Conservatoire de Musique de Montréal

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 49^th 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?”◼︎

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_{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.}

I am sitting across from Roger Tellier-Craig, the legendary and decidedly niche Montreal electroacoustic musician, at a wobbly brown table in the back room of Caffè Italia on Boulevard St. Laurent.

Tellier-Craig is telling me that his brief stint in the early 2000s as what he describes as a “hired gun” for the exponentially more legendary and decidedly less niche Montreal band Godspeed You! Black Emperor has hurt rather than helped his musical credibility.

“The people who love Godspeed aren’t into experimental electronic music, and the people who listen to experimental electronic music hate Post-Rock.”

Ambivalently, I concede, those two scenes and their members have little overlap. And consequently, counterintuitively, Tellier-Craig’s connection with one of this city’s most venerable musical outfits falls largely, proverbially, upon deaf ears. But Tellier-Craig’s sound goes well beyond the binary.

Even though he has been associated with everyone who’s anyone here — from Godspeed, Fly Pan Am, and Jerusalem in my Heart, to the filmmaker Karl Lemieux, and the intermedia artist Alexandre St-Onge — his solo work has been under construction for almost as long as Montreal itself.

I have followed Tellier-Craig for more than a decade, having discovered Le Révélateur — the musician’s influential collaboration with the video artist Sabrina Ratté — at Mutek in 2012. Later that year, I interviewed him for a Global Ear feature on Montreal in The Wire magazine.

Subsequently, Tellier-Craig has completed a degree in Electroacoustic Music at the Conservatoire de Musique de Montréal, collaborated with Karl Fousek and Devon Hansen, and ripened into a wise elder statesman of sorts.

It feels as though several lifetimes have come and gone since then, and it’s not just the pandemic time warp.

The Montreal Maple Spring soured into the cynical tolerance of capitalism and an acceptance of a provincial swing rightward. Now-ambient disruptions in technology and culture constantly destabilize how and where and why people engage with music. It is safe to assume that Tellier-Craig is not on TikTok.

That is not to say that his music is retro, nor his modes old-fashioned. Roger Tellier-Craig has reached a plateau at which he can focus upon the present, looking neither forward nor backward, content just to be.

Cut back to Summer, 2022. Tellier-Craig and I are sitting at Monarque in Old Montreal. The restaurant has graciously allowed us to film an interview in their dining room, as long as we do it between lunch and dinner service. I have no idea what I am going to do with the footage. But the thing about Tellier-Craig is, like the seasons in Montreal, he’s sure to come around again.

_{Roger Tellier-Craig talks to NicheMTL about his favourite local artists.}_{Andrei Khabad for NicheMTL.}

“Things have changed so much that I think the information I have acquired through this experience is kind of irrelevant,” says Tellier-Craig when I ask what sort of advice he might offer to the kids these days.

“I started making music in an era where you would put out records. Now you’re flooded with this information, this cultural information. How do you say, ‘Hey, here I am, listen to my thing?’ Everyone can make music. It’s readily available through things that we now, 20 years later, take for granted. People have access to MacBooks and laptops and GarageBand or whatever. The DIY mentality is even applicable to stuff that ends up sounding commercial. That’s very different from when I was younger.”

Certainly the world is awash in music. But it was not always so, and his particular encounters with Popular culture as a youngster formed Tellier-Craig’s sensibilities early on — and for a lifetime.

“My dad used to record this show called Friday Night Videos,” he recalls. “This was in 1983 or ’84. And every Saturday we would watch that. At the time, there was no other way to watch videos, so we would just religiously watch this every weekend. And I really got into Culture Club, Duran Duran, Michael Jackson, Madonna, Greg Kihn Band. Pop stuff. I remember getting Thriller on cassette. That was a big one.”

Tellier-Craig evangelizing about music is something like an encyclopedia on tape. He seems to know every little thing about every band, big and small, and makes hyperlinked leaps from one reference to another. “I know all those Beatles songs and ABBA songs by heart, but I don’t remember really listening to them. Music wasn’t as clearly important until I discovered punk. No no no,” Tellier-Craig backtracks, “when I discovered Pink Floyd. And the Velvet Underground. Because I watched The Doors. By Oliver Stone.”

Tellier-Craig cherishes musical breakthroughs as an intrepid explorer might have cherished landing upon some alien shore. His enthusiasm for high and low culture is infectious. Though he flatly denies guilty pleasures. “If you like it, you just have to own it,” Tellier-Craig claims.

“This came from me discovering Scott Walker — but the early Scott Walker, not the late Scott Walker. I discovered the early stuff when I was around 22. During that time, I was starting to discover some French Pop, too — like France Gall — and I knew that this music sounded kitschy to some people. But I was like, I really have to own that. I’m not liking this because it’s ironic. I’m not liking this because it’s cute. I like it because it really means something to me. It resonates on an emotional level.”

There is something inherently Montréalais about Tellier-Craig, and something inherently Tellier-Craig about Montreal. I ask what it means to be an artist in this city, and he contemplates for a long time before replying, “Montreal is accessible, not so expensive like Toronto or Vancouver, but still metropolitan, which means that a lot of people gravitate towards Montreal. A lot of talented people. Maybe people who are a bit more on the margins. To me, Toronto has always sounded more accessible or industry-like. Whereas Montreal has always sounded a bit more weird, in a good way. Like, people are taking risks.”

It has perennially struck me that artists from Montreal, and Canada, more broadly, need to make a name for themselves elsewhere before we take them seriously chez nous. It seems as though Tellier-Craig’s life story so far is about possibilities — possibilities to travel, possibilities to return, and now the chance to stay close to home.

“When someone gets successful outside of Montreal,” Tellier-Craig supposes, “it does make people here want to take notice more. Because they’re like, ‘Oh wow, this has an impact, other people think this is relevant, so I should pay attention to this now.’ But, for example, I remember seeing Godspeed before I played with Godspeed, when they opened for Sonic Youth, and people loved it. They were a band from here and they weren’t famous. Nobody cared outside. Nobody knew about them. And I remember people really, really loving that. It’s not black and white here.”◼︎

Roger Tellier-Craig performs 7 December 2023 at the Conservatoire de Musique de Montréal, 4750, Av. Henri-Juilien.

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The Accidental Tourist

More My Speed: in conversation with Roger Tellier-Craig