within them the greatest of fortunes.◼︎

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

NicheMTL is Montreal’s independent source for this city’s most niche arts and culture. If you love what you’re reading, please consider subscribing.

Cover image: Catarina Ykens II (1659-1737), Vanitas Bust of a Lady, 1688. ©️ The Phoebus Foundation, Antwerp, Belgium. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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