Tag Archives: La Sala Rossa

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This Is Fine

ALL HANDS_MAKE LIGHT, 8 February 2024, La Sala Rossa

All Hands_Make Light photographed for NicheMTL.

Fire is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, fire illuminates. On the other, it destroys.

You can’t fight fire with fire. Because then all you have is orders, powers, magnitudes of destruction.

But if what you are attempting is to enlighten, starting multiple fires is integral, beneficial, vital.

La Reine-garçon, Opéra de Montréal, Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier, 3 February 2024

French is the world’s fifth most frequently spoken language. By comparison, English is first, with roughly three to four times as many habitual speakers. (Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, and Spanish sit between.)

67 countries around the world list English as one of their official languages, as opposed to only 29 that name French. It is safe to say that France is no longer conducting much colonial expansion these days — no one is, really, except of course for Russia — meaning that it is unlikely that any new countries will become French-speaking nations for the foreseeable future.

With regard to language, I wrote a book called Mad Skills once upon a time, about the history of the Musical Instrument Digital Interface, otherwise known as MIDI. MIDI is a computer “language” — and a robust and long-standing one at that.

Even though they were marketplace competitors, synthesizer companies in the early 1980s agreed that creating a standard control protocol would be advantageous to growing their trades manufacturing and selling musical instruments. If you could plug a Yamaha into a Roland and make them work together, the theory went, musicians would buy more Yamahas and Rolands.

It was especially the Japanese CEOs — who had themselves learned to speak decent English — that pushed for what was initially called UMI, pronounced you-me — a Universal Musical Interface.

UMI eventually morphed into MIDI, and the rest morphed into music history. Artists from Depeche Mode to Devo to Run DMC adopted MIDI and ran with it. Today, everyone except for Jack White has a MIDI-enabled instrument somewhere in their collection, and Roger Waters would never have been able to mount The Wall singlehandedly and interminably without it.

More than 40 years on, MIDI is still far and away the most commonly used “language” with which digital musical instruments “communicate.” And though other machine control protocols still survive, MIDI became the de facto industry syntax, and a lot of wonderful music ensued.

Imagine if a standard musical language never existed, what kind of noise people would have made.

Hell is Paradise, 5 February 2024, Quai des Brumes

Hell is Paradise photographed for NicheMTL.

There is no sound out in space. Because sound requires air as a medium to vibrate through, the sounds that we hear are very much unique to this world. Therefore, language — or the vocal, audible form of communication that most people and cultures across the globe and even many animal species use — is a place-dependent phenomenon.

That place is Planet Earth. And depending upon the location, the people and cultures of this planet inhabit variously configured bodies and correspond through diverse and ever-evolving languages.

The French philosopher Alain Badiou wrote that there are only bodies and languages. Except that there are also truths. One truth, though, is that there are only bodies and languages here.

Bodies and languages don’t matter much if they’re relieved of their earthbound gravitas.

India Gailey, No Hay Banda, La Sala Rossa, 4 February 2024

India Gailey photographed for NicheMTL.

And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. —Genesis 2:19

It is noteworthy that according to Judeo-Christian tradition, language is man’s creation, not God’s. God made the animals and gave Adam the privilege of naming them. Which begs the question: what language does God speak? Is there such a thing as Divine Language?

The American ethnobotanist Terence McKenna described his transcendent experiences with N, N-Dimethyltryptamine, commonly abbreviated as DMT, in illuminating and often hilarious terms. On a collaborative 1993 spoken-word album made with the electronic musician Jonah Sharp, otherwise known as Spacetime Continuum, McKenna recounts hallucinating under the drug’s influence a race of interdimensional angelic beings that he called “self-transforming machine elves,” which communicated in delightful utterances that McKenna imitated.

These beings instructed McKenna to talk as they did — “do it, use your voice to make an object,” they told him — forming lexical blocks out of word units constituting a simultaneously novel and ancient language.

Suddenly, from McKenna’s body, as if ex nihilo, foreign yet familiar tongues emerged. “Meaning and language are two different things,” observes McKenna. There is no inherent reason why we call a table a table. It’s not as if you slap your palm down on a table and it sounds like “table.”

Reality itself is constructed upon a series of reiterative symbolic systems, language being one of them. Language only means something because we repeat its words. The more times we repeat the language’s words, the more pregnant with meaning they become.

Until they cease to lose all meaning. If you have ever repeated the same word over and over in your mind, you will have experienced the uncanny sensation of language unfastening itself from sense-making.

Language is like the fruit of a tree. It can nourish or it can poison, depending upon the nature of the tree. No good fruit can come of an evil tree, and a good tree cannot produce evil fruit.

“The world is made of words,” McKenna astutely concludes, “and if you know the words that the world is made of, you can make of it whatever you wish.”

Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore: Giants of Modern Art, 8 February 2024, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts

Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore vernissage at the MMFA photographed for NicheMTL.

I treasure going to openings. It is one of the perks of writing — being invited to an exclusive opening.

The last exclusive opening I will ever attend will be that of my own casket. Unfortunately, the show will close the same day.◼︎

Cover image: patrons inspect Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Grey Cross on Blue” (1929) at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, photographed for NicheMTL.

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At State’s End

Moishes, 5 November 2023

The hype was overwhelming.

Advertorials in all the major (and minor) newspapers — about the renovations; about how much money the chandelier cost; about the relocation of some storied Montreal institution. As if they had dismantled the entire Jacques Cartier Bridge and rebuilt it piece-by-piece on Square Victoria. Who wouldn’t want to try it out?

The first time I went to the new Moishes, the ambiance was over-the-top, a caricature of Montreal’s corporate and financial elite, drinking and dining and swine-ing in luxury, ironically adjacent to the site of Montreal’s Occupy Wall Street and Maple Spring sit-ins in 2012, and today looking right smack in the face of the masses who find it harder and harder to afford the basic quotidian necessities, never mind drop a hundred bucks on a steak.

I sat at the bar and ordered a filet mignon and fries. Directly across from me sat a gentleman of about sixty years of age, who was joined momentarily by, shall we say, a young lady of the evening — and then, a few moments later, by another. I might have been embarrassed, disgusted, and impressed in equal measure. The audacity.

But this is not about prostitutes. It’s about meat.

Moishes was supposed to do one thing and do it right: serve a perfect steak, preferably with fries. Perhaps they were still working out the kinks. But that day, my fries arrived cold, and the filet was hockey-puck overdone.

Moishes had apparently nailed every detail of absurd fine-dining opulence — the renovations, the chandelier, the guy with a hooker on each arm — except for the food.

Fortunately, though, this story does have a happy ending. I was invited back by an overly apologetic manager and am pleased to report that Moishes now has the food sorted, too. So, if you’re the kind of person who drives a dirty Lamborghini SUV in the wintertime and likes life a bit bloody, I cannot recommend the place highly enough.

Tribute to György Ligeti, Jean-Michaël Lavoie conducting musicians of the OSM, Bourgie Hall, 4 November 2023

Ligeti’s unsettling 20th century Classical works have gained popularity in the public consciousness in part due to their inclusion in famous film soundtracks like 2001 and The Shining, directed by Stanley Kubrick, and more recently, in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return.

But Ligeti’s orchestral music is cinematic enough on its own to summon in the imaginary an interdimensional portal, or some deranged lunatic’s interior mind. They are enough to affect you on a visceral level, enough to make your stomach turn in sympathy with their wonderful cacophonous atonality.

Esmerine, La Sala Rossa, 2 December 2023

Esmerine perform 2 December 2023. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Esmerine was the first band I ever saw perform live in Montreal, in about 2004 or ‘5, at La Sala Rossa. It was to support the launch of their latest album, Aurora. The bar seemed vast to me at that time, and the band possessed a reverent mystique, percussionist Bruce Cawdron solemnly caressing a xylophone with cello bows, emitting a glass-like drone, conjuring an enchanted atmosphere in this surreal space.

You could still smoke indoors in those days. That might have been part of the effect.

This time around, nearly 20 years later, the air was clearer, but the room appeared smaller somehow, more intimate. The band was set up in front of the stage, not on it. I perched myself about six feet away and listened as they played me back in time to my first Montreal gig and a baptism of sorts into a very special scene of talented artists. I felt lucky to be there then. I still do.

Afterwards I spoke with Cawdron. I told him about the Aurora show 20 years ago and what it meant to me, and furthermore, that prior to Esmerine, I had never seen anyone play a xylophone with bows before. Cawdron, gathering XLR cables into neat coils, winked and said, “you still haven’t seen anyone play a xylophone with bows, because this is a marimba.”

Monnomest, Productions Supermusique, Espace Orange, 23 November 2023

Le Vivier showcases some of the nuttiest, wackiest, nichest contemporary music in Montreal, and although the group was founded in 2007, I had never heard of it before this year.

Maybe it’s because the English and the French experimental music communities don’t intersect much; maybe it’s because I simply wasn’t paying attention to anything until after the pandemic, when I started paying attention to everything. But still, it reminds me that there are always whole worlds in this city to discover.

Hidden Intention, Error 403, 25 November 2023

Ky (right) and Eejungmi (left) perform 25 November 2023. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Loft parties are an integral part of Montreal’s fertile nightlife and Hidden Intention, the newish series of DM-for-address get-togethers organized by Nennan’s Amy Macdonald, is a promising continuation of that longstanding tradition. If you want something done, do it yourself.

Roger Tellier-Craig, Conservatoire de Musique de Montréal, 7 December 2023

Roger Tellier-Craig performs 7 December 2023. Photographed for NicheMTL.

It’s high time that Roger Tellier-Craig is taken as seriously by Montreal as he takes his work. There is no more dedicated artist to the lineage, the craft, and the precision of an artform.

Tellier-Craig’s sounds are presented, aptly for this media-saturated and constantly distracted generation, suitably out-of-context. Some of them sound metallic and sharp; others wet and cold; others still seem warm, soft, and round. But none of them ostensibly have origins. There is no guitar to be found in there, no snare drum, neither rhyme nor reason, save for Tellier-Craig’s own immutable internal rhythms.

Handel’s Messiah, Orchestre Classique de Montreal, St. Joseph’s Oratory, 14 December 2023

The Orchestre Classique de Montréal performing Handel’s Messiah in the Crypt of St. Joseph’s Oratory. Photographed for NicheMTL.

As a child, I believed that justice existed independent of us. There was some universal set of rules that governed right and wrong, and sooner or later, those rules would be applied. If you committed fault, you would eventually face this thing called justice. You couldn’t just invade a sovereign nation, say, or commit genocide, because justice would prevent it.

As I get older, however, I have come to understand that justice is something we ourselves make or break. There may be some common, universal sense of right and wrong, but it is human people who have to interpret and apply it. If something unjust happens and nobody stops it, justice cannot magically step in.

Justice is not the light itself; rather, truth needs the light shone upon it to become just. In pursuit of justice, we either direct or misdirect that light.◼︎

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Escape This Desire

Les lumineuses Vêpres de la Vierge de Monteverdi, Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier, 20 August 2023

Antoine Saito for the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal

After their tremendous performance on the truncated stage at a reconfigured Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier, conductor Eric Milnes shouted out to an enthusiastic audience, “Want some more?”

Everyone did. But I wonder if all the musicians wanted to give more. Or if the audience might have liked a moment to soak in the experience before the encore. Of course no one said no.

Nonetheless, Mr. Milnes is hardly the most scandalous maestro of Monteverdi in recent weeks. The acclaimed English conductor John Eliot Gardiner slapped a bass soloist in the face after he reportedly stepped in the wrong direction off the podium at a festival in La Côte-Saint-André, in the south of France. There were no serious injuries, only bruised egos. And a flurry of apologies. However, Gardiner, who is 80, has withdrawn from his remaining European tour dates, and this incident will doubtless shade the twilight of his career.

Who would have imagined that the void of Hollywood plot twists left by the tandem writers’ and actors’ strikes might be filled with the Baroque classical music world’s high melodrama?

Jake Bowen, No Rhyme or Reason, Atelier Galerie 2112, 24-28 August 2023

Jake Bowen photographed for NicheMTL

I hope I’m not telling tales out of school.

But the bright young artist Jake Bowen confessed to me at his recent vernissage that he was leaving Montreal to return to his native Toronto. Citing a number of valid reasons, chiefly among them language, rising costs, and the difficulty of making a living under the first two conditions, Bowen painted a picture of Montreal as a city that can seem especially cruel to sensitive types like him.

This was not the city I moved to.

Montreal was once a metropolitan magnet to aspiring artists. Cheap rent, a laissez-faire way of life, and diverse and expanding creative communities used to draw people like Bowen from Toronto and beyond.

Not anymore.

Inflated property values mean inflated rents, putting Montreal on par with other Canadian cities for affordability. And living and working as an Anglophone painter under an increasingly hostile Francophone government is no longer such a romantic sacrifice.

It’s a shame that we can’t retain Bowen and others like him who leave. He didn’t fail to make it here; Montreal failed to make it for him — and it is our loss.

They call it the brain drain. Still, that term has a double meaning: not only is Montreal being drained of our brains, but enduring the absurdity in Quebec’s minutiae of language-based political bureaucracy literally drains the brain.

Ensamble de Cámara Orquesta Experimental de Instrumentos Nativos, La Sala Rossa, 15 August 2023

ECOEIN photographed for NicheMTL

Ten years ago, I travelled to Peru to participate in the sacred ritual ingestion of ayahuasca. Motivated by the romanticized stories of telepathy and time travel alluded to in correspondence between William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, and published as The Yage Letters, I was certain that ayahuasca would somehow benefit me immensely. It would offer me profound insight into the human condition. It would open up my third eye. I’d be at one with the universe. Or whatever.

It didn’t do those things — and that’s not to say that it wasn’t worth doing. The trip alone was instructive. I gained new perspective on completely different ways of living. I reconsidered travel and tourism, labour and leisure. I awoke, ate, and slept in the jungle. My experience of time changed. But it didn’t take ayahuasca for that.

The psychedelic trip was only a fraction of the whole trip, broadly speaking. It may have facilitated learning, but the medicine itself didn’t teach me anything new.

Psychedelics are more akin to diagnostic tools, like a finely tuned machine that tests a car’s horsepower. It’s a close look under the hood. It doesn’t make the old clunker go any faster. It just gives a general indication of what shape it’s in — if you need wheel alignment, say. Or brakes, or shocks. But if your vehicle is running smoothly, there’s no need for diagnostics. And probably no need for psychedelics, either, if you already have a sense of perspective.

What Burroughs and Ginsberg didn’t say, perhaps what they never considered, is the simple age-old wisdom: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

The Lives of Documents — Photography as Project, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Until 3 March 2024

NicheMTL

Notions of beauty have changed significantly during my lifetime. What we consider beautiful is not universal, much less timeless. And it’s a pity that beauty graces our senses unevenly — that is, what is beautiful to the touch is not necessarily beautiful to the eye, or the nose, or the ear.

A new hierarchy of beauty has emerged, though: the beauty of reality. It doesn’t matter how attractive a beautiful woman is in a photograph. The photograph isn’t the thing with the beauty; she is. Ugliness, out there in the real world, possesses more beauty than the prettiest pictures.

A happy medium exists when photographs of beautiful objects are themselves presented as a collection of beautiful objects. Let’s call it happy mediumicity.

Nennen, La Sotterenea, 31 July 2023

Buddhists believe that desire is the source of all suffering. If we could only somehow sublimate our constant cravings and yearnings for that which we yearn and crave, the theory goes, then those old familiar achy breaky feelings of unsatiated longing would subside and we’d attain enlightenment — Nirvana.

But Buddhism is dumb. Buddhist philosophy doesn’t want to admit that desire is the very essence of life, the primordial stuff of which it’s comprised. Desire is what makes things happen. It’s our most basic element, our most essential ingredient. If there were a cookbook for all that ever was and all that ever will be, every recipe would end with: “a dash of desire.”

When we cease to desire — things, people; to be loved, to love in turn — then the ride ends. The fire inside burns out and we might as well expire.

Desire is to humans as constant movement is to sharks. Cheat death: stay hungry.◼︎

Cover image: Bowen, Jake. Ball of Energy (2022), detail, 30×24″, acrylic, oil, and spray paint on canvas.

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999 Words

The Real Thing: in conversation with No Hay Banda

“There is no band.”

I walk myself into this obligatorily cheeky response, I suppose, when I ask the three core members of No Hay Banda — the Montreal contemporary music collective / band / events organizer / community builder — if they are a band, or what.

Violinist Geneviève Liboiron, pianist Daniel Áñez, and percussionist Noam Bierstone operate under the mysterious Lynchian moniker as a contemporary classical power trio that’s more art than any one facet of it. As the name suggests, they keep their operations deliberately vague.

“There are fine lines all over the place,” Áñez tells me at the group’s rehearsal studio near the D’Iberville metro, which also functions as an artist’s residence for travelling musicians. “What is contemporary? What is experimental? What is musical theatre? What is electronic? We have not yet put lines, but we’re inside those genres.”

No Hay Banda began in 2016 as a concert series held at La Sala Rossa, the landmark Plateau neighbourhood venue that serves as the collective’s exhibition space, and lends the proceedings its red-curtain vibe.

Since, the cooperative has dabbled in expanded performance; founded a record label called No Hay Discos, upon which they released their own impressive double-album debut; and are now producing a two-night show at the Chapelle de La Cité-des-Hospitalières, the historic chapel attached to Hôtel-Dieu, premiering an opera entitled Body Without Organs (With Organ) by the acclaimed Japanese experimental vocalist Tomomi Adachi. “He’s incredible,” Liboiron says.

Throughout the pandemic, No Hay Banda, along with vocalist Sarah Albu and guitarist An Laurence, recorded a serial opera by Adachi called 51 Short Pieces for Soprano, Violin, and Guitar, releasing one video daily online.

“Some of them are like five seconds,” Liboiron says, “super theatrical, super short, one or two notes.” The project carried the trio through the depths of quarantine, and also forged an enduring relationship with Adachi that brings him to Montreal for a 10-day residency and various performances affiliated with the Suoni per il popolo festival.

“Adachi asked us if he could write us his second opera,” says Bierstone. “So it’s a semi AI-created opera. A lot of the text is AI-generated, but I don’t think any of the music is.”

“How would we know?” jests Áñez.

Each of the two performances features different local openers, encouraging audiences to return for round two. On June 16th, the harpist Sarah Pagé plays an electronically manipulated Koto against percussionist Patrick Graham. On June 17th, the duo of Chloë Lum and Yannick Desranleau celebrate the release of their new album, The Garden of a Former House Turned Museum, on the No Hay Discos imprint.

“We’re super happy to have them in our label,” Áñez says. “All of our shows have two artists, two sets. Like a local set and an international set. No Hay Banda has ambitions to be a place of exchange that has eyes inside and also has eyes outside.”

The trio often talk in nebulous ambiguities like this, and it reminds me of the way the niche American filmmaker David Lynch discusses his work — obliquely and in metaphors. “We love David Lynch,” says Liboiron.

The name No Hay Banda is borrowed from the striking scene in Lynch’s Mulholland Drive in which the protagonists attend a surreal theatrical performance that is one part Vaudeville, one part acid trip.

“We started all the concerts with that scene from the movie,” Liboiron explains. “People are just having drinks, listening to the music, and when this would start, it was the cue that the show was about to begin. And also we are producers that are sometimes playing. So in all the dimensions of the scene, David Lynch was matching our aesthetic, we felt.”

“It’s come up more,” adds Bierstone, “in situations we didn’t expect. Like this Adachi piece: there is a lot of lip syncing and faking and playing with the public’s perception. We don’t pick pieces because they are very David Lynch, but it just happens.”

Áñez elaborates: “We also found somewhat of a manifesto in this idea. Because the text says, ‘There is no band, il n’y a pas un orchestre, it’s all a tape recording.’ And then there’s all these performers on stage in that scene in the movie where they’re faking that they’re playing and then they show that they’re not playing. It’s all part of that concept of alternative performance that we try to bring into our concert series. We are not blinded by it. Like, sometimes we have concerts where there is just a pianist playing the piano. But there’s this idea of a new way of playing and presenting yourself.”

No Hay Banda is insistently blazing fresh tracks in the Montreal contemporary experimental music scene, and slowly, steadily creating a new constellation of affiliates.

“I would say it’s been very hard since the pandemic to bring the public back to the halls,” Liboiron concedes. “Even before, it’s always been really hard for doing contemporary experimental music, to have a huge public. But we know there are a lot of people in Montreal and around that would love to see these shows. It would be really nice to meet all of them.”

“We’re pursuing this artistic path of alternative performance, so we touch the public that goes to experimental theatre. And we touch the public that goes to experimental dance. The shows that No Hay Banda puts together rejoin this wider public that is interested in fucked-up-edness,” says Áñez.

In that specificity, something universal emerges out of No Hay Banda’s creative project, which is augmented by their perplexing air of obscurity. Like a David Lynch movie, there are no simple explanations for what these or any artists do, no Hollywood endings that wrap up the plot.

“Leaving things open and vague allows us to develop in ways we would have been too restricted to had we said we were just a concert series,” Bierstone says.

What to expect from their Adachi collaboration?

“It’s hard to know,” teases Liboiron, “what it is going to be.”◼︎

Tomomi Adachi & No Hay Banda perform 16 & 17 June 2023 at Chapelle de La Cité-des-Hospitalières.

Cover image: Noam Bierstone photographed by Robert Del Tredici.

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