Tag Archives: La Sala Rossa

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Monkey Warfare

No Hay Banda, BEAM SPLITTER with Anne-F Jacques & Ryoko Akama, La Sala Rossa, 29 September 2025

Anne-F Jacques & Ryoko Akama perform for No Hay Banda’s 10th season premiereat La Sala Rossa, 29 September 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

The 2006 Canadian film Monkey Warfare, starring the Torontonian writer-director Don McKellar and his late partner Tracy Wright, centres on an ageing couple of radical political militants who spend their days smoking pot, listening to The Fugs, foraging for antiques to peddle online, and ruminating over their heyday committing soft acts of left-wing domestic terrorism.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s most recent feature, One Battle After Another, displays remarkable similarities to McKellar’s film: handlebar-moustached male leads with flawed personalities and difficulties maintaining relationships; attempting to outrun previous misdeeds; the hope bestowed upon a new generation of notably female operatives.

Although their politics align, these films’ ultimate morals could not be further apart. The necessity of violence is the definitive subject at the heart of every revolution.

Don Giovanni, Opéra de Montréal, Salle Wilfrid Pelletier, 30 September 2025

The cast of Don Giovanni take a bow at Salle Wilfrid Pelletier, 30 September 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“…the more consciousness a man possesses the more he is separated from his instincts (which at least give him an inkling of the hidden wisdom of God) and the more prone he is to error. He is certainly not up to Satan’s wiles if even his creator is unable, or unwilling, to restrain this powerful spirit.” —Carl Jung, Answer to Job.

We are constantly at war — evidently with each other, but more frequently with ourselves. We fight to resist our base impulses. We struggle to transcend our animal instincts and become human. Foregoing indulgences and pleasures of the flesh is an archetypal fight. It is not only a moral but furthermore an existential conflict. We battle our inner demons which seek to lead us astray from the straight and narrow path.

Consciousness, then, is an archetypal paradox: consciousness is necessary to discern the difference between what is wrong and what is right; but it is also consciousness that sensibly represses nature’s divine intelligence.

POP Montreal presents Do Make Say Think with Kee Avil, Rialto Theatre, 28 September 2025

Patrons spill out onto the street to perform a “Cellphone Symphony” following Do Make Say Think at the Rialto Theatre, 28 September 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

The problem of why we repeat is a fundamental philosophical question. Once something is done, why bother to do it again?

There are a number of answers, including, but not limited to, compulsion, addiction, and inevitability.

I might be compelled, say, to have lunch even though I had lunch yesterday because food keeps me alive and I love life. I might drink a cup of coffee even though I drank a cup of coffee a few hours ago because caffeine is a habit-forming substance and I am a creature of habit. I might go out to see a beloved band perform again even though I have seen them perform before because I am opportunistic and cannot avoid exploiting any occasion to do so.

Our impulse to repeat is at odds, though, with the longing for novelty and the desire for freshness of experience. And so, we disguise our repetitions. We have a ham sandwich for lunch today because we had a tuna fish sandwich yesterday. We order an espresso in the morning and an allongé in the afternoon. And our favourite bands subtly alter our favourite songs in order to inject them with a sense of surprise, even though we know very well the verse and the chorus.

“We do not disguise because we repress,” writes Gilles Deleuze in Difference and Repetition, “we repress because we disguise, and we disguise by virtue of the determinant centre of repetition.”

Ensemble Urbain, Origines, La Sala Rossa, 21 September 2025

Ensemble Urbain perform at La Sala Rossa, 21 September 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

I have often wondered why, if there is so much vacant space in the world, people feel the need to occupy the same zone.

Humans congregate in cities like magnets draw metal shavings. Everyone wants to live in Paris or London or Berlin or Moscow or Montreal. Fewer people are drawn to Saint-Joseph-de-Sorel.

“New York City,” said the departed comedian Phil Hartman, “is a testament to man’s desire to be stacked on top of other men.”

Africa Fashion, McCord Steward Museum, 25 September 2025 – 1 February 2026

Dr. Christine Checinska introduces Africa Fashion at the McCord Stewart Museum, 24 September 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

A fool’s mouth is his destruction, and his lips are the snare of his soul. —Proverbs 19:7

Beauty, wisdom, virtue, justice, and truth seem to be the predominant preoccupations of the world’s religious doctrines.

About a decade ago, we entered into an historical era that the media dubbed “post-Truth,” in which objective facts took a supporting role to individual opinions and emotional appeals. This new epoch coincided with the first election of the Orange Cheeto in the United States and Britain’s exit from the European Union across the pond.

The universality of truth is implied by its most frequently used form, in the singular. We don’t instruct our children to tell multiple truths. Rather, we implore them to tell the truth. One.

Conversely, falsehoods are plural. Lies. Practically infinite iterations.

Monotheism is the creed that there is only one God. The concept developed in opposition to polytheism in which adherents worshiped multiple deities that governed various aspects of nature and reality. The term originates from the mid-1600s when Henry More, the English theologian, devised it to designate preferential religions and reject substance dualism.

In the 21st century, we tend to perceive and interpret reality through a series of interconnected actors, actants, and networks. This perception encourages an assumption of complexity that the understanding of a singular truth bypasses entirely. The austerity of one truth, one God, and one administration of justice has an inherent and minimal beauty to it. But it does not reflect the structure of the organic world around us, and particularly the world we have constructed.

Multiplicity characterizes technological postmodernity and diversity represents biological fortitude. Both of those assertions are observably true — and they seemingly contradict the world’s religious doctrines.

The notion of multiple truths presupposes that facts are a little different for everyone, like a universal version of Rashomon. Reality has apparently bifurcated exponentially since the turn of the millennium, and those divisions have accelerated following Trump, Covid, and Trump 2.0.

Are we never ever getting back together?◼︎

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

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

Cover image: Gallery view of Elvis, part of Africa Fashion at the McCord Stewart Museum. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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Being Boring

I’d bolted through a closing door, I would never find myself feeling bored. —Pet Shop Boys, “Being Boring”

“Boredom is immanence in its purest form.” —Lars Svendsen

Good Sine, Group Drone, Cyber Love Garden, 26 January 2025

Luke Loseth and friends perform a group drone at Cyber Love Garden. Video captured for NicheMTL.

We express all ideology oppositionally.

We can either be progressive or conservative, right- or left-wing, for or against this or that.

Ideology is universally understood and yet difficult to define. However, its easiest explanation is itself in opposition — against violence.

Violence is the tool of the repressive state, whereas ideology is the apparatus of the apparently rational. We follow a rules-based order because of ideas rather than existential fear. And yet, when ideas fail, we still resort to violence.

Obedience at its limit is enforced with brutality. Wars, whether physical or economic, erupt at the margins of ideological control.

Horizons, Bradley Ertaskiran, 23 January – 1 March 2025

Gallery views of “Le Grand Corail,” the solo exhibition by Bony Ramirez. Photographed for NicheMTL.

In the 1991 novel American Psycho, the author Bret Easton Ellis represents postmodern ennui with matters of subtle distinction. The variance between brands of mineral water, for instance, or Huey Lewis’s albums, preoccupy Patrick Bateman’s fascination and stand in for legitimate concerns in an atmosphere that defies any sense of depth or retrospection.

Of course, when the difference that makes a difference no longer necessitates discernment, Bateman resorts to the most horrendous violence to rectify his dissatisfaction, oscillating wildly between granular control and broad viciousness.

Rash decision making is a key symptom of disorder. The inability to think through the possible consequences of one’s actions is characteristic of both stupidity and evil, which are the same, as the author Margaret Atwood points out, if one judges by the results.

In a recent New York Times op-ed entitled “The Six Principles of Stupidity,” the columnist David Brooks observes the current prevalence in the United States of the “Dunning-Kruger” effect, noting that “incompetent people don’t have the skills to recognize their own incompetence.”

The modulation of oscillations between hyper-rationality and violence, however, is not the metric of American psychosis so much as is its speed.

You don’t need a psychiatrist to know which way the wind blows. You only need an anemometer to measure its velocity.

Sarah Pagé & Patrick Graham, Littoral States, Envision Records (2025)

Sarah Pagé and Patrick Graham perform with No Hay Banda at La Sala Rossa. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Information and its significance are two separate things. There exists an overabundance of information today, in practically infinite forms — linguistic, numeric, subconscious. But most information doesn’t necessarily result in anything meaningful.

We can distinguish information and meaning in part by their rate of transmission and interpretation. Information nowadays moves at the speed of light. That is to say, binary code travels practically instantaneously around the world. Speed itself is speeding up.

Meaning, though, takes time, deliberation, and intelligence to decode. Interpretation may even define time anew in an era of informational instantaneity. When novelty is refreshed at ever-accelerating rates, and virtual mobility diminishes distance, what’s surplus is time.

Jaeyoung Chong & Anita Pari, In Darkness and Light, Banjaxed Records, 26 January 2025

Anita Pari and Jaeyoung Chong perform at Banjaxed Records. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“All greatness is in assault!—an inaccurate translation of Plato or a paraphrasing of American forcing?” —Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics

Perhaps Norman McLaren’s most famous short film, Neighbours, as its name suggests, caricatures the devolving relationship between two next-door neighbours as they fight, mortally, over the rightful ownership of a flower.

At first, a fence is erected. Eventually, families are murdered — this is played for laughs — and ultimately, the pair die, killing the flower over which they fought in the process.

The moral of the story isn’t too deep or difficult to detect. The title card at the end of the typically Canadian vignette suggests, in multiple languages, to “love thy neighbour.”

Maybe McLaren’s film is overly optimistic, though. Because in addition to reiterating Christ’s empty commandment, which few have abided by in more than two millennia, the suggestion is that loving one’s neighbour will elicit reciprocation. Just because you love someone doesn’t mean they’ll love you back.

At the moment, we have a neighbour impervious to love, who demands fear, who provokes rage. And so, we might do well to observe Jesus’s other Golden Rule: do unto others as they do unto you.

Christian Gerhaher & Gerold Huber, Schumann Recital, Bourgie Hall, 28 January 2025

Christian Gerhaher (left) and Gerold Huber (right). Nikolaj Lund for Bourgie Hall.

There is an apt scene for this moment in the otherwise abhorrent 1993 McCauley Culkin film The Good Son.

The movie portrays Culkin as a psychotic child who behaves cruelly towards his cousin, played in the picture by a cherubic young Elijah Wood.

Early on in the story, Culkin and Wood’s characters are seated for family dinner when Culkin kicks Wood’s foot under the table. At first, Wood attempts to ignore Culkin’s sick little game. But he quickly becomes antagonized and finally kicks Culkin back. This provokes a masochistic grin on Culkin’s face, a smirk that speaks volumes about the nature and desire of violence.

Doing nothing is a luxury that most of us can no longer afford. And I’m not talking now about taking a day off or even powering the screen down and zoning out for a few hours. We haven’t been able to pry ourselves away from productivity for a long time already, with work increasingly colonizing our free time, disguising drudgery as fun, insidiously transforming leisure into labour.

I’m talking about doing nothing in the face of methodical provocation. When Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022, doing nothing simply wasn’t an option. There was no scenario in which inaction would generate the desired result.

Forcing a reaction is a textbook tactic of narcissistic personalities — whether in individual people or entire nations. Narcissists strike out primarily to be struck in return.

But another strategy has emerged in contemporary psychology to counteract narcissistic escalation. I first read about it in another New York Times piece with the intriguing title, “How to ‘Gray Rock’ Conversations with Difficult People.” What is ‘Gray Rocking?’ I wondered.

Incidentally, it’s just what it says on the tin: becoming as dull and unresponsive as a gray rock.

Sometimes, the best reaction is no reaction.◼︎

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: Nicolas Grenier, Flag Study (Sun), 2024-2025. Oil on canvas, 63.5 x 73.7 cm.

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Resistance Is Futile

CIBER1A, Contraxion, BOZAL (Humidex Records)

“We recognize that capitalism is no solution to the problems we face in our communities. Capitalist exploitation is one of the basic causes of our problem.”
—Huey Newton, “Black Capitalism Re-analyzed I: June 5, 1971.”

The Borg are perhaps the most intriguing villains in the fictional Star Trek universe, and the most emblematic of the contemporary moral dilemmas we now face.

Should one relinquish their sense of individuality to join the “hive?” Should one embrace questionable ethics in order to succeed under capitalism? And now more than in the previous generation — which, ironically, was The Next Generation — should one fuse one’s biological self with cybernetic implements like A.I. and virtual reality to realize the experimental post-humanist project?

The Borg’s modus operandi was assimilation, assigning converts numbers as a prison would a convict. Their most dreaded dictum was “resistance is futile,” implying superficially that any struggle to oppose assimilation was useless.

We might feel that way metaphorically with regard to the onslaught of seemingly monstrous events that keep occurring: escalating global conflicts, the rightward turn politically of our nearest neighbours, and the general sense that progressivism and classic liberal ideals have stalled.

Resistance as a political strategy ceases being effective because a certain amount of resistance is essential and can in fact strengthen the system. Capitalism is capable of digesting small interventions and using them as nutrition. Anyone who has ever squeezed a garden hose to create a gushing spray of water understands the concept of impedance.

If resistance is to triumph against neoliberal accelerationism, it must be sustained en masse or not at all.

Chloe Majenta, Enantiodromia, Artch, 16-20 October 2024

“What if the domain of politics is inherently ‘sterile,’ the domain of pseudo-causes, a shadow theatre, but nonetheless crucial in transforming reality? What this means is that one should accept the gap between sterile virtual movements and the actuality of power.”
—Slavoj Žižek, In Defence of Lost Causes.

The analytic impetus in troubled times is to search for historical precedents, scrubbing back and forth over history for some period when our ancestors were capable of overcoming similar obstacles under comparable circumstances.

But troublingly, the present moment is more and more discursively described as “unprecedented.” For example, never in the history of the United States was a convicted felon elected president. You need a police check to get a job at Wendy’s, but any common criminal can now occupy America’s highest office.

So, the tactics for victorious political battles must also be without precedent. The weapons of the 20th century Left — protest, activism, even satire — will no longer suffice. We must emancipate hatred and fear with unified hope and love.

Nadia Myre, Robert Myre, & Guido Molinari, Tout geste est/et politique, Fondation Guido Molinari, 31 October – 22 December 2024

Robert Myre, Tout geste est/et politique. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Only prisoners have time to read, and if you want to engage in a twenty-year-long research project funded by the state, you will have to kill someone.”
—Mark Fisher, “Time-Wars: towards an alternative for the neo-capitalist era.”

Capitalism is not so much a socioeconomic model as it is a code, like an operating system upon which the apps of our daily reality run.

As an ideology, capitalism seldom reveals itself — except in those moments when the real-world friction of its true unpredictability becomes exposed. In this way, capitalism is more like a computer virus, lurking just beneath the cool surface of the interface.

For instance, this week, I tried to deposit two twenty-dollar bills into an ATM and the machine malfunctioned and ate one of them. The expressed disappearance of symbolic capital was a stark reminder of capital’s intrinsic and eternal ethereality.

What buoys our perception of reality is our belief in it. Money only exists and exerts power because we agree it does. If we were to stop agreeing, it would evaporate like an apparition. There is enormous creative potential in reimagining a world void of capital.

N. Katherine Hayles writes in her 2006 article, “Traumas of Code:” “…code is a virulent agent violently transforming the context for human life in a metamorphosis that is both dangerous and artistically liberating.”

Cindy Hill, A Bell I Never Hear, Centre CLARK, 31 October – 7 December 2024

Cindy Hill, Bridal Fantasy (2024). Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Information speeded up, slowed down, permutated, changed at random by radiating the virus material with high-energy rays from cyclotrons, in short we have created an infinity of variety at the information level, sufficient to keep so-called scientists busy forever exploring the ‘richness of nature.’”
—William S. Burroughs, “Technical Deposition of the Virus Power.”

Replication and difference are the only significatory tools we have to remind ourselves that the world is fundamentally a simulation. Nothing represents replication and difference more hilariously than the mechanical bull.

Why anyone would want to ride a flesh-and-blood bull is in itself approaching the apex of absurdity. The existential unnecessity of bull riding is confronted only by its apparently high stakes in meatspace, the wild animal’s capricious chaos.

Remove the chaos, however, or reduce it to repetitive mechanical gestures, and tragedy — and its capacity for trauma — transforms into farce. Simulation itself is doubled, like constructing scaled down replicas of the twin towers and annihilating them again.

The performance of risk deactivates the façade of catastrophe.

Sunset Rubdown with Sister Ray, La Sala Rossa, 29 October 2024

Sunset Rubdown perform at La Sala Rossa, 29 October 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Oh the world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don’t much mind
a few dead minds
in the higher places
or a bomb or two
now and then
in your upturned faces
—Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “The World is a Beautiful Place.”

I watched in awe on the metro this week as a boy of about 12 almost unnaturally rapidly unscrambled a Rubik’s cube. It restored in me some measure of hope that the next generation may be better equipped to solve the world’s old puzzles.◼︎

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: Chloe Majenta, The High Priestess (2024) Oil on cotton mounted on wood panel. 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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All Dressed

Wait For It: in conversation with Sarah Davachi

Unlike an old-fashioned phone call, where there are potentially several rings for anticipation, Zoom meetings just start.

In a very binary, off-on fashion, suddenly, someone simply appears on your screen, which moments before was merely a blank space. Right on time this particular morning, that someone is Sarah Davachi, the celebrated artist whose durational musical works have captivated lovers of modern classical, ambient, and drone composition for a long while.

Reclining on a chesterfield in her living room, Davachi speaks to me in Montreal from her home in Los Angeles, where she is currently pursuing a Ph.D., on the occasion of the total solar eclipse, an auspicious if fleeting sliver of history. Behind her, a Black Sabbath poster is tacked to the wall, a trivial clue that speaks volumes to the depth and breadth of generic influences that have filtered over time into her work.

“My brother was born in the ’70s, so he listened to a lot of classic rock,” Davachi divulges.

“I got really into Metallica when I was in 7th grade. I remember listening to …And Justice for All on my discman and being so blown away by all the detail.”

If there is one thread that runs through all of Davachi’s compositions, it’s an acute attention to detail. Timbral detail; temporal detail.

“In order to hear overtones and things like that, you need to let a sound continue without moving to the next thing.” Sarah Davachi performs with the Podlasie Philharmonic, Białystok, Poland, September 2018. Photograph provided to NicheMTL by the artist.

“The music that I make is very minimalist in style,” Davachi explains. “It removes a lot of melody and rhythm. Part of that is to bring the focus to the texture of the sound and the harmonics that are happening in any given moment. The time aspect was a necessity to make that happen. In order to hear overtones and things like that, you need to let a sound continue without moving to the next thing. It needs that time to actually unfold.”

On the surface, it may sound to the casual listener in pieces like 2022’s single “En Bas Tu Vois,” or “Magdalena,” from her critically lauded 2021 recording entitled Antiphonals, that there is not that much happening.

But beneath their austere veneer, oceans of complexity begin to emerge in these works in the form of microtonal variations, resonant harmonics, and apparent temporal distortions. In the tradition of venerated composers like Gavin Bryars and Max Richter, Davachi has the rare and uncanny ability with her music to stretch out a listener’s perception of time.

“In my lifetime,” Davachi says, “it feels like there’s a lot of push for things to happen quickly — not even for things to be experienced but just glimpsed at. If you go to a museum or something, it’s very unusual for people to spend even a minute looking at a specific painting. You’re just walking through and not actually looking at anything. With durational music, it’s almost like showing a painting in bits as opposed to showing the entire thing all at once. You have this control over the listener, being able to slow them down deliberately and force them to go slow. It changes the way you hear things. It changes your brain. I think that’s important, psychologically, for people.”

It’s clear that Davachi meditates, perhaps obsessively, on her work, and specifically, about how her audience receives it. She began studying piano in the Royal Conservatory system as a child, and majored, appropriately, in philosophy and music as an undergrad at the University of Calgary. “The philosophical side was informing a lot of how I thought about music,” she says.

Davachi enrolled in an electroacoustic music class and soon became enamoured with the process of layering performances and mixing recordings. “For me, it made a lot of sense,” she says. “That got me really interested in composing.”

In 2007, Davachi began working at the National Music Centre where she was introduced to a museum-full of organs, synthesizers, and various other claviocentric instruments, which were capable of prolonging sound beyond the piano’s limitations.

“Discovering that way of making music opened the door to being able to do music in a way that I wanted to,” she recalls. “It was ironic,” she laughs, “because for me, music was the sensible alternative to doing a philosophy degree.”

“I learned how to make music in this electroacoustic way, and that still informs the way that I think about where my music exists.” Sarah Davachi performs at the Museum of Jurassic Technology, 2019. Photograph provided to NicheMTL by the artist.

After graduation, Davachi was accepted to the prestigious electronic music program at Mills College in Oakland, California, where noted musicians like Pauline Oliveros and Maggi Payne had served as faculty members. She divulges, “That’s where it started with the music that I make now.”

Early in her professional career, Davachi took the conscious decision to forgo a life of performing live. “I just hated the pressure,” she confesses. “In classical music, the performance is everything. You have to get it right, and you only get one shot. If you screw up, that’s that. To me, that’s not how I think about music.”

Instead, Davachi began devoting herself to the granular levels of control that the studio-as-instrument can afford. She feels closest to the creative process when she is “taking things and sculpting them,” she says. “I learned how to make music in this electroacoustic way, and that still informs the way that I think about where my music exists. A lot of it happens in the compositional phase.”

Davachi will be in Montreal for the Suoni per il Popolo festival in June to attend the world premiere of a new work entitled “Three Unisons for Four Voices,” which the experimental ensemble No Hay Banda commissioned. The piece is a 65-minute composition for violin, cello, trombone, bass clarinet, ondes Martenot, and percussion.

“It’s split into three sections,” she tells me. “One of the things that I’m interested in is this way of having a certain piece of melody that repeats itself similarly to how sound-on-sound tape delay works. It repeats and it keeps repeating until it slowly starts breaking itself apart. I’m trying to do that in an acoustic way.”

Just as Davachi graciously and all too briefly occupies my screen on our Zoom call, her sumptuous and profound compositional works expand to inhabit whatever sonic spaces they’re in. And though her pieces extend beyond what might be considered acceptable running times for popular or even avant-garde music, they seem to end too soon. Elongating beautiful moments in musical time has always been a central tenet of Davachi’s modus operandi, starting with her earliest days as a pianist.

“When I played something, like a chord, I remember thinking that I would like to hear that more,” she recollects. “You’re playing and you get to a chord, and you have to keep going, because that’s the nature of the piano. I remember being annoyed thinking, ‘that’s such a pretty cadence, or a pretty harmony.’ I just wanted to hear that more.”◼︎

No Hay Banda performs Sarah Davachi’s “Three Unisons for Four Voices” for the Suoni per il Popolo festival 13 June at La Sala Rossa, 4848 St. Laurent Blvd.

Cover image: Sarah Davachi photographed in Los Angeles in 2020. Provided to NicheMTL by the artist.

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How Do You Spell Holiday?

All In The Family: in conversation with Kiva Stimac

Pre-Christian festivals traditionally marked the turning of the seasons, celebrating solstices, equinoxes, the planting and harvesting of crops, and other sundry natural cycles.

Festivals nowadays are largely symbolic of such seasonal celebrations, centering more upon common interests and activities like film, theatre, dance, and music.

The festivalization of cultural industries in the 21st century has meant that patrons more often than not expect a curated round-up of events rather than any stand-alone experience. There are such things today as “festival circuits,” a secondary calendar upon which cultural products and producers travel and tour year-round.

Without doubt, one of Montreal’s most interesting springtime festivals is Suoni per il Popolo, currently entering its 24th iteration.

Founded in 2000 by the artist, printmaker, and chef, Kiva Stimac, Suoni, for short, has become a much anticipated and lovingly lauded launch pad for those with big ears for experimental sounds.

“Montreal is at its most beautiful right now,” Stimac observes as we chat over the phone on a sunny late May morning. “And the festival this year — I’m very proud of. We made it so we’re going to have challenging, revolutionary, good times.”

“Montreal audiences are very enthusiastic.” Kiva Stimac for Popolo Press.

Stimac and Godspeed You! Black Emperor bassist Mauro Pezzente have collaborated since the festival’s inception on booking bands at Casa del Pololo and La Sala Rossa, twin venues that they started nearly a quarter century ago, which have become go-to stages for local and international musicians, and venerable institutions for Montreal’s music aficionados.

“We had a very deep love for music of all kinds,” Stimac says of the impetus behind Suoni’s founding. “But we noticed that bands were skipping Montreal. People would play Boston, Toronto, but they would skip Montreal. For instance, Arab Strap wasn’t playing Montreal. So, we booked them a show at Casa, and it sold out in 10 minutes.”

Originally called Artichaut, the venue that now houses Casa del Popolo in 2000 was “more like a hippie space,” Stimac remembers.

“At that time, this part of St. Laurent was very desolate, uninhabited,” recalls Stimac. “The rent was affordable enough that we signed a lease. And everybody started coming in while we were trying to renovate, trying to get our permits and stuff, saying, ‘hey, I was supposed to play a show here next week, or ‘I was supposed to do something here in a month from now.’ So, we just started saying ‘okay’ to people.”

Quickly, demand for these live happenings coalesced and Stimac realized that she could invite artists of her own choosing, renting the Spanish Cultural Center across the street soon afterward and transforming its upper level into La Sala Rossa.

“Montreal audiences are very enthusiastic,” Stimac notes. “From the first year of the festival, everybody that we called and asked to play said ‘yes.’ And to come and play an artist-run, small venue, not necessarily knowing us, once they showed up and it was a family vibe, and we cooked them food, and gave them advice on the sound, even though these were small spaces, with the vibe of the audiences, everybody was really enthusiastic.”

A singular aesthetic is Suoni’s hallmark, but the festival is recognized for curating artists from diverse genres — from punk to funk, classical to jazz — and across various demographics, too. It is not a youth-oriented or fashion-specific affair.

Some of this year’s highlights include No Hay Banda on June 13th performing a commissioned piece that Sarah Davachi composed; the Swedish vocalist and electronic composer Erika Angell on June 17th, and industrial-rap superstar Backxwash, aka Ashanti Mutinta, on June 21st.

“Having our final show be Anthony Braxton and Wolf Eyes is a pretty big deal,” Stimac remarks. “That’s the elder free-jazz experimenter hero, and then the noise-making trickster Detroiters, also heroes, coming together and making a sound that is really special.”

For the first time, day passes will also be sold this year for $45, allowing patrons to attend every event on any given day.

“Sometimes, it’s challenging,” Stimac admits, regarding programming Montreal’s premiere avant-garde festival. “A lot of times, it’s problematic. It’s not like, oh my God, we’ll play Kumbaya and everybody’s going to come together. Oftentimes it forces people apart or sets people into scenes, like ‘oh, I can’t interact with this or that scene.’ So, having multiple intergenerational interracial scenes here, that is very important to me.”

While the city’s bigger festivals like Osheaga, Pop Montreal, or the Jazz Fest court corporate sponsorship and attempt to attract higher-profile star power, Suoni deliberately remains committed to showcasing the best underground artists from Montreal and internationally. Stimac believes that a strong sense of community and solidarity through struggle is at the heart of Suoni’s ethos.

“We want to sell these shows, but also be true to who we are as people.” Kiva Stimac for Popolo Press.

“I didn’t create this thing as a business,” says Stimac, “or even as a festival. I created this as a family situation. Family isn’t just blood, either. It’s chosen family, too. The outsiders, the misfits, the queers, the punks — we’re all an international family. How do we exist in a world that’s so tragic and horrific?”

Stimac answers her own question: “I think making music and art of all kinds — dance, theatre, visual art — is an important connecting point to get to the next step of, hopefully, creating something different in this world.”

Montreal and music’s independent scenes have changed significantly since Stimac conceived of the festival. Covid and its restrictions were particularly difficult on the arts and one of Stimac’s performance venues, La Vitrola, was forced to close its doors.

The cost of mounting major events like Suoni increased three and four-fold as artists and their surrounding industries attempted to make up for lost revenues. Even though her festival has thrived for more than two decades, Stimac seems acutely aware of wanting to share the wealth as ethically as possible.

“When you’ve been around for 24 years, and you have some funding, a lot of times you’re also seen as ‘the man.’ We want to sell these shows, but also be true to who we are as people. That’s the hustle,” Stimac explains.

At twelve days, this edition of Suoni is leaner and more focussed than previous years, with fewer shows programmed against each other, leaving more room for audiences to discover the depth and diversity of Stimac’s vision. Still, she is generous to give credit where it’s due. From ancient fairs and feasts to modern festivals, the central theme of any seasonal celebration has always been a spirit of communion.

“I’m not looking to be the curator of the entire festival anymore,” says Stimac. “I’m doing this with over 25 different co-presenters from all different backgrounds. I just do what I can do with my own hands. So, I make the posters, I make the food, DIY. But hopefully we’re figuring out more how to DIT — do it together.”◼︎

The 24th edition of Suoni per il Popolo runs 12-23 June 2024.

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Play Recent

Shock & Awe

François Le Roux, Le Bal masqué and L’Histoire du Soldat, Bourgie Hall, 18 April 2024

François Le Roux performs at Bourgie Hall. Photographed for NicheMTL.

The Reuters News Agency photographer Mohammed Salem this week won the World Press Photo award for his snapshot of a Palestinian woman, Inas Abu Maamar, cradling the lifeless corpse of her 5-year-old niece, Saly, who reportedly was killed in an Israeli airstrike at Nasser hospital in Southern Gaza last October.

On the surface, it’s an aesthetically appealing image.

The cold and rigid textures of white marble and yellow sandstone behind the pair of women contrast their bodily figures, draped in blue, brown, and white textiles.

And yet another feature strikes the viewer on a more subliminal level: there is very little humanity to this photographic record of apparently human suffering.

The only hint we get of the subjects’ earthy identity is a snatch of Maamar’s hand emerging from her sleeve, gently caressing Saly’s enshrouded head. Otherwise, there is nearly no humanness evident in any recognizable corporeal features — an inverse, say, of the iconic Pulitzer Prize-winning image that The Associated Press photographer Nick Ut captured of Phan Thi Kim Phúc running naked and screaming down Route 1 near Trang Bang immediately following an American napalm attack on South Vietnam in 1972.

In Ut’s historic image, the horrors of war were laid bare in black and white, visceral, and unmistakable. With Salem’s more current photo, everything that’s terrible about genocide is concealed, abstracted, wrapped up literally as if mummified. It’s an image sanitized of pain that invites viewers at once to look and to not really see.

During the Vietnam War, it was customary in the U.S. not to show dead soldiers’ bodies in the media. Visible suffering was a duty for the other side to bear.

But through the proliferation of shocking media images amidst wars in Iraq, Bosnia, Rwanda, Afghanistan, and Syria, the west no doubt fell victim to what the cultural theorist Susan Sontag in her book Regarding the Pain of Others defined “desensitizing horror.”

We’re frankly exhausted with looking at destruction and death. When there’s nothing else to look at, an image as enigmatic as Maamar’s requires an act of interpretation, forcing viewers to participate in discerning its true meaning.

Ensemble Urbain, Créations, Collectif MTL, 14 April 2024

Anita Pari and Joshua Morris perform at Collectif MTL. Photographed for NicheMTL.

How we signify internal pain entails a more symbolic vocabulary of representation. At a recent post-classical recital hosted by Ensemble Urbain, the composer and doctoral candidate Anita Pari chose to translate her own lived experience with mental health through music.

In a piece called “Escape for Cello and Piano,” Pari and accompanist Joshua Morris communicated sonically the experience of “persistent intrusive thoughts” — a phenomenon that everybody can experience, regardless of medical diagnosis or clinical disorder.

Ordering sound is one way to restructure any situation in which we find ourselves out of control. That’s why music — and art, more broadly — is such a successful therapeutic form, which we should consider before reaching for pharmaceuticals or other easy fixes.

Pari’s composition didn’t come off too conceptual, either; it wasn’t, so to speak, just a “one-note” performance. I found myself both aesthetically pleased as a listener, and emotionally moved as a person empathetic to those who find this life a struggle. What a wonderful place to put disordered energy.

Anybody who attempts to bring order into this world is going to scrape up against chaos. Anyone who tries to shine a light through darkness will inevitably cast a shadow.

Nary a Fang with Elizabeth Lima, No Hay Banda & Innovations en concert, La Sala Rossa, 15 April 2024

Jennifer Thiessen performs with Nary a Fang at La Sala Rossa. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Not to disparage “one-note” performances, the experimental quartet Nary a Fang delivered a transcendent concert at La Sala Rossa last Monday, revolving around miniscule microtonal variations on a single frequency. Like listening to a piano being tuned, it becomes evident that an infinite number of notes exist between notes — that one is many, and many is one.

With this realization, it’s impossible not to be fulfilled by a drone that ostensibly never changes. When we find whatever it is we’re looking for — in sound as in life — there is no more “more” to find.

The Spanish kabbalist Shem Țob ibn Shem Țob wrote in his Sermon on Wa-Yeħi in the 1480s:

“Those who love money can never have enough of it. But the reward that comes to those who engage in Torah and commandments will fully satisfy them, for this goodness spreads like the water of a brook. Just as the sunlight can illuminate the entire world without diminishing, so the goodness of the world to come will not diminish, no matter how many share in it.”

The Philadelphia Orchestra, Maison Symphonique, 19 April 2024

Yannick Nézet-Seguin conducts The Philadelphia Orchestra. François Goupil for the Orchestre Métropolitain.

A good conductor takes command of an orchestra, which is prerequisite. A great conductor can regulate the crowd with a wave of his hand.

While directing The Philadelphia Orchestra, his American charge, Yannick Nézet-Séguin after the first movement of Florence Price’s 4th Symphony on Friday night at Maison Symphonique gently and successfully instructed the sold-out audience to kindly hold their applause until the end of the piece.

It was a simple gesture, a subtle manual motion made without even turning around. But subtlety is most effective in a righteous demand for respect.

Is it possible that force isn’t the best way to overcome an army?

Wanda Koop, Who Owns the Moon, Musée des beaux-arts, until 4 August 2024

Left: Wanda Koop, Objects of Interest — Panel 4, 2023 and Objects of Interest — Panel 2, 2023. Right: a patron inspects Black Sea Portal — Luminous Silver, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Night Gallery. ©️ Wanda Koop. Photographed for NicheMTL.

In preparation for painting, Wanda Koop lies on her back with eyes closed, often for hours, envisioning what each new piece should look like. Before a brush touches canvas, she has already formed a clear mental image of what the work will be.

“I love feeling that I’m always seeing everything in technicolour,” Koop told me at the press conference for her Musée des beaux-arts exhibition.

“It’s one of those shows where you should come by yourself and be quiet — like looking at the moon,” Koop suggests. “The eclipse is something that I speak to in my work. It’s something bigger than us.”◼︎

Cover image: Wanda Koop, Ukrainian Quartet — Power Plant, 2023, Courtesy of the artist and Night Gallery. ©️ Wanda Koop. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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