Tag Archives: Centre PHI

Massive Lectures

Rolling In the Deep: notes on the immersive turn

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

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

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

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

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

Doubtless, 2025 was the year we drowned in immersion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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All Dressed

This Continuous Spectrum: in conversation with Jessica Moss

On 20 July 2024, the violinist Jessica Moss was set to perform an intimate gig at Hotel2Tango, the storied recording studio in Montreal’s Mile End district. It was a glorious summer’s day as I walked westward from the Rosemont Metro station. A short burst of afternoon rain gave way to an evening sunset which bathed the iconic 1 Van Horne building in a brilliant golden light.

I was early, so I stopped at the public gardens installed along the south side of the Van Horne overpass. Busy bees pollinated the wildflowers and a gentle stream of traffic flowed over the bridge. I turned around and was suddenly struck by a vivid double rainbow that spanned the entire horizon.

The rainbow, in addition to adorning flags symbolizing diversity and inclusivity, is also a symbol of God’s promise to mankind to never again attempt to destroy us.

“I do set my bow in the cloud,” it is written in Genesis 9:13, “and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth.” What an auspicious sign, I thought, to observe in advance of a musician whose instrument resounds, literally, by drawing a bow against its strings.

“In my mind, I don’t play an acoustic instrument,” Moss informs me 15 months later as we chat over the phone one recent morning. “I play violin and pedals. The combination is the instrument.” Behold, to adapt a phrase from R. Murray Schafer, the new orchestra.

Moss has called me from her studio in the Atlas Building on Jean Talon, a collaborative loft called Error 403 which she shares with a community of artists and musicians. Her portion of the space is crammed to the rafters with trinkets and collected curios: plastic horses and ceramic birds and doll heads and kitschy dioramas. A Mason jar-full of piano tuning pegs. A heavy glass ashtray with an array of lambs lying on their sides. Everything in Moss’s environment possesses some double meaning, it seems, an overabundance of semiotic import.

“I don’t see another way to engage with the world than the one that I do,” Moss tells me, speaking characteristically cryptically. “It’s kind of like a raw wound. But that’s how I roll.”

“I realized how much I loved the technical process of working with recorded material in a collage-type way.” Photographed for NicheMTL.

I have requested an audience with Moss ostensibly to learn more about her newest LP, an album entitled Unfolding, released via Constellation Records in mid-October. But our conversation meanders organically in a patchwork manner that mimics Moss’s overlapping compositions, melodic and melancholic strands of interlaced string-and-electronics arrangements that glide through your ears until they weave themselves subtly into your soul.

Jessica Moss is one of Montreal’s great collaborators, playing with Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra and the Klezmer-influenced Black Ox Orkestar, and appearing as a guest player on albums by Arcade Fire, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and the late Vic Chesnutt, among many others. Yet, over the past decade, Moss has found her footing as an uncompromising solo performer, releasing six sturdy full-length records since 2015.

“The very first time I recorded solo,” Moss explains, “I went to New York and into the basement of Guy Picciotto, who is a dear friend, and we made the cassette, Under Plastic Island, which is technically my first release. I wanted to tour but I didn’t understand that you can’t tour without making a record. So, I said, ‘fine, I’ll just record the stuff that I’m doing.’ Even from that very first moment, I realized how much I loved the technical process of working with recorded material in a collage-type way. It’s a process that I’ve used all my life, making things. It’s the artistic mode that I operate in.”

Unfolding was recorded using Moss’s distinctive montage process, starting with demos captured on her iPhone and culminating in layered strata of sounds that the engineer Radwan Ghazi Moumneh mixed into its final form.

“For me, I have various grooves,” Moss tells me. “My album-making process, even though it has evolved over the years, has kind of remained the same from the very beginning. I only go into the jam space with the intention of recording once I know that I’m in the clear to work on music for the next while, that I have time to make a record. When that happens, I get very, very into it very quickly because usually by then the concept has been boiling in my head for a long time. So, my process is improvising with a theme in mind and slowly picking apart what I’ve done and slowly creating the skeleton of what will end up being the record. All of those feel like being extreme flow states for me. Once that is done and everything is in front of me in ProTools, the pulling things together is one of my favourite things in the world, even though it is also extremely difficult and takes so long. I feel very alive doing that.”

Appropriately, Unfolding is scheduled for a month long run at Habitat Sonore, the immersive Dolby Atmos-outfitted listening room in the basement of Centre PHI. “It’s pretty exciting, that place,” Moss beams. “I just spent a week doing the Dolby Atmos mix. It’s a very special thing for me.”

Moss was raised in Toronto before relocating permanently to Montreal in her late teens. “My grandparents lived here in Montreal and my parents grew up in Montreal,” she explains. “My mother decided even before I was born that I would be having music lessons and that they would be a serious part of my life. My dad played in bands in the Communist Jewish community. There was a lot of singing and a lot of music-sharing circles. We spent summers and winters in Montreal and I knew from an early age that when I could move here I would. And I’ve never looked back. The grown-up me grew up in Montreal.”

Childhood for Moss was filled with Classical music, Jazz, and old-school Blues, until she developed her own individual tastes. “The very first obsession with music that I had was the Grateful Dead. I fucking loved the Grateful Dead. That was my first real passion.”

The earliest album she remembers buying of her own volition was Appetite for Destruction by Guns N’ Roses. “I listened to it a few years ago,” Moss recalls, “and the lyrics are fucking heinously disgusting,” punctuating this disdainful appraisal by elongating her syllables. “It was one of the many eye-opening moments of realizing as a young girl-type person the kind of misogyny that was rampant in the stuff that I listened to. Musically, you can’t go wrong. Lyrically, it’s better to not listen to the words at all.”

Quickly, Moss discovered and was influenced by the more experimental side of Grunge Rock emerging in the early 1990s. “I was in high school when Kurt Cobain died,” she says. “I remember the very day. Sonic Youth was a gateway. The Pixies were a gateway. Fugazi. The classics.”

When she absconded to Montreal in the late ‘90s, Moss found herself on the ground floor of the nascent Constellation Records scene, a cornerstone of this city’s mythology as a nucleus for underground insurgent music.

“One of my first best friends in Montreal was Ian Ilavsky,” Moss remembers. “We played in bands together. We hung out all the time. He and his mystery friend Don Wilkie from Toronto, who was planning to move to Montreal, wanted to start a venue-slash-record label. They wanted it to be called The Constellation Room. So, Don moved here, and then they were confronted with the incredibly Kafkaesque bureaucracy in Montreal with doing anything dealing with the public. They couldn’t get a venue permit no matter what they did. So, they just rented a loft and started the label and started hosting a small concert series in Old Montreal in their first location. And that experience became Constellation Records. Their first release was Ian’s band Sofa, who I was a huge fan of at the time, and I had seen every show of. That was pre-history. I was around for the whole dawn — the Don dawn,” she laughs.

In the ensuing decades, Montreal has undergone seismic political and economic shifts which have translated into a fluctuating cultural landscape.

“For a long time, it felt like Montreal was immune to the global Western world shift towards gentrification,” says Moss. “But in the last few years, what I thought could never happen here has happened here. You’ve seen it. We’re experiencing what everyone else is experiencing of being priced out, if you aren’t lucky enough to have some kind of stable living conditions. Particularly because of the rapid rise of rents here which have not matched the rise in income, what’s happening here is very violent in that way.”

“Having transformative experiences along with people who are working towards making change is a real thing.” Photographed for NicheMTL.

Moss possesses a strong sense of social responsibility, leading by example in an abstract but tangible fashion. She is a founder member of the Montreal chapter of Musicians For Palestine and has co-organized a number of local fundraising events for the cause.

“I don’t think that I’m under any naïve illusions that there is any one thing that can affect change,” she admits. “Definitely music as a general term is too broad. But it’s one of the many tools that a community can have that can offer a space to bring like minded people together, or near-like minded people together, and have it be a situation where a group of people can leave more aligned than they entered. Or they can have this experience of sharing the energy of seeing music performed. To me, that can be a genuinely transformative experience. Having transformative experiences along with people who are working towards making change is a real thing. It’s not just entertainment. It’s a dedication to creating those spaces in the best possible way that I know, to facilitate that type of communion.”

There is an air of urgency, profundity, and gravitas to Moss’s life and work — from collecting obscure ornaments to condensing a multitude of tracks into glimmering sonic jewels that both trouble and delight. Watching Moss in her element is a masterclass in ritual reciprocity, an unforgettable experience for anyone fortunate enough to have encountered her delicate indomitability.

“I feel very committed to it being a reciprocal relationship,” she divulges. “It’s 100 percent the motivation that keeps me like a moth flying at the light.”◼︎

Jessica Moss performs 18 October 2025 at Centre PHI, 407 Rue Saint-Pierre.

Cover image by Audrey Cantwell.

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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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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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All Dressed

The PHI Phenomenon: in conversation with Myriam Achard

Verily, time is of the essence.

“It’s been busy,” says Myriam Achard as she reclines into one of the plum-coloured sofas in the foyer of the PHI Centre, Montreal’s foremost site for the exhibition of works that exist at the intersection of art and technology.

Achard has recently returned from a festival in the south of Taiwan and will next embark upon a whirlwind Trans-European reconnaissance tour through Geneva, Amsterdam, and much of Germany.

“I’m not complaining, I love what I do,” says Achard. “But I’m not very proud of my carbon footprint.”

Atop a mane of spirited blonde curls that are her trademark, Achard wears a number of hats at Centre PHI: chief of new media partnerships, head of public relations, and an overarching curatorial role in selecting exhibitions.

This last credential is what frequently takes Achard around the world, visiting festivals, vernissages, conferences, art fairs, and related types of events, always on the hunt for the latest in creative technological mediation.

Video taken from Laure Prouvost’s installation Oma-je at Fondation PHI. For NicheMTL.

The PHI Foundation was launched first as DHC/ART in Montreal in 2007 by the producer and Ottawan Phoebe Greenberg, whose father was among the founding partners in the real-estate conglomerate, Minto Group.

Greenberg chose our city over New York and Paris as the home for her philanthropic legacy, and concurrently tapped Achard as one of her closest collaborators. “I’ve been working with Phoebe for 18 years,” Achard tells me. “We met, and it was somehow love at first sight.”

Though unlike other influential curators, Achard peculiarly doesn’t come from an Art History background. Nonetheless, she has assumed the job with a particular sense of purpose and a dose of destiny.

“I’m a trained German teacher,” she says. “But art has always been part of my life. My mom took me to the movies and to the theatre as a kid,” Achard recalls. “I didn’t think I would work in that sphere. But going with my mom to Casse-Noisette, and as a teenager to the movies with friends, going to concerts, art has always been very present. It was a happy accident.”

The waiting room and main hallway constructed for the installation Tulpamancer at Centre PHI. Photographed for NicheMTL.

With its cobblestone streets and Gaslamp aesthetic, Old Montreal might on the surface seem like an incongruous district to showcase some of the world’s most technologically advanced works of art. But across two historic edifices — one tucked into the corner of Saint-Jean and Saint-Sacrement, and the other located at 407 Saint-Pierre — the PHI Foundation and Centre PHI, respectively, have remained at the forefront of avant-garde art exhibition in Montreal for nearly two decades. And PHI Contemporary, a cluster of 18th century heritage buildings across from Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours Chapel on Rue Saint-Paul, is slated to open in 2028.

“PHI Contemporary will allow us to bring under one roof what we are currently doing in two physical spaces,” Achard explains. “Right now, when we speak about the Foundation, we speak about contemporary art, and when we speak about PHI Centre, we speak about art and tech. We just want to speak about art. We don’t want to have to separate this anymore. Artists don’t either. There are more and more artists that are using technology to tell their stories. PHI Contemporary will allow us to have one discussion.”

A rendering of the forthcoming PHI Contemporary space on Bonsecours and Rue Saint-Paul. Visualization by Secchi Smith, ©️ Kuehn Malvezzi + Pelletier de Fontenay.

The Montreal architecture firm Pelletier de Fontenay in collaboration with Berlin-based Kuehn Malvezzi won the international competition to repurpose Maison Louis-Viger and Maison Du Calvet, both of which date from the mid-1700s and are among Canada’s oldest existing structures, into the new PHI Contemporary location.

“We are definitely aware of our responsibility to Montreal’s history,” Achard says. “We feel the pressure of succeeding. But we are convinced that this new institution will become a landmark for Montreal. I sometimes go to New York just to see an exhibition. One exhibition. We hope, we think, that people will do the same — they will come to Montreal to see an exhibition at PHI Contemporary.”

Centre PHI has a unique directive based upon the Kunsthalle model for artistic institutions.

“The Foundation doesn’t have a collection,” Achard says. “We don’t represent any artists. The goal with the PHI Centre is to present international artists to the local community. Artists that maybe never had a solo show in Quebec, or Canada. Our proposition is unique not only in Montreal but internationally. I’ve travelled a lot, and I’ve never found a space like us.”

With its specific mandate of presenting art’s increasing conjuncture with digital technology, Centre PHI has broad license to exhibit works across a diversity of forms and media.

Currently, there are four exhibitions under PHI’s aegis: Oma-je, the French artist Laure Prouvost’s sprawling and multidisciplinary contemplation on ancestry, family, and memory; Habitat Sonore, which invites listeners to experience Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds’ new album, Wild God, in Dolby Atmos sound; Tulpamancer, a clinical installation that projects through Virtual Reality goggles possible pasts and futures individually tailored for each audience member; and The Golden Key, an interactive audiovisual mythology created by Matthew Niederhauser and Marc Da Costa which harnesses A.I. to generate a never-ending user-directed fairy tale.

Still image from Matthew Niederhauser and Marc Da Costa’s The Golden Key. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“We are aware that Artificial Intelligence could potentially be a threat for some artists,” Achard admits. “But with our mission, we have to embrace it. The Golden Key, for example, is making fun of A.I. So, we don’t take it too seriously. We want people to laugh and make fun of what A.I. gives us. I think A.I. in general needs to be regulated. But it’s here to stay, so it’s better to go with the flow than to try and go against it.”

Technology in contemporary art practice is most often associated with themes of disruption, velocity, disposability, and post-humanity — things that seem at odds with Montreal’s local, scrappy, DIY spirit. Yet, Achard is ultimately aware that longevity and collaborative community are the core of any enduring curatorial practice.

“12 years ago, when the paint wasn’t even dry on the walls,” Achard remembers, “we organized a press tour. And some journalists and people from the community were like, ‘why will you show only international artists?’ And we said, ‘that’s our mandate.’ But then, over the years, we enlarged our mandate to include local artists. At the PHI Centre, when I can, I want to show local artists. It’s nice to find a balance. It will be the same at PHI Contemporary. The Montreal audience is so curious, so savvy, so open. Sometimes we fail. But it’s okay to fail. Our audience understands that great collaborations take time.”◼︎

Cover image: Myriam Achard photographed for NicheMTL.

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The Accidental Tourist

Patrick Watson and the Orchestre FILMharmonique, Maison Symphonique, 21 November 2024

Patrick Watson and the Orchestre FILMharmonique receive a standing ovation after their performance at Maison Symphonique, 21 November 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

In the filmmaker Luca Guadagnino’s adaptation of William S. Burroughs’s 1985 novel Queer, Daniel Craig, of James Bond and Belvedere Vodka advert fame, stars as Burroughs’s protagonist, Bill Lee, an ageing junkie absconding in 1950s Mexico City to avoid a possession-related prison term in the U.S.

Burroughs based Lee on a thinly veiled version of himself at a time when drug use and homosexuality were widely considered outlaw behaviours. Nowadays, there is nothing more normie. Burroughs, were he alive today, may have been shocked with these twists of fate.

Shifting social mores notwithstanding, Guadagnino wanted the film to have an authentic aesthetic, especially in terms of its costuming. According to a recent New York Times article, all of the actors’ greasy apparel worn onscreen was of the period, sourced from vintage clothing boutiques and flea markets, with the costume designer, Jonathan Anderson, creative director of luxury brand Loewe, unearthing a treasure trove of 1950s underwear right here in Montreal. Because of course there is a Montrealer harboring a peculiar obsession with historical skivvies.

“An addict has little regard for his image,” Burroughs wrote in the novel’s introduction. Ironically though, the image makers here had to devote outsize attention to details which the story’s real-life subjects themselves ignored.

Distressed clothing has proven fashionable now for decades, with torn jeans and threadbare sweaters from high fashion houses like Balenciaga and Saint Laurent commanding higher market and cultural value than crisp new garments ever could. The 2001 film Zoolander satirized this with its hilarious plotline of an haute couture brand, Derelicte.

“The Ugly American” defines a stereotype of Americans travelling abroad — obnoxious, arrogant, ignorant, and unwashed. One of my favourite Burroughs lines comes from the David Cronenberg adaptation of Naked Lunch in which Hans, the German Black Meat manufacturer, observes, “You know how Americans are. They love to travel. But they only want to meet other Americans and talk about how hard it is to find a decent hamburger.” Two-time president Donald Trump himself has been known to extoll the virtues of “great American food.”

Immigration has become the center of heated political discourse on both sides of the 49th parallel, the subject of tariffs and potential trade wars. But it must be said that of all the immigrant nationalities to Canada, Americans are the grimiest.

Dexter Barker-Glenn, Soul Manifest, Espace Maurice, 30 November — 21 December 2024

Curator Marie Segolene and the artist Dexter Barker-Glenn at Espace Maurice, 30 November 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

When I toured Cuba in 2007, Fidel Castro was still its leader. Americans were not permitted to visit the country. George W. Bush was still the worst U.S. president there had ever been.

Except for political propaganda, there was no Western style advertising anywhere. No Coca-Cola. No Apple billboards.

However, entering the capital, a gigantic mural relief of Che Guevara was visible against the side of Cuba’s Ministry of the Interior building in Havana’s Revolution Plaza.

Alberto Korda’s image has become a logo of sorts for revolution the globe over — so much so that Guevara’s visage is deflated of semiotic import, trapped in a t-shirt rather than elevated as an icon for social change. This is precisely where capitalism wants him.

Guevara wrote, “in moments of great peril, it is easy to muster a powerful response with moral incentives. Retaining their effectiveness, however, requires the development of a consciousness in which there is a new scale of values.”

Let’s call it “Acid Communism.”

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Habitat Sonore, Centre PHI, 21 November — 19 January 2025

Whenever I enter into an artist’s oeuvre late in their career, I feel like a dilettante. Such is the case with Nick Cave, whose music I was always peripherally aware of, but was never central to my experience. Being immersed in Cave’s latest album, Wild God, is enough to bring anyone up to speed and convert the most ardent non-believer.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor, MTelus, 26 November 2024

Godspeed You! Black Emperor perform at MTelus, 26 November 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Prior to the coronavirus crisis, I frequently fell ill whenever I travelled.

In 2018 and 2019, I attended the Unsound Festival in Krakow, Poland. And each time I returned home sicker than the sickest I had ever been. There must have been some wild Cold War-era bacteria floating around in one of those moody and disused old Soviet warehouses.

Everyone seemed to catch the bug, too. We joked that it was “Rave Flu.” But doubtless, festival settings where attendees are over-partied and under-slept, improperly nourished and potentially intoxicated, are cesspools of contagion and disease.

When it comes to convalescence, there is no place like home. Carl Rodd, Harry Dean Stanton’s character in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, relays a wise sentiment regarding tourism: “I’ve already gone places,” Rodd declares. “I just want to stay where I am.”

Paramirabo & Thin Edge New Music Collective, Chamberdestroy, Conservatoire de Montréal, 29 November 2024

Paramirabo and Thin Edge New Music Collective perform at Conservatoire de musique de Montréal, 29 November 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“If we choose to recondition our interpretation system, reality becomes fluid, and the scope of what can be real is enhanced without endangering the integrity of reality.”
―Carlos Castaneda, The Art of Dreaming.

“[[ ]] Level-1 or world space is an anthropomorphically scaled, predominantly vision-configured, massively multi-slotted reality system that is obsolescing very rapidly.
Garbage time is running out.
Can what is playing you make it to level-2?”
—Nick Land, “Meltdown.”

The gamification of lived experience is a common theme of the postmodern multiverse narrative. Late 1990s movies like Open Your Eyes, eXistenZ, and of course the David Fincher film The Game presuppose that we must play in order to participate in reality. Win, lose, or draw.

A generation prior, the comedian Bob Newhart set a precedent with the brilliant series finale of his eponymous sitcom in which Bob Hartley, Newhart’s character from “The Bob Newhart Show,” his previous programme, awakens to discover that the antecedent eight years — and an entire TV series — had all been an elaborate dream.

Anachronistically, the Newhart writers could have just as easily conceived of the Chinese Waiter’s last line in Cronenberg’s eXistenz.

“Hey… aren’t we still in the game?”◼︎

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: Dexter Barker-Glenn, Spectre (2024), Blotting paper, hydrochloric acid, potassium chloride, alpha amylase, protease, lactase, copper. 7.5 x 7.5″. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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Slipping Away

Coded Dreams, 9 October 2024 – 12 January 2025, Centre PHI

Marc Da Costa and Matthew Niederhauser at Centre PHI. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“First the sun and then the moon, one of them will be ‘round soon.” —The Rolling Stones, “Slipping Away”

The impetus for technological innovation was once upon a time to extend humankind’s functional capacities. We invented shovels so we wouldn’t have to dig with our fingers. We devised washing machines so we wouldn’t have to scrub our fabrics by hand. Books prolonged our natural memories; recordings preserved ephemeral sounds that would have otherwise been lost in time.

Media then became all about compression, packing more and more into less and less. Books and motion pictures and audio recordings were progressively condensed onto celluloid reels, shellac disks, vinyl records, magnetic tape, then digitized into formats that advertised their increasing miniaturization. The Compact Disc. The iPod Nano. The MacBook Air. Everything into nothing.

Artificial Intelligence presents the veneer of infinite information beneath a shiny, tiny interface. But below the surface, it’s as hollow as an abandoned snail shell — pretty but vacant.

“Images and information,” writes the media theorist Laura Marks in her 2010 book Enfoldment and Infinity, “come into the world and roll back into the infinite in a ceaseless flow of unfolding and enfolding.”

It is not, however, the process of unfolding-enfolding that is ceaseless; it’s the flow.

Communauté Slo / Nancy Tobin, Superheart L’Opera, 9 October 2024, La Chapelle | Scènes Contemporaines

The company of Superheart L’Opera receives a standing ovation. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“The future exists only in the shape of our present apprehensions and hopes, and the past merely as memory.” —W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn

The camera eye is a consumer-grade drone flown across the New Mexico desert by a twelve-year-old boy named Emmanuel. We cruise smoothly over scrub and brush, whizzing above rocks and low bushes, surrounded by nothing but reddish-brown sand and cerulean, blue sky. In the far distance, mountains; in the other direction, what looks like a state-of-the-art military base.

A hare scurries among the spikey cacti and thistle weed, approaching the observation tower and barbed wire fences surrounding the secured compound. As it tracks the hare, Emmanuel’s drone suddenly explodes mid-air, apparently shot by an automated ballistic weapon.

The boy runs to the perimeter fence, tears streaming down his face. He retrieves the wreckage as an obese, moustached guard wearing a bulletproof vest and aviator sunglasses approaches the fence from the other side.

“Shouldn’t be flying that damn thing around here, kid,” warns the guard — too late for Emmanuel.

“This base has the highest-level security of any in these United States,” he mutters to no one in particular as he wheels back on his leather boots and returns like a fat robot to his post.

A Place to Noise, Léa Boudreau, 11 October 2024, Cyber Love Hotel

Schematics drawing at Léa Boudreau’s A Place to Noise installation. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Nothing here now but the recordings.” —William S. Burroughs, “Soul Killer”

Autumn is undoubtedly the season for nostalgia, for reflecting on the year’s events and making plans for whatever time is left. The falling leaves signify time’s passage and the inevitability of death. Montreal’s autumnal magnificence is surely a testament to the truth that there is beauty in decay, that youth is illusory, time is cyclical.

Sometimes, you already know when something is happening that you will become nostalgic for that time later in life. It’s an uncanny feeling, projecting yourself into an inherently sadder future in which you will miss the moment you’re inhabiting right now. The now that will be.

When you have that future nostalgic sense, hold onto it for as long as possible, and then let it go as soon as you feel its departure.

Cleave it and leave it.

Wadada Leo Smith and Sylvie Courvoisier with Rehab Hazgui, 7 October 2024, La Sala Rossa

Rehab Hazgui performs at La Sala Rossa for the Flux Festival, 7 October 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“In conditions of digital recall, loss is itself lost.” —Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life

Human memory has always been selective. We tend to recall our favourite moments with crystal clarity. Trauma, too, marks our commemorative impulses deeply. But hard drives and digital memory store the good and the bad with ruthless indifference. They can call up any memory at any given time — even simultaneously — with the happiest and most distressing events sitting right next to each other, sharing virtual space on a plane with seemingly an infinite amount of it.

Machines don’t discern between one or another emotion. Plenty of sweat and tears have been shed trying to teach them to behave more human-like. The question is, should machines become more like us, or should we strive to be more like them, abandoning our warm and soft physicality for something colder and more calculating?

FYEAR with Erika Angell, 16 October 2024, Centre PHI

Left: Tawhida Tanya Evanson; Right: Jason Sharp of FYEAR. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“What’s done in the dark will be brought to the light.” —Johnny Cash, “God’s Gonna Cut You Down”

I received an email from a friend recently telling me that he was finding it increasingly difficult to do anything “for fun.”

The news of war in Lebanon — and Gaza, and Ukraine, and Sudan — was apparently robbing him of the inner capacity for enjoyment just for the sake of enjoyment. Of course, we focus on death toll and count victims in numbers. But enlightenment is immeasurable, and the true casualty of war.

This, I believe, is what Mark Fisher meant by “consciousness deflation.” In order to raise the awareness of our collective situation and surroundings, we require an elevated sense of perspective. We have to become lighter to attain the moral high ground. Our opponents seek to lower us, to weigh us down with a constant barrage of base-level emotions — fear, anger, hatred — that enshroud us in a thick and heavy darkness.

In Krakow’s ghetto district, where thousands of Europe’s Jews were rounded up during World War II before being shipped off to die in concentration camps, I was surprised when I travelled there for the first time in 2018 to see a graffito on a tenement wall depicting Gene Kelly from the 1952 film Singin’ in the Rain with a caption reading, “I’m happy again.” A dark joke, I thought.

I couldn’t help but laugh, though, given the context — both historical and geographical.◼︎

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: Still from Marc Da Costa and Matthew Niederhauser’s The Golden Key. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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