Tag Archives: Hotel2Tango

All Dressed

100% In It: in conversation with Radwan Ghazi Moumneh

The power is out at Thee Mighty Hotel2Tango.

The legendary Montreal recording studio on Van Horne Avenue that has produced some of this city’s most iconic recordings over the past two decades, by the likes of Arcade Fire, The Dears, The Barr Brothers, and Godspeed You! Black Emperor, among many others, a building that is normally positively buzzing, both literally and figuratively, stands eerily quiet on a recent Wednesday.

In a whirlwind of apologies for the lack of electricity, its co-founder, the composer and recording engineer Radwan Ghazi Moumneh arrives right on time, to the minute. Hydro Quebec had months ago scheduled an outage to accommodate routine maintenance work, Moumneh tells me. But he had forgotten, and on this afternoon, we would have to proceed under natural light. In the studio’s main room, fortunately, the sun streams in as if from some divine source.

Moumneh wears dark glasses, his head covered by a bright pink hoodie and a pair of signature leather loafers over bare feet. He speaks rapidly and affably and philosophically and curiously self-deprecatingly, entirely void of any sense of rock star ego, even if it might be warranted by the sheer volume of celebrated albums in which he has participated. Recordings by Thee Silver Mt. Zion, Jessica Moss, and Land of Kush, just to name a few.

“The other day,” he confides, laughing, “we were at the PA, and my son turns to me and asks, ‘Dad, are you famous?’ And the clerk looks at me like maybe I am. And I’m just standing there like someone who’s trying not to be recognized, with a potato and an onion in my basket. And I say, ‘no — and we’re not getting any chocolate or chips, either. We’re getting an onion and a potato for dinner.’”

Moumneh and his business partners Efrim Menuck, Howard Bilerman, and Thierry Amar purchased the unassuming white complex that houses Hotel2Tango nearly 20 years ago. Constellation Records has its offices upstairs, and Grey Market Mastering rounds out the edifice as a one-stop record workshop. This is our Abbey Road, our Brill Building, our Sound City all rolled into one — in a city with its own undoubtedly signature sound.

“When people make their records here, it’s such a precious thing,” Moumneh muses. “So, I make sure my heart’s 100% in it. Each one is such a unique experience and a very important piece of the puzzle. And each one has really annoying things that make me get fucking upset at the artist because I’m like, ‘God fucking damn it, this sucks. This is a silly way to work. This is a silly thing that you’re doing.’ But I’m also very conscious that that is a very important part of making something. Nothing can be wholly perfect. The perfection is the bad and the good.”

Moumneh, 49, is an Orson Welles-level Renaissance man who has worked as a musician with Jerusalem in My Heart, in partnership with Edmontonian expat Erin Weisgerber, a producer, a filmmaker, a composer for cinema, dance, and theatre, an actor, and a sound designer for public art installations. He was responsible for the audio of 21 Balançoires, the musical swings created in 2011 in the Quartier des spectacles and exported to various cities around the world as a work of living urban sculpture.

The swings, a collaboration with the design team Daily Tous Les Jours, rewarded users’ cooperation with more complex melodies as they swung in unison. 21 Balançoires won numerous international awards and caught the attention of the talk show host and global tastemaker Oprah Winfrey. “I do so many different things,” Moumneh says, “but I still feel like I have no idea what I’m doing half the time. I’m still such a student of everything.”

I caught Moumneh last year at Hotel2Tango performing an improvised electronics set with the Parisian musician Frédéric D. Oberland, with whom he has just completed recording a long player to be released in 2026.

“What we do is dangerous and fun,” Moumneh explains. “Just experimentation in the truest sense. Knowing that this could be not amazing and that’s okay. That’s the spirit. Let’s do something singular and unique and we’re never going to do it again.”

Moumneh also freshly wrapped sessions with the Lebanese post-rock band SANAM, with which he will perform a handful of live dates at Suoni per il Popolo, the 25th iteration of the storied Montreal music festival, in June 2025.

“I’m going to do a duo with the synth player of SANAM,” Moumneh tells me. “And Jessica Moss will do a trio with the bassist and the drummer, who is a phenomenal musician. I’m really lucky to have these people as dear friends.”

Born in Lebanon and raised in Oman, Moumneh’s family fled to Canada in the mid-1990s while he was still in his mid-teens, as part of a government initiative to resettle at-risk migrants. “My parents had no idea where Canada was,” Moumneh divulges. “But it was this or go back to Lebanon. They were just trying to offer these crazy deals to people with young children and nowhere to go.”

Moumneh remained in Montreal while his family returned to Lebanon fewer than five years later. “My parents spoke no English and no French. They hated it here,” he says, elongating the operative word. “I was like, ‘I really need to have my own thing, away from you guys.’”

Soon, Moumneh found his footing attending engineering school and teaching himself to play a variety of musical instruments. “I just started playing music because I met a couple of weirdos in class and they were like, ‘hey, do you want to try and learn how to play music?’” He relocated momentarily to Lebanon but moved back to Montreal in the early 2000s and was among the cohort that founded Hotel2Tango. “I was working on stuff before that, too,” he says, “but this is where things really got serious.”

Moumneh travels to Beirut twice a year, he tells me, to visit family and close friends, recounting how the city was bombed twice on his last sojourn. “It was typical, stupid shit,” he deadpans. “3:30 in the morning jumping out of bed because the whole fucking neighbourhood is bombed and you’re like, ‘fuck you guys.’”

It is striking how nonchalantly he speaks of the routine violence that Lebanon has endured historically, escalating again with the most recent war in neighbouring Israel. “It’s not as dramatic as it sounds,” Moumneh says. “It is dramatic, but people deal with it on a whole different level. Our idea of danger is a different thing. People like my parents can’t leave, but people who are young can’t live there. All the youth leave because it’s so dead-end.”

“I absolutely worship challenges. I live for them.” Radwan Ghazi Moumneh photographed for NicheMTL.

We talk at length about the disparities between the West and Middle East. “Two people can go to the same area and have completely different experiences of what they understand Lebanon is,” he describes. “It’s very un-understandable. That’s our sectarian system. If you want to see the extremes of all aspects of life, you go to Lebanon. It’s just extremes in every direction. It’s a really spectacular place. There is obnoxious wealth, of course. Beyond obnoxious wealth. And beyond insane poverty. And beyond insane beauty. And beyond insane ugliness. There is more beauty than there is ugliness. And even in the ugliness there is beauty.”

I ask him to contrast Montreal and its unique brand of ugly beauty.

“If someone was to come from abroad and only visit Montreal and that to them is what represents Canada, how distorted of a fucking idea would they have of what Canada is? This is a crazy place. It’s so absurd that this whole place,” he says, spanning out his arms, “is an arbitrary country. You can fit three Montreals into Lebanon. It’s so tiny. It’s like from here to Ottawa. And yet we have a million different populations that are so drastically different. There are so many dialects, so many accents, culinary differences, cultural differences, within one tiny little blob. Imagine. It’s all beautiful. But it’s sad, also, the destructive side of it.”

Finding beauty in despair, or creating it when none seems readily available, is the responsibility of the socially conscious artist, someone like Moumneh with that superpower that produces spontaneous voltage, especially when the electricity is out, either metaphorically or actually.

“I love throwing myself into hoops of fire,” admits Moumneh, speaking now more broadly about his general approach to life. “I love it. I love the challenge. I absolutely worship challenges. I live for them. I think it’s what keeps you mentally a child. It feels like you have so much to learn.”◼︎

Radwan Ghazi Moumneh performs as part of Suoni per il popolo with SANAM 21 June 2025 at La Sala Rossa, 4848 Boulevard St. Laurent.

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How Do You Spell Holiday?

Questions In a World of Blue: in conversation with WE ARE WINTER’S BLUE AND RADIANT CHILDREN

Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. —William S. Burroughs, “Soul Killer”

Turning power against itself has always been a useful form of resistance.

Donning the enemy’s flag and uniform has historically been deployed as a consistently successful strategy to confuse and infiltrate any opposing army. American Delta blues artists like Skip James and Robert Johnson confronted the misery of the Great Depression by singing sad songs. The legendary Montreal post-rock record label Constellation in the early days of the corporate internet posted to its website a manifesto proclaiming, “THE WORLD HAS NOT CHANGED. THE WORLD REMAINS THE SAME. THE END OF THE WORLD WILL NEVER COME. WE ARE ALL GUILTY.”

It is befitting, then, that more than two decades later, Patch One, the Portland, Maine-based artist and musician, the experimental guitarist and synth player Jonathan Downs, Efrim Manuel Menuck, a founder member of Godspeed You! Black Emperor and numerous offshoot bands, and I meet via Zoom, the technology platform that came to fame most notably during the coronavirus crisis, to discuss their latest collaboration, a battle-weary go-screw-yourself forthcoming on Constellation Records, squarely aimed at state power, entitled NO MORE APOCALYPSE FATHER.

“Fuck this app,” Menuck ceremoniously exclaims from behind a mountain of beard and hair as he flickers onscreen.

The four of us are gathered virtually on the day that the last remaining North American university campus protest against Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, at McGill, is bulldozed. It’s a stark local coincidence that underscores the simultaneous urgency and ambience of apocalyptic global events, as well as the necessity for artists to continue making art in the face of it all.

“I think ‘contribution’ is a key word,” says Patch in response to the question of how music can stimulate social change. “I can pretty quickly talk myself into a corner and think that this is nothing, this is fucking stupid that I’m doing this right now. But I don’t actually believe that. That’s what the powers that be are telling me to think. There is a lot to be said for putting things out into the world.”

WE ARE WINTER’S BLUE AND RADIANT CHILDREN sleeve drawing. Patch One.

“For me, making stuff is a compulsion,” Menuck insists. “As far as I can tell, the responsibility of an artist is to address whatever reality they’re living in in the moment in a way that’s truthful. And there are a bunch of different truths. I think the four of us in the band share certain types of truth that lead to the record that we made.”

NO MORE APOCALYPSE FATHER clearly originates from a post-punk infused worldview, and a post-rock inspired aesthetic: shimmering, lurching, distorted dirges that harken to Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra’s catalogue, as well as that of Big|Brave guitarist and collaborator Mathieu Ball, with whom I caught up a few weeks later at a gig at Ateliers Belleville.

“I don’t know how this album came together,” Ball admits. “It just did.”

Although Patch and Downs are American, Montreal’s zeitgeist comes to the fore with WE ARE WINTER’S BLUE AND RADIANT CHILDREN.

“Like every bigger city in the world,” observes Ball, “with the cost of living continuously increasing, I do find it slightly harder to continue pursuing creative endeavours. It’s becoming more difficult to find a studio and workspace. But the creative community in this city will not anytime soon cease to exist.”

The album was recorded over an intense week with the foursome hunkered down at Hotel2Tango, the studio which incubated some of Montreal’s most enduring recordings, including Fly Pan Am’s N’écoutez pas, Arcade Fire’s Funeral, and Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s debut, F♯ A♯ ∞.

“Patch and I drove up to Montreal at the end of last August,” Downs recalls. “Efrim knew how we played and asked us to be a part of it. He thought we’d fit in. He and Mathieu had worked out some jams beforehand, and Efrim had sent us all some skeletal structures — some ‘songs,’ you might say. It was all kind of loose and we listened to the songs over the PA speakers and just put more into them and built them up.”

That layered approach produced an encrusted and profoundly moving LP that primarily invokes the despair of observing savagery from a safe distance whilst being unable to intervene. This theme is ever-present, even metaphorically, for instance, on the song entitled “Dangling Blanket from A Balcony (White Phosphorous)” which grapples with the shock of watching Michael Jackson suspend his son out of a hotel window for the apparent bemusement of the paparazzi.

“I think that sometimes people make the mistake of thinking that having empathy or feeling pain watching something happen is a productive human value,” says Menuck. “It’s a reflex, and it’s a good reflex. But the reality is that it doesn’t do anything on its own.”

“Not that there’s not always horror and war in the news,” Patch chimes in, “but since we recorded this, I’ve thought a lot about how people use social media and post things on the internet. Everyone that I look at on the internet is just showing me all this shit and it’s like, what does this mean for the people? Are you trying to do this just to show me something about what’s happening, or to show me something about yourself? I don’t blame people because it is a thing, and I’ve been that person, too. You want to feel like you’re fucking doing something while you’re just sitting there at home or whatever.”

“The big problem,” adds Menuck, “is that the way to disseminate these images is all owned by huge sketchy companies that are really just data-scraping endeavours. Who owns these companies? I feel like there has been stuff on social media that’s made a change. But what that change leads to, I don’t know. What people do with that horrible feeling of being stuck just witnessing is what matters. Just the witnessing doesn’t matter.”

WE ARE WINTER’S BLUE AND RADIANT CHILDREN back cover photo. Efrim Manuel Menuck.

“I wonder,” muses Downs “what other moments in history would have been like with everyone having a smartphone, or a camera, and being able to connect information from those devices to a lot of people? I think it has made more people aware with a lot more people looking at it. The more people tear away from the mainline story of what’s happening, the better.”

The media landscape within which WE ARE WINTER’S BLUE AND RADIANT CHILDREN emerged, however, is unique, even in a world that seems to interminably reiterate atrocity. There are now multiple wars raging, with no end in sight, and a panoply of viewpoints on every aspect of daily life. There is no question that art contributes to producing more positive conditions, if even to offer a soothing tune in troubled times. But how that occurs is difficult to describe.

“I think a melody with words attached that have some sort of meaning does get into people’s heads” Menuck explains. “But at the same time, we’re not making popular music. So, it’s just a few people at a time.”

Now Menuck starts second-guessing himself.

“If one song changes…” he pauses mid-thought. “No, if one song opens someone’s mind… No, that’s way too heavy. If one song gets a certain idea… No, that’s heavy, too.

He exhales a plume of smoke and reorients himself in front of the camera eye.

“Mostly the world is going to change based on small things like the conversation we’re having with each other. That stuff does ripple out. It’s not enough. It’s really not enough. But it does play a part. We live in an organic system, and all these small things interweave with each other. And all these tiny little accidents are what make change at the end of the day. It’s not a glorious thing or a heroic thing. It’s just trying to contribute to something that’s better than this.”◼︎

NO MORE APOCALYPSE FATHER is released via Constellation Records 13 September 2024.

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Ignoring van Gogh

Heith with Orchestroll and Audréanne Fillion, Espace SAT, 12 July 2024

Orchestroll perform at SAT, 12 July 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

I know a lot of people who want to quit doing the things that they know are bad for them. Smoking, drinking, eating crap food, taking drugs, toxic relationships — these kinds of things.

For some reason, many of these people come to me as if I have answers for them. Maybe it’s because I have stopped doing all of these things myself, and they believe that I can magically ladle them out of that thick soup of addiction.

Sorry, I can’t. Nobody can.

These people think that there is some light that will switch on, or off, when someone like me shows them the secret, or some useful doctor prescribes the right antidote, or recommends replacing one compulsion with another. They try to change their friends, or their work, or move house. They think that by rearranging everything around them, something inside them will be altered, too.

People ask me if I feel better now.

No. But I feel. My sense of feeling has improved, both pleasure and pain, happiness and sorrow.

So yes, I suppose that technically speaking, I do feel better now. And yet I still don’t know how to feel.

Learning to feel again is the opposite of riding a bike. Once you learn, you immediately forget. It’s like being a goldfish, swimming forever around the castle in the feelings fishbowl.

There is no sage advice, no magic formula. The sole equation that exists, which is rather quotidian, is Life + Time = X.

The only advice I can offer for people who want to stop, for instance, smoking, is just to stop smoking. Stop putting combustible sticks in your mouth and lighting them. And keep stopping doing that. Stop lighting combustible sticks in your mouth until you don’t feel like lighting combustible sticks in your mouth anymore.

And even after that, keep stopping. Never go back. Just stop for good.

The worst thing anyone can do who wants to stop doing something is to start doing that thing again. You cannot reward yourself for an extended period of abstinence with short bursts of indulgence.

If there is one weird trick to quitting anything, it’s to learn to enjoy not wanting, say, cigarettes, or alcohol, or smack, or your crazy ex, or whatever it is that you so badly want. Learn to love unconsummated longing, and suddenly, you will find fulfillment in absolutely everything. And nothing.

The less you need to satisfy yourself, the freer you will feel.

What then? Then you die. Full-stop.

Music & Nature, Private home of Nabil Fawaz, 13 July 2024

Yuki Isami and Nabil Fawaz perform impromptu at Mr. Fawaz’s private residence, 13 July 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Among the first films ever made is a short by the Lumière brothers called “Feeding the Baby.”

It depicts in documentary form precisely that: Auguste Lumière and his wife, Marguerite, feeding their infant daughter, Andrée.

Still, the subtext of this film is noteworthy. Cinema feeds its audiences the images that form our consensus.

There is a reason why our timelines are called “feeds” — and the text at the bottom of a newscast is coined “the crawl.”

A Nearly Tangible Fiction, Patel Brown, Until 17 August 2024

Malik McKoy, when can we start using emojis as titles?, 2023, acrylic and yarn on canvas. Photographed for NicheMTL.

A fundamental difference exists between galleries and museums.

Generally, curators run art galleries with a passion for art. Galleries have to make money, too, because operating a gallery is labour, like any other kind of labour. And labourers deserve to be paid. Art labourers work hard finding art.

Art museums, on the other hand, are far more monetarily concerned. We mistakenly believe that curators run art museums, too. This is false.

Art museums are run by PR and marketing teams who work two days a week and meet over Zoom, or Zoom over Teams. Art museums are run by risk management departments and accountants who devise and revise ever-shrinking budgets on ever-expanding Excel spreadsheets. Players more than workers run museums.

If ever there was an artist as original and talented today as a van Gogh, even if he or she or they crawled into the museum bloodied and overdosing and earless, the players who run them would never take notice.

They’d be too busy counting Instagram followers like sheep and unconsciously refreshing their newsfeeds, looking everywhere except in front of their faces for the next big thing.

Museums are where great art gets lost. Art galleries are where great art is found.

Vagabond Shoes, McBride Contemporain, Until 17 August 2024

Eun-Ha Paek, Mongmong Lassies Double, 2024, Glazed stoneware with luster, 16.5 x 21.6 x 8.3 cm. McBride Contemporain.

We are taught to forgive those who trespass against us, for they know not what they do. Most people, when they do us harm, feel a sense of remorse. So, it’s easy to forgive. If someone apologizes for their trespasses, it inclines exoneration.

But what happens when people who trespass against us aren’t sorry, when they don’t feel a sense of remorse, when they know precisely what they do?

There’s less teaching for that.

Jessica Moss with Radwan Ghazi Moumneh and Frédéric D. Oberland, Hotel2Tango, 20 July 2024

Jessica Moss performs at Hotel2Tango, 20 July 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth. And it shall come to pass, when I bring cloud over the earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud: And I will remember my covenant, which is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh. —Genesis 9:13-15

There are no coincidences.

Not because everything happens for a reason. But rather, because we alone manufacture the often-arcane meanings we ascribe to concurrent or successive events.

These meanings are only meaningful insofar as they are collectively felt, or whether we are capable of communicating and convincing others of their circumstantial, synchronous significance.

Take, for example, the full-horizon double rainbow that occurred over the Van Horne underpass about an hour before Radwan Ghazi Moumneh, Frédéric D. Oberland, and Jessica Moss were set to perform at Hotel2Tango.

There is nothing inherently meaningful in a deluge of summer rain and the natural prismatic phenomenon that occurs just afterwards. There is no symbolic significance to rainbows taking place before a gig — or for that matter at any given time. There is only scientific significance to light refracting through water.

Nonetheless, it was a coincidence. Know what I mean?◼︎

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