Tag Archives: la chapelle

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Shook Ones, Pt. II

An Assembly for the Cosmos, Curator: Antoine Bertron, Galerie de l’UQAM, Until 17 October

A person observing an art installation with large stones arranged around a illuminated screen displaying abstract visuals.
Tabita Rizaire, Mamelles Ancestrales, 2019, Video, colour, sound, 61 min, French with English subtitles, rocks (siliceous sandstone). Photographed for NicheMTL.

“It’s it
What is it?”
—Faith No More, “Epic”

I begin this column with an apology:

I am sorry for deviating from my normal routine of talking around the thing and instead talking straight at the thing. Because the thing is, the thing can no longer be ignored.

The thing is impenetrable by analysis, ignorant of analogy, resistant to criticism, impervious to satire. We may not recognize the thing or be interested, but the thing recognizes and is interested in us.

The thing in question is not A.I. The thing is not Donald Trump, nor is it Vladimir V. Putin, nor any of the abhorrent individuals that pass these days for leaders. The thing is not war, nor is it famine, nor even death. These things indeed are real things. But they are symptoms of the thing, not the thing itself.

The thing, the enemy, the culprit, the syndrome, is capital — the insatiable appetite.

Capital produces death by abstracting life. Capital produces famine by unevenly valuing people and things. Capital produces war by incentivizing detachment from local ethno-geographic realities. Capital produces figures like Putin and Trump, who are neither its smartest nor its most powerful representatives.

Trump and Putin are not heads of state; they are the headless of statelessness, because capital and its agents have no allegiances to anything except for capital.

Nos espoirs furieux, dir. Alex Trahan, La Chapelle Scènes Contemporaines

A performer in a sparkling gown stands center stage under dramatic lighting, with beams of light radiating around them, while seated audience members and a few other performers are visible in the background.
Manon Lussier onstage at La Chapelle Scènes Contemporaines. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“You throw me a lame ‘wait shit out,’
You’re a little late.”
—Sharon Van Etten, “Afraid of Nothing”

U.S. president Donald Trump’s “America First” policy appeals most publicly to the Old Right’s hearth-and-home, non-interventionist doctrine of taking care of our own. This strain of nostalgia speaks to the powerful American mythology of reclaiming its bygone greatness. Trump’s supporters chase it like the horizon.

But now, in an era of global interdependence, which America to a large extent initiated with its policies of industrial offshoring beyond its borders and outsourcing to the lowest bidders, the U.S., one of at least three global superpowers, is in fact enacting extreme 21st century interventionism more evocative of an America post-9/11 than of the nation imagined during its salad days.

Trade wars are tantamount to physical wars because they assault quality of life. But Trump participates in real wars, too — primarily against Iran, tertiarily against Palestine, and implicitly, through alternating inaction and begrudging support, against Ukraine. Therefore, Trump is attempting — and failing at — both nostalgia and neo-reaction.

No Hay Banda with Sam Salem and Dali de Saint Paul, La Sala Rossa, 7 September 2026

A stage set for a music performance, featuring musicians seated with their instruments. A backdrop displays text about an event titled 'Montreal Castle' scheduled for April 14, 2025, in Jordan. The setting is dimly lit with an audience visible in front.
No Hay Banda performs with Sam Salem and Dali de Saint Paul at La Sala Rossa. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“By the time imperial destiny is a political question, it is already historical fact. It is too late, then, for simple denial. The thing is in motion. It cannot be asked not to have begun.”
—Nick Land, “Which Fails First…” (2014)

Dismantling hostile regimes with militarism, however, is replaced in Trump’s time with economic violence against former allies and trade partners, unmaking industries abroad that are not in competition but rather co-dependent with America.

Referring to Trump’s zone-flooding, Dunning-Kruger effect moves as “doctrines” or “policies” or “ideologies” is too generous and implies a measure of forethought and expertise that Trump’s administration falls far short of demonstrating. They are “strategies” at best — not so much “art-of-the-deal” as “hold-my-beer” tactics with little foresight beyond immediate gain and base-level gratification. They are reminiscent less of Herbert Hoover’s Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act than of Charlie Sheen’s rants on Twitter about #Winning.

Trump’s plan is diplomacy-as-hashtag.

Ensembles Zafraan & Paramirabo, Salle de concert du Conservatoire, 4 September 2026

A performance on stage featuring musicians and singers in a brightly colored auditorium with a grand piano and other instruments visible.
Ensemble Zafaan performs with Ensemble Paramirabo at Conservatoire de musique de Montréal. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“The sky had the stagnant breath of a furnace and the streets of New York were like pipes running, not with air and light, but with melted dust.”
—Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

For the generation 25 years old and younger, that was born after September 11th, 2001, a world in which voluntary submission to some measure of authoritarian control simply never existed. And so, there is no debate around the merits of control society. It just is. It is fascinating and terrifying to watch people argue against freedom, to democratically elect tyrants, to choose a cleaner cage over the prospect of escape.

I was equally fascinated and terrified in 2008 when I first read Rob Walker’s book Buying In. In it, Walker, who at the time wrote an excellent column entitled “Consumed” for The New York Times Magazine, chronicled the ways in which branding in the 21st century frequently integrated anti-consumerist messaging characteristic of alternative millennial cultural texts like Radiohead’s OK Computer, Fight Club, Adbusters, or Naomi Klein’s No Logo.

Walker wrote about how brand consultants working for companies like Nike and Red Bull in the early aughts studied the rhetoric espoused by Thom Yorke and Naomi Klein and redirected it like some Kung Fu master move that turns one’s opponent’s energy back upon itself. Walker called this approach “murketing,” a clever portmanteau of “murky” and “marketing,” rounding up cynical sentiments against advertising into “some kind of small-scale National Endowment for the Arts for young American outsider culture.”

Caroline Monnet, Kwìngwan: The Earth Trembles, Blouin | Division, Until 6 November 2026

A colorful abstract art piece displayed on a white wall, featuring vibrant patterns in shades of red, blue, and black, arranged symmetrically.
Caroline Monnet, With Eyes Full of Joy (2026), Floor and roof underlayment, waterproofing and insulating membranes, sill gasket, polyethylene, tarpaulin, thread, grommets, 104.8 x 206.4 cm. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“…if a Karen can convince herself that she is actually a Rosa in disguise…”
—Naomi Klein, Doppelganger

In the late 1990s, it seemed only natural that a majority of reasonable people would recognize the outsize power and control that corporations were beginning to exert and rightly choose to disengage with them. This, at that time, is what constituted “anti-elitism.”

Nowadays, it is mostly conservatives who rail against the “globalist elites.” How did this about-face occur? It might have earnestly begun with branding. After all, selling a thing = selling an idea.

The tendency on the political left is to ignore its opponents’ activities, to not watch, read, or absorb ideas that we find unsavoury. But the brand bullies of the new millennium devoured oppositional thought and thus immunized themselves from their threatening ideas.

It is high time for the political left to do this — to read Ayn Rand and listen to Nick Fuentes and unite over the traditionally conservative strategies of overlooking rather than microscopically re-examining and granularly disagreeing on our increasingly miniscule divisions.

There are bigger issues at stake — survival, for one.◼︎

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: Caroline Monnet, Flower of Sound, (2026), Polyethylene, synthetic roofing underlayment, radiant barrier solar attic foil reflective, inkjet on synthetic flashspun high-density polyethylene, thread, 160 x 160 cm. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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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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Crosslight

Time Image: notes on Tyson Houseman’s Askîwan ᐊᐢᑮᐊᐧᐣ

Earth, water, fire, air: these are the elemental constituents of the blue-green ball we call Earth, the home that we all share, and for which we are all responsible.

Each of these elements exists in asynchronous, cyclical, and deep time, according to nêhiyaw teachings. Director Tyson Houseman gently reminds audiences of these simple and fundamental truths in his multimedia opera entitled Askîwan ᐊᐢᑮᐊᐧᐣ which runs over three performances at La Chapelle Scènes Contemporaines in late November.

The stage is scattered with bowls, speakers, a long strip of reflective foil, mirrors and twigs. When the ensemble of four takes the stage together, Houseman at the centre of it all, back to his audience, begins to pan digital cameras across these items, which create a live video projected on the wall behind the stage, revealing in close-up each of these pieces transforming before our eyes into skies streaked with Northern lights, mountain ranges, and forests. At the heart of a natural disaster lies the personal history of Houseman’s relationship to the land of the West Coast.

We are told in the press release that “Houseman’s practice focuses on aspects of nêhiyaw ideologies and teachings — speaking to land-based notions of non-linear time and the interwoven relations between humans and their ecologies.” This sounds abstract. But I can confidently say that I was left with a keen understanding of this practice after experiencing askîwan ᐊᐢᑮᐊᐧᐣ.

The creators recently told Sophia Jama of Westmount Magazine that the title describes “a year, it is summer; it is the earth, it is the ground.” In other words, it is a place in time across time.

Tyson Houseman performs onstage at La Chapelle Scènes Contemporaines. Photo by Joseph O’Malley.

The piece begins with lights in a night sky, which Houseman brings up onscreen, crouching amongst the household objects that create the shapes projected up on the wall ahead of him. The night sky breathes with refractions through a bowl of water, and dance as another water bowl sits atop a set of speakers, creating mandalas of moving light and colour. Above the mountain range implied by the shadow of tinfoil, towering trees appear as his camera crosses branches lined up on small stands.

Askîwan ᐊᐢᑮᐊᐧᐣ is an opera in form and content, the resonant baritone of Jonathan Adams singing in nehiyawewin, evocative of an arrhythmic Gregorian chant, accompanied by cellist Leah Weitzner on the viola de gamba, and Montreal-based composer Devon Bate creating a cosmic texture of complementary sounds on an electric guitar and laptop.

While the performance incorporates common consumer technologies to spectacular ends — cameras, speakers, projectors — it is unmistakably operatic in scale. Not only because its narrative is sung resonantly throughout, in another language, in a heavenly range, but because of the dramatically heartbreaking tragedy at its climax. Everything eventually ends.

Houseman’s quartet reveals in sound and onscreen a vista of the beauty of the mountains and forests of British Columbia, the colonial name given to this land. Slowly, loudly, we see lights turn orange, textures grow tongue-like, as the song of the story swells to a cry of agony. The forest is on fire.

As the flames die down, the colour and sound decrescendo to a peaceful void, wherein photos and videos presumably of the director’s family emerge. A verdant restoration grows around these videos and their sounds of laughter, of a childhood from which Houseman shares personal scenes. This deeply affecting inclusion brings the whole work of Askîwan ᐊᐢᑮᐊᐧᐣ out of the abstract and down to earth, encouraging love of our home and native land.

Leah Weitzner and Devon Bate perform onstage at La Chapelle Scènes Contemporaines. Photo by Philippe Latour.

Davon Bate shared with me that the piece is headed to the Vancouver PuSh Performing Arts Festival in January, where it will no doubt be felt by West-Coast audiences as a welcome homecoming. Surely, Houseman, originally a BC-based artist, has a unique connection to those lands, waters, forests, and mountains.

The monumental quality of Askîwan ᐊᐢᑮᐊᐧᐣ carries well and comes across even to this metropolitan Montreal audience like a dirge, a lament grieving the irreversible damage that climate change has wrought upon nature. Houseman’s human element reminds us that the age of the Anthropocene will have destructive impacts but also become the site of our stewardship of the natural world, and our familial relationship to it which we too easily forget. It is a credit to this small ensemble and Houseman’s mastery of puppetry and performance art that such a vast scope of perspectives on the world is so vividly brought into the theatre’s interior space.

I can always depend upon the programming at La Chapelle Scènes Contemporaines to bring timely and thought-provoking themes to their stage, and Askîwan ᐊᐢᑮᐊᐧᐣ is without exception a testament to their mission.◼︎

Cover image: © Tyler Houseman

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Big Shiny Tunes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What good is preservation without repetition?

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

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

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

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

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

Many cultures believe that the world was created with sound.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forwards or backwards, we’re going nowhere fast.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NicheMTL is Montreal’s independent not-for-profit source for this city’s most niche arts and culture. If you love what you’re reading, please consider buying a yearbook and subscribing.

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

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The Dark Canuck

Nico Williams, Bingo, Fondation PHI, 23 April — 14 September 2025

Nico Williams at the Bingo vernissage, Fondation PHI, 23 April 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Americans say no to drugs. Canadians say no thank you.”
—Susan Musgrave, You’re in Canada Now, Motherfucker.

I flew in July 2006 from Montreal to Victoria and drove from there in a rented Toyota about 25 kilometers south to a small municipality called Metchosin. The purpose of this trip was to interview one of the most famous incarcerated Canadians, the bank robber-turned-author Stephen Reid.

Reid at the time was a ward of the William Head Institution, known colloquially as Club Fed, a minimum-security correctional facility constructed at the lonely end of Vancouver Island’s southernmost tip.

Originally built as a 19th century immigration quarantine station, William Head might have been among the most picturesque sites for a prison, a remote and rugged stretch of oceanfront property perfumed with Douglas Fir and the saline breeze.

Reid was imprisoned, this time around, for the brazen robbery of a Victoria bank in 1999. But he had already earned a storied reputation as a member of The Stopwatch Gang, a crew of Canadian career criminals who had in the 1970s and ‘80s successfully pulled heists throughout the United States, making off with millions.

The gang earned their nickname in the newspapers because they carried stopwatches instead of guns, completing their jobs in under 90 seconds and escaping gracefully before law enforcement could respond to the 211.

What could be more Canadian than non-violent larceny? Reid told me they never failed to say ‘thank you’ to the guards as they strode out the door carrying Yankee Doodle’s hard-earned dough.

Catch Step HYA remix featuring Lunice (with EENO T and Magnanimous), La Chapelle | Scénes Contemporaines, 22 April 2025

EENO T and Magnanimous. Clémence Clara Faure for La Chapelle | Scénes Contemporaines

“By walking I found out
Where I was going.”
—Irving Layton, “There Were No Signs.”

Over the past several months, and intensifying during the Federal Election campaign, Canadians of all political stripes have been engaged in some deep soul-searching to define specifically what characterizes Canada as a sovereign nation.

“Not American” is of course the most obvious answer. But we can’t simply identify ourselves by what we are not. We must, rather, assert Canadian-ness as a series of distinct and affirmative characteristics.

It may be a surprise to learn that the Scottish have a version of poutine appropriately called “chips and cheese and gravy.” The British are also known for being polite. So, what makes Canadian poutine — or politeness — any different?

African-American Sound Recordings with SlowPitchSound and Dumb Chamber, Société des arts technologiques, 27 April 2025

Dumb Chamber performs at the SAT, 25 April 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“A Canadian is someone who drinks Brazilian coffee from an English teacup, and munches a French pastry while sitting on his Danish furniture, having just come from an Italian movie in his German car. He picks up his Japanese pen and writes to his Member of Parliament to complain about the American takeover of the Canadian publishing business.”
—Campbell Hughes, 1973.

Canadians pride ourselves on our inclusivity and the doctrine of multiculturalism enshrined in social policy since the first Trudeau’s term in office. We congratulate ourselves with the fact that slavery was never legally practiced in Canada, that ours was and continues to be a safe-haven nation for people escaping bondage and other forms of systemic oppression.

As opposed to the American melting pot, Canada is a mosaic, a puzzle that doesn’t just scramble disparate identities into one uniform nationality but instead incorporates each of them into a rich and panoramic tapestry.

Still, just because Canada never practiced slavery doesn’t mean that racism and discrimination didn’t exist here. They did — and continue today as we strive to shake the legacy of colonialism and reconcile historical injustices perpetrated on Indigenous land.

And yet, the present condition requires evermore nuance because Canada is not only composed of colonizers and the colonized.

My ancestors, for instance, were displaced in the late 1920s when Russia was actively colonizing the Indigenous people of Ukraine. First-person accounts by the first wave of Ukrainian immigrants, collected in a book called Land of Pain, Land of Promise, are filled with stories of gratitude for Indigenous peoples’ assistance adjusting to life in Canada.

An underlying monstrosity remains, however. The American writer William S. Burroughs described this irrepressible abomination as “The Ugly Spirit.” Righteous retribution for genocidal expansion from coast to coast to coast.

The Ugly Spirit is a stateless entity, unrestrained by borders, floating northward like a ghost or a virus, the immigrant to end all immigrants. Thinly veiled beneath the respectable surface of unblemished bureaucracy, white linens and starched shirts and sunny ways, peace, order, and good governance, savagery lurks.

Oscillating Spaces launch with curator Anneke Abhelakh, Canadian Centre for Architecture, 24 April 2025

Gallery view of Oscillating Spaces, CCA. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Canadian history could be a drug-free alternative to anaesthesia.”
—Mike Myers, Canada.

One of the most frequent adjectives used to describe Canadians internationally is “nice.” Nice isn’t boring, although we are known as that, too. Nice isn’t kind, although kindness could be considered a constituent component of being nice.

What nice really means in practice is milquetoast. When threatened, we tend to back down. When attacked, we prefer to concede defeat than to offend our aggressors with a fight.

There’s nice and there’s naïve. The most extreme example of the perversion of niceness is the departed Canadian author Alice Munro’s apologetic acceptance of her daughter’s sexual abuse. Munro would rather have overlooked horrible transgressions against her kith and kin than to upset the larger family order in protest. In her own mind, was she just being nice?

Tolerance is one of Canada’s most admirable virtues. But when we tolerate violence against us, we should discard our national reputation for being nice and adopt a tough and just disposition. In significant ways, the Orange Cheeto’s 51st state rhetoric is forcing Canada to grow a backbone, to stand our ground, even if it means abandoning some of our soft-touch image.

Così fan tutte, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, Maison Symphonique, 23 April 2025

The cast of Così fan tutte performing with the OSM, Maison Symphonique, 23 April 2025. Antoine Saito for the OSM.

“‘Cause in the forget-yer-skates dream
You can hang your head in woe
And this diverse-as-ever scene
Know which way to go.”
—Gord Downie, “It’s a Good Life If You Don’t Weaken.”

It is appropriate that the “Elbow’s Up” rallying cry galvanizing Canadians originates from hockey, Canada’s undisputed national pastime.

There was no question which country I was in when, during the intermission at an opera, the woman seated next to me leaned over and asked if I knew the score in the Habs game. On the ice, playing arguably the most brutal organized sport, is where Canadians exchange our mannerly habits for altogether snottier, bloodier, and more dangerous conduct.

Unlike baseball, which participants can play overweight and drunk, hockey demands strength, skill, speed, guts, grit. Like revenge, hockey is best served cold. The rink is the site of inspiring Canadian victories over both doppelgänger superpowers Russia and the United States.

Interviewing Stephen Reid in jail in 2006 was like playing in the Stanley Cup final for a writer and lover of good stories. Reid was simultaneously terrifying and charismatic, cunning and cultured, a formidable conversationalist and true Canadian captain on our proverbial national team.

Goal-scoring could be considered analogous to bank-robbing in the sense of slipping one past the authorities, armed with little more than will and determination, and grace, too.◼︎

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: Nico Williams, Uncle, 2023, 10/0 Japanese glass cylinder beads and 11/0 seed beads on thermally-fused/braided polyethylene thread, mother-of-pearl buttons, 124,5 x 73.7 cm. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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Always Forever Now

Shunk with Born at Midnite and Flleur, La Sotterenea, 12 March 2025

Shunk perform at La Sotterenea, 12 March 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Satiation is the point at which you must face the existential revelation that you didn’t really want what you seemed so desperate to have, that your most urgent desires are only a filthy vitalist trick to keep the show on the road.”
—Mark Fisher, “Accept like a curse an unlucky deal.”

“The damage today
They fall on today
They beat on the outside
And I’ll stand by you
Now”
—David Bowie, “Outside.”

“These guys would have been really popular in, like, 1980 or ‘81,” my friend Oliver who checks coats at La Sala Rossa, world-weary with arms folded, asides to me at the album launch on Wednesday night at La Sotterenea for Shunk’s hyper-retro, longer-than-extended but shorter-than-long-player, Shunkland.

It is true.

Oliver says this neither ironically nor with derision; rather, matter-of-factly, with reverence and astute observance that retromania has not ceased, more than 15 years after Simon Reynolds diagnosed and devoted a book-length study to this particularly 21st century condition, to be an operative mode proper to postmodern cultural production.

More than nostalgia, more than cyclical fashion, time itself seems to have collapsed in on itself, every historical era occurring and recurring simultaneously in the present, flattening the entirety of existence into the always-already now.

Myriam Dion, Timelines, Blouin | Division, 15 February – 5 April 2025

Detail of Tile Mosaics (2024), Myriam Dion. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Forward momentum is a thing of the past.

It is possible that futurity was always illusory, that memory was rare and in short enough supply to create the impression that each season was fundamentally different — the length, width, and hem of pant legs; KitchenAid’s colour of the year (it’s butter, by the way) — when time has never been anything more nor less than a flat circle.

But today, memory is cheap, if not free — you can’t even give it away — and forgetfulness is a sentimental luxury, like Polaroid film, heritage hipsterism, and paying with cash.

Pretending not to remember is a new form of conspicuous consumption, with half-recalled experience in place of a disposable product.

Two Readers and Music V, featuring Tara McGowan-Ross, Gwen Aube, and Aistis, 6 March 2025

Aistis performs at yolk’s Two Readers and Music, 6 March 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

If there is no now, then there is no then, and no will be.

More accurately, there are eight billion nows, in an age of siloed politics and niche media, protectionism and regional nationalism. And so, the future will ultimately be all the more fragmented and multifaceted. If cultural memory defies consensus, then so does cultural imagination.

However, contrary to the assumption that variety stimulates autonomy, increasingly granular diversity threatens collective solidarity and remains vulnerable to more totalizing control systems. Functioning society relies upon constructive group psychology. Deteriorating society conversely flourishes within an environment of its destructive inverse.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the failure of leftist political satire. The imperviousness to both ridicule and scorn that the right enjoys right now is a symptom of disintegrating unanimity owing to the “splinternet.”

In his book Post-Comedy, author Alfie Bown observes under technocratic hyper-capitalism “the creation of a closed circuit of didactic humour in which only those designed to experience it do, leaving its potential as a political tool for activism almost redundant.”

For people to find certain attitudes abhorrent or funny, there must exist a kind of ideological consensus. When none does, insults and sarcasm simply keep people and ideas current in consciousness, which paradoxically strengthens their dominance, if only due to renewed visibility.

It accomplishes nothing to skewer Elon Musk on his own social network. Making fun of the orange Cheeto doesn’t change any minds and rather strengthens his brand.

One of the more terrifying realizations circulating lately is that the billionaire class pulling the government’s strings will still be in power long after today’s or even tomorrow’s politicians.

Democracy is fragile now, but capital can resist forever.

For Everyone Stuck Chasing the Clock, dirs. Chloë Lum and Yannick Desranleau, La Chapelle | Scènes Contemporaines, 3-7 March 2025

The cast of For Everyone Stuck Chasing the Clock takes a bow on opening night, 3 March 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

As a child, my first word was “clock.”

It wasn’t “mommy” or “daddy” — you can ask them. As the story goes, I pointed in my infancy at the time-keeping device on the wall and distinctly articulated the word, “clock,” shocking and likely disappointing my parents. Because time was clearly already of the essence. I don’t remember my mindset, obviously, but I may have had an early inkling of the lengthy life sentence to which I’d been condemned.

At times, it seems that time is tight. At others, minutes appear to stretch into hours. It is always when we are aware of time — when we’re late; or when we’re waiting — that it behaves antithetically to our desires.

Back to the Future was one of my favourite movies as a kid. I was eight in 1985 when the film was released and was just beginning to understand the nature of time as infinite and our experience inside time as limited. I knew what death was. So, I understood that everything everyone does in one’s lifetime must somehow fit within time’s puzzle.

When you’re a child, time yawns out before you like a red carpet unfurling into the world. But as time marches on, you can see that roll getting smaller and smaller, and it becomes ever more apparent that the rug will eventually, inevitably, be pulled from beneath your feet.

This is both frightening and reassuring. Who would want to live forever? But also, who wouldn’t want another day when their time comes?

Duality, Persons, Ascension (Personal Records)

Haunting is one way to cheat time. Besides a supernatural extension, there are other methods to haunt the present. Chiefly among them is to make art. Or something of art’s ilk, that endures beyond death.

If as I am you’re obsessed with history, you’re bound to live amid ghosts. Some of them point to lines of flight. Others drag us down. Even the living can have a haunting effect.

Communing with ghosts is where we find ourselves.◼︎

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 images: Detail of Tile Mosaics (2024), Myriam Dion, Galerie Blouin | Division. 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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