Tag Archives: La Sotterenea

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Our Lover’s Story: in conversation with HRT

“Enya rocks so hard,” proclaims Anastasia Westcott who, along with vocalist Kirby Lees, comprises the legendary Montreal-based Rave-Punk duo HRT.

The three of us are riffing in the living room of Westcott’s McGill-ghetto flat, which serves simultaneously as HRT HQ, on the music that we listened to as kids, delighting in many of our similarities: Free Jazz; Death Metal; Classic Rock; Hole.

Somehow it doesn’t altogether come as a surprise that Westcott, in addition to edgier artists, from Metallica to Coil, might count Enya among her influences — considering that Enya, too, is known for crafting tightly composed and densely layered electronic music.

Hailing originally from Atlantic Canada, Westcott from Newfoundland and Lees a Haligonian, there is something of a maritime work ethic and misty spirit that Enya and HRT share. And while HRT might aesthetically be as confrontational as Enya is calm, there exists an undeniable throughline.

Still, HRT is impossible to pin down, generically speaking, spanning Hardcore, Breakbeat, Electro, Post-Punk, and Darkwave. The result is a melange of infectious, industrial, danceable bangers specifically unique to this twosome, and indicative of Montreal’s appreciation for music’s most experimental margins, more broadly. Theirs is a decidedly niche brand of no-nonsense knees-up business.

For the uninitiated, HRT does indeed stand for Hormone Replacement Therapy, a not-so-subtle possession of their identity as Transgender artists.

“We kind of threw people a curveball not putting periods between the letters, I guess,” Westcott laughs. “We were initially going to start an anonymous hyperpop group called HRT because we thought, ‘what’s the most Trans-coded name we could think of?’”

“But then we were just like, ‘fuck it, go for it,’ and called ourselves HRT,” Lees elaborates. “I haven’t really thought about our music in relation to identity. We don’t write anything specifically with Trans identity in mind. We’re just Trans girls making music. I think the two just inherently happen.”

While music and identity can be mutually exclusive, every act is arguably political. And HRT are as radical as contemporary performance gets. They attract a core community of like minded devotees with volatile and cathartic live shows, one of which I attended at La Sotterenea on 7 February as part of the Taverne Tour. Standing at the edge of the stage, I suddenly realized, like a volcanologist poised on the threshold of an active lava lake, that I was precariously close to being sucked into the vortex of the mosh pit.

Their audiences “come to party,” as Westcott describes.

The crowd at La Sotterenea reacts as HRT’s Kirby Lees jumps into the audience. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“That night felt particularly insane,” Lees remembers. “It was very packed. We weren’t really expecting it either, considering Taverne Tour had eight other shows happening on that block that night. Especially lately, it’s been that kind of energy pretty consistently.”

Westcott echoes: “Often when we play shows, I have to be like, ‘how was it?’ Because I don’t see. I don’t think. I’m nothing. Which feels amazing.”

The indomitable vibe that Lees and Westcott conjure together is vital, and it seems that the pair have their division of labour down pat. HRT formed in 2018 and, like everyone, was compelled into a two-and-a-half-year hiatus during the coronavirus crisis. “We had to take a forcible stop where we tried to write stuff together over Zoom,” says Lees. “I learned a lot about how to use gear, but it was kind of a nightmare.”

“The original songs were like Kirby making janky beats over a vocal sample and me turning them into songs on actual gear,” Westcott explains. “We’ve written in so many different ways at this point.”

“I learned how to play bass during the pandemic,” Lees professes. “And I did a lot of gear stuff. But my comfortable space is handling lyrics, largely.”

Both Lees and Westcott are self-taught musicians with no formal training. “I’ve been playing shows since I was 14 or 15,” Westcott tells me. “I did some Jazz guitar lessons in my early 20s. But most of my experience comes from just playing music.”

Lees fronted a band called The Dolly Partners after she moved in 2014 to Montreal from Halifax. “It was a Punk Dolly Parton cover band,” Lees deadpans. “But this has been my longest-standing project.”

Westcott decamped from St. John’s in 2012. “Originally I was going to go to Concordia for Jazz studies and didn’t get in,” Westcott confesses. “I’ve been part of a lot of different scenes, made a lot of different types of music. I’ve been in, like, way too many bands.”

Lees explains that HRT’s modus operandi is, “just doing it because we like it. The sound of it keeps changing, too,” she says, “between each thing we record. We’re not sticking necessarily to any one particular genre. We’re just doing what we want to do, when we want to do it.”

That liberatory ethos has served the band from their first release under the name Dregqueen, Connective, in 2019, to a live EP recorded at Café Cleopatra just before the lockdowns and launched on Bandcamp in 2021, and ultimately, to their most recent LP, entitled warm wet stroke of luck, released in late 2024.

If there were a band motto, Westcott says, it would simply be, “making people feel like they have a place to dance.”

“Our main goal is to keep doing it until it’s not fun, honestly.” Ana Westcott and Kirby Lees photographed for NicheMTL.

Providing that safe space is central to HRT’s endearing appeal. Unfortunately, however, North America, and expressly our neighbours to the south, seems dead set upon making public spaces less safe for Trans people. The U.S. under Donald J. Trump has just passed an executive order banning travellers whose passport documents don’t conform to their birth-assigned genders.

“We would love to do a good tour,” Lees says. “But it doesn’t really look like the states is the place to do that right now. So maybe a European tour at some point. We’re literally living in a hellscape. But our main goal is to keep doing it until it’s not fun, honestly.”

For the moment, Westcott and Lees are content to hunker down in Montreal and explore the possibilities afforded by incremental technological innovations.

“I got a computer,” Westcott boasts. “I didn’t have one that could run Ableton before. So, I’m making music on the computer instead of hardware. It feels pretty good so far. But it’s weird to have everything because I am really used to working within limitations and having limitation act as a creative tool.”

As a cultural observer, I am tempted to suggest that social limitations to a large degree encouraged Westcott and Lees to pursue creative fields rather than, say, careers in finance. Some artists are made while others are born. Nonetheless, Montreal has nurtured HRT to an extent that few other metropolises would. How long this continues, though, is unknown.

“It’s changed a lot, but this city does offer you space and time and access to work on passion projects,” says Lees.

“Up until recently, there’s always been a lot of DIY venues,” Westcott recalls. “But housing is so fucked in Montreal right now that that’s having an impact. When I moved here, I was paying $170 in rent. That’s not the situation anymore. Community is what makes bands. And the more that Montreal becomes like other cities, the less it will be like Montreal.”

Lees concurs. “If you make it harder to live here, you’re going to lose everything that made this city what it is: its art scenes; its music scenes; the actual culture that makes up this city. And for what? Don’t wreck your city. It’s the last one we have in Canada where you can actually make something happen if you want to because you have that access. We’re losing it really quickly. Make living affordable. That’s the baseline.”◼︎

HRT perform 9 May 2025 at the D4E Rave, Location TBA.

Cover image: Anastasia Westcott and Kirby Lees 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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Smells Like Team Spirit: in conversation with Shunk

After meandering through miscellaneous topics such as analogue versus digital recording formats and a friend’s dad’s BMW that had a Foo Fighters CD stuck in the stereo, the conversation ultimately turns to the olfactory qualities of various local bands and with whom it would be acceptable to spend significant time together in a touring van.

These are observations voiced with an equal measure of revulsion, reverence, and glee.

For bassist Julia Hill, 24, guitarist Peter Baylis, 32, drummer Adrian Vaktor, 31, and 30-year-old vocalist Gabrielle Domingue, who together comprise Shunk, Montreal’s darlings of post-pandemic post-punk, an overripe scent is just another part of the aesthetic.

“Don’t print this!” Hill laughs.

Of course, there is no choice but to print it now. Because if you’re not working up a bit of a stink, you’re not doing rock and roll right.

Shunk have invited me round to their rehearsal space at the Marsonic building on Papineau, a gritty warehouse with top notes of lager-soaked carpet and Purple Kush. Converted into diminutive jam cubicles, Marsonic houses some of this city’s scrappiest acts. Four or five other bands share Shunk’s windowless chamber, they say. Nonetheless, this cheap little studio allows artists like Shunk the necessary space to hone their repertoires — and get weird in the process.

“We have good music, and we have really good vibes.” Gabrielle Domingue and Adrian Vaktor photographed for NicheMTL.

“I feel like you can experiment a bit more in Montreal,” Domingue says. “And you’re less worried about fitting it into the box. Music is such a joy, and it would be so sick if everyone could live off of that. But it’s so nice to be with people and create this sonic scape. It’s crazy that we can create that here.”

Aiming for something like Cocteau Twins, Shunk coalesced in the autumn of 2022 during the heady days immediately following the coronavirus lockdowns. As a former member of Pottery, another Montreal indie outfit, Baylis enlisted Vaktor, a fellow local who had trained with the legendary Hasidic drum master Jacob Kaye.

Domingue, who previously fronted the Mothland-adjacent Visibly Choked, brought her friend Hill, originally from Newfoundland, into the mix to round out the rhythm section. With their complementary sensibilities, the foursome strike a unique balance blending elements of ‘70s garage, ‘80s shoegaze, ‘90s grunge, and aughts-era media savvy into something truly thrilling.

“I was always in choirs,” Hill recalls of her childhood musical education. “And then I started taking cello lessons, which was really random because I watched this movie — it was a book adaptation of some YA novel — and the girl in it played cello and I was like, ‘I want to be a classical musician.’ And that didn’t work out because I got into punk rock.”

Baylis studied Royal Conservatory piano. “But after one of those tests,” he says, “I didn’t go back. I wish I’d never taken that break, but way she goes sometimes,” he laments. Instead, he took up the guitar and became a self-described “rock and roll lifer.”

Domingue relocated a few years prior from Ottawa after completing a music degree in operatic vocal performance. Yet she found classical music “too stuffy,” and Montreal’s ever-expanding cultural scenes provided the personnel and playing field “to be loud in,” she explains.

“In a band, you need three things,” Domingue states. “The music has to be good; or the vibes have to be good; or you have to be making good money. And you need two out of three of these to sustain yourselves. Otherwise, you’re screwed. We have good music, and we have really good vibes. So, we’ll keep going and hopefully along the way, we’ll start making good money. But for now, we’ve got the two essential ones.”

After three raucous singles — “Tennis,” “Sated,” and “Goblin,” (the latter of which appears on the NicheMTL 2024 Yearbook compilation CD) — Shunk have now released their first full-length recording, entitled Shunkland, and are slated to play a handful of not-to-be-missed shows in the Montreal-Toronto-Ottawa corridor.

Mastered by the veteran Canadian musician Nik Kozub of Shout Out Out Out Out, Shunkland was recorded over only three days with mixing engineer Josh Kaiser in Baylis’s father’s study at his parents’ house.

“They left for a week,” Baylis confesses. “So, me and Adrian went and set up the drums and tested them out, smacking the snare in different rooms around the house.”

As Vaktor describes, “It was literally walking around his house going, ‘how does this room sound?’ Gong!”

“We had the songs pretty down,” says Baylis, “and I knew that I wanted to do a live off-the-floor record instead of a track-by-track record. And I knew that Kaiser would add a clean shine to it, to the grunginess that we were bringing to it live. I feel like the music comes easy for us in some way,” Baylis claims. “Everybody’s open to listening to people’s ideas when it comes to writing or changing the songs. I don’t think anyone’s too stuck in their route about how it should sound.”

“I’d agree with that,” Hill chimes in. “It’s definitely more just we all have ideas when we’re writing so quickly and we all trust each other’s visions, especially when it comes to the songwriting stuff. So, whoever can put their idea…”

“…into words fastest!” Domingue interjects.

“…and loudest!” Hill resumes. “Whoever has the loudest idea that takes up more space is what we usually end up going with.”

“Sometimes the soft-spoken ideas come through anyway,” murmurs Vaktor, eliciting laughter from his bandmates.

“Yeah,” Hill concurs. “The three of us will be yelling over each other and Adrian will quietly have an idea and we’ll be like, ‘no, that’s not going to work.’ And then 20 minutes later we’ll be like, ‘he was right the whole time.’”

“We’re always hacking away,” says Vaktor. “We’re blacksmithing.”

“We’re like a hive mind,” says Hill.

Domingue deadpans, “We’re the Borg.”

“Performing onstage is such a rush — the ultimate rush.” Julia Hill and Peter Baylis photographed for NicheMTL.

I first caught Shunk live last spring at Suoni per il Popolo, as the opening act for Yoo Doo Right, where the double bill nearly blew the top two floors off of La Sotterenea. Subsequently, I saw them perform twice beneath the Van Horne overpass and again on the rooftop of a house show near St. Laurent and Beaubien.

It is apt that this remarkably entertaining band, which encompasses influences across low and high culture, never seems satisfied to be in the middle. Carpet-bombing their hits onstage, Shunk exudes the unmistakable napalm smell of victory.

“I love playing live shows,” says Hill. “It’s my favourite thing in the whole world. I’ve always been like that, since I was a kid. Performing onstage is such a rush — the ultimate rush. It’s so fun. Nothing else can compare to playing a live show. Or in the studio when you make something exactly how you want it, and you just get super excited. Those things are the best.”

“When you’re playing the best you can with your friends, you’re playing in front of people, that feeling is a great high, for sure,” Baylis agrees. “And when we’re writing something really new and all together on this one idea and it’s really sounding good and everybody is on the same page, that’s also really a rare thing to find with people.”

“In that moment,” Vaktor muses, “you’re seeing a new pathway open.”◼︎

Shunk launches Shunkland with Born at Midnite and Flleur 12 March 2025 at La Sotterenea, 4848 Boulevard St. Laurent.

Cover image: Courtesy of Shunk.

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Objet petit a

Joyce Wieland, Heart On, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 6 February 2025 — 4 May 2025

Joyce Wieland, O Canada, 1970, Lithograph in red on wove paper, 57.4 x 76.4 cm. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“…there is no language in existence for which there is any question of its inability to cover the whole field of the signified…”
—Jacques Lacan, The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious.

In the wake of the Super Bowl halftime spectacle that the rapper Kendrick Lamar performed on 9 February, which was, of this renowned un-Canadian sporting institution reportedly the most-watched edition, likely due to multitudes tuning in to see whether or not there would be a third and ultimately successful assassination attempt on Donald Trump, the catastrophic U.S. President and billionaire blowhard, a flurry of frothy media commentary emerged, the kind of chatter that passes in our intellectually insolvent neoliberal era as “cultural discourse,” regarding the intention and interpretation of the political statement the artist was apparently making in the act.

Lamar clearly designed the elaborate show to entice spicy takes.

Almost all of these observed Lamar’s lowercase ‘a’ on a diamond-encrusted chain and proposed what it meant: the Amazon logo, perhaps, or a nod to his production company, or another sly swipe at Drake’s supposed penchant for minors.

Still, none entertained the possibility that a deeper meaning should be discerned by delving into any unintended or subconscious reading.

Kendrick Lamar performs at the Super Bowl LIX Halftime Show, Caesars Superdome, New Orleans, 9 February 2025. Gregory Shamus/Getty Images.

Curiously, no hot take that I read invoked the 20th century French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, which seems a glaring oversight, since obviously the chain at once signifies and is the signifier of Lacan’s “Objet petit a.” The pendant is literally a small ‘a,’ and as an object of desire, it also represents the anxious lack sought in subjective otherness. This to me screams peak America.

Did Lamar explicitly intend to elicit this analysis? I don’t want to underrate the dude. He did win a Pulitzer Prize. But I harbour my doubts.

Nonetheless, it doesn’t matter whether it was intentional or not. Because as any philosopher of art understands, poetry, and art more broadly, as Wimsatt and Beardsley observed in 1954 in The Verbal Icon, “is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it.”

For Lacan, the “Objet petit a” is “what falls from the subject in anxiety,” and, more simply, “the cause of desire.” For the Buddhist, it may also be the source of all suffering.

HRT, Taverne Tour, La Sotterenea, 7 February 2025

HRT perform at La Sotterenea, 7 February 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“The fundamental substance of an epoch and its unheeded impulses illuminate each other reciprocally.”
— Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament.

It is fascinating that Trump is the first sitting American president to attend a Super Bowl game, and highly symbolic to the neofascist form of politics that he represents. The Olympic Games in Berlin in 1936 were central to Hitler’s display of power, too. The objectification of bodies in Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia is as unambiguous as the marching columns of red, white, and blue, Black performers that formed and reformed around Lamar.

Doubtless Trump viewed this spectacle unfolding for his own personal amusement because Trump, with the exception of McDonalds cheeseburgers, is composed of pure unconscious desire, pure id.

L’enfant et les sortilèges, Opéra de Montréal, Théâtre Maisonneuve, 8 February 2025

The cast of L’enfant et les sortilèges onstage at Théâtre Maisonneuve, 8 February 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“A little man does not know he is little and is afraid to know.”
—Wilhelm Reich, Listen, Little Man!

America functions on the libidinal drive. It is so repressed that it represses its own repression, which is only revealed to itself in fantasy and horror and violence. It is ironic that digital language is called hypertext, because the nation’s native language, rather, is subtextual. This is why artists like Lamar layer their true messages in code, and why critics fall all over themselves to attempt to decode them as if performing some elaborate reciprocal gymnastics routine. Of course, this process only produces more anxiety in the form of surplus unfulfilled desire.

It took Trump all of a few days to reveal his overt desires upon assuming the presidency for a second time. In addition to Muntzing (or should we now call it ‘Musking’?) the government apparatus as if he were pulling out circuit boards from a HAL 9000, Trump finally verbalized his imperialist impulses to territorially expand America as he had enviously seen Vladimir V. Putin doing for three years. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Trump called the move “genius,” and doubtless, he could scarcely wait to demonstrate his own, however unstable his cognitive processes had become.

Ravel and Prokofiev with Weilerstein and Payare, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, Maison Symphonique, 12 February 2025

Alisa Weilerstein performs with the OSM at Maison Symphonique, 12 February 2025. Antoine Saito for the OSM.

“Desire begins to take shape in the margin in which demand rips away from need…”
—Jacques Lacan, Subversion of the Subject.

The Panama Canal, Greenland, and Canada are all in Trump’s crosshairs, and we would be wise to take the threat seriously, because Trump disguises his expansionist desires not as wants but as needs. America needs to absorb these sovereign territories for the sake of national security, or of economic security, or of restorative balance and retribution. These are the same excuses Putin used to invade Ukraine, and that Hitler used to invade Poland. But what they repress is the Objet petit a, that which Trump — and America — lacks, and which will never be satisfied.

Benjamin Appl & Eric Lu, Schubert’s Swan Song, Salle Bourgie, 13 February 2025

Benjamin Appl & Eric Lu onstage at Bourgie Hall, 13 February 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Of Children in Swaddling Clothes
“O cities of the sea, I behold in you your citizens, women as well as men tightly bound with stout bonds around their arms and legs by folk who will have no understanding of our speech; and you will only be able to give vent to your griefs and sense of loss of liberty by making tearful complaints, and sighs, and lamentations one to another; for those who bind you will not have understanding of your speech nor will you understand them.”
—Leonardo da Vinci

The intentional fallacy extends past poetics and penetrates into politics. There were far graver motivations, for instance, for George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan than to prevent terrorism and root out weapons of mass destruction. There were generational fixations that served as factors.

And there are much more sinister explanations behind, say, Musk’s double Nazi salute following Trump’s inauguration. Unlike Kendrick Lamar’s deliberate obscuring of overt political symbolism, Musk’s was laid bare for all to see — and immediately excused by him and his apologists as unintentional. For Lamar, what audiences had to decipher was its real message. For Musk, what they unequivocally witnessed was not.

If the time to be alarmed was not before 5 November 2024, it is certainly now, as Trump and Musk alternate at behaving on a national scale like sexually frustrated frat boys with GHB prescriptions. There is no critical or analytical skill necessary to crack their code, and no thinly veiled good intentions behind which to hide. The word ‘alarm’ comes from the French, à l’arms.

If Canada has any saving grace, it is that America, in its perpetual repression, already has a 51st state — the permanent state of anxiety.◼︎

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: Installation view of Joyce Wieland’s Flag Arrangement, 1970–71, knitted wool.

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Split Pulse: in conversation with Nassir Liselle

“When you’re coming up with a new band name, it’s kind of a hellish thing to have to take on,” says Nassir Liselle, the lead guitarist and founder member of Montreal Art Rock band DahL. “To find something that’s relevant, catchy, that hasn’t been borrowed.”

As literal as it may sound, the band name DahL is derived from the South Asian stew, typically made with lentils and a mishmash of optional ingredients, each with its own particular flavour.

“When I was younger we often ate it,” Liselle recalls. “We chose the name DahL because one of our sound techs had once described our sound as a bunch of people going in different directions. I like that idea. It’s like a different series of grooves all working together.”

For the uninitiated, DahL’s sonic aesthetic is as diverse as any soup recipe, more than the sum of its parts, incorporating elements of Trip Hop, electronic, and spoken word and fusing those into something uniquely contemporary.

The band — which consists of Liselle, Bryan Greenfield, Edward Scrimger, and William Winston — garner comparisons most frequently to a Montreal-specific blend of Dean Blunt, TV On The Radio, and Massive Attack. “I love Daddy G,” Liselle admits.

“When you’re out west you always hear about Montreal as this mythological spot.“ DahL band image provided by Nassir Liselle.

Hailing originally from Calgary, Liselle relocated with Greenfield to this city in 2013 and has since become something of a fixture within Montreal’s independent music scene.

“We’ve gone to school here,” Liselle tells me. “We’ve had more than one iteration of a musical project. We’ve built lives here, and roots, and built community.”

Montreal’s legendary sense of community is what drew Liselle and Greenfield eastward, with few outlets in Alberta’s more conservative environs for their outré creative sensibilities.

“It was hard to find venues in Calgary,” laments Liselle. “At the time it was still limited to community centres. We just wanted to be more immersed in a music scene. When you’re out west you always hear about Montreal as this mythological spot. But it’s not even a mythology, it’s very much real.”

Indeed, the achievements of bands like Suuns, agencies such as Mothland, labels like Constellation Records, and the storied Suoni per il Popolo festival called out like a siren song to Liselle.

“What Suoni has done here is so important to art and sustaining art and giving it some vitality,” he says. “The spaces and the venues they operate are so intrinsic to Montreal. They’re accessible to so many people. A lot of their efforts have been done to facilitate that. In terms of community, Suoni is deeply involved in different events and community-based organizing. They’ve done so much.”

Liselle’s musical education and influences span a wide generic spectrum — from country and folk to calypso and punk. “My mother was really, really into kind of crooner-esque stuff like Kenny Rogers, and Neil Diamond, and Graceland by Paul Simon,” he remembers. “But the first albums I ever owned were Tragic Kingdom by No Doubt, Smash by Offspring, and Dookie by Green Day.”

Liselle’s parents enrolled him in classical piano lessons at age five, and he developed an immediate aptitude for singing and songwriting. His paternal uncle in Edmonton was that city’s sole steel drum band leader, and his cousin, Janayah Ellis, in the early 2000s performed Dancehall-inflected Reggae under the moniker Souljah Fyah.

“We didn’t have a lot of money when I was growing up,” he confesses, “so I would make makeshift drum cases by putting plastic bags on cups of different sizes, trying to figure out what Tré Cool was doing. I’ve been obsessed with composing and writing songs since I can recall, but I started playing music and being more ambitious about it in my early 20s. What matters to me these days is the song. And I love a good story.”

DahL perform “Una Minutes” at CHMA Live Session in Sackville, New Brunswick, 8 November 2024.

DahL’s singular compositions come together through an inimitable dialogue between Liselle and Greenfield, its principal songwriters.

“We often will work on our own thing and bring it to each other,” Liselle explains. “I’ll be in my room working on something, or at the studio space, and Bryan will ask what’s going on and I’ll be like, ‘not yet. I can’t show you yet.’ When I’m still in my own little world is when I’m closest to the art, dumping the Lego box out and trying to make pieces of something, even before they really become songs that I think I’m ready to show, when I’m still in discussion with myself.”

With a 1990s Hollywood surf movie as an unexpected touchstone for inspiration, Liselle has just started writing what he believes, in two years’ time, will become DahL’s next album.

“In terms of songwriting, it’s going to be a lot less linear. The band might hate me for this,” he laughs, “but right now, I’m obsessed with the score to Point Break. Gary Busey sounds. I recently bought this lovely synthesizer that the American composer Mark Isham used to make that soundtrack. I’m like, that’s the sound.”

Liselle feels an affinity with Montreal’s established and emerging indie rock scene in bands such as Museums, Chasm, and Bluebird. “They’re more country-folk,” he tells me. “It’s really organic and from the heart, off the floor. And I’m a huge fan of Kristian North, formerly of the punk band Babysitter. Crooner singer-songwriter vibes. There are a lot of strong, tight-knit communities in Montreal, and it’s both a blessing and a curse. Those communities and the wealth of community that can be generated when people are together is great. But if you’re outside of it, it’s hard to access.”

Nonetheless, the Montreal music community has nurtured DahL across ten recordings, including, most recently, an EP entitled That’s It, a remix split with Scottish electronic duo Post Coal Prom Queen, and a live album called The Earl’s Hall Sessions, which the band recorded in Wakefield with saxophonist and prolific local collaborator James Goddard.

“There is constantly so much going on in Montreal. If you want to take the time and make yourself open, you can take in a lot.”◼︎

Dahl perform with LAL and Bianca Supercell at La Sotterenea 24 November 2024.

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All Summer in a Day

Shunk with Ahren Strange and Checkmate Bullseye, 6482 Saint Laurent, 11 August 2024

Shunk performs at 6482 Saint Laurent, 11 August 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Harmony is rather behind us than before. —Henri Bergson

I often think of those stereotypical pep talks that coaches give in the locker room when their team is down. Or the speech that generals make to their troops on the cusp of some important battle. Something like, “I’m not going to lie to you: you’re going to have to give this everything you’ve got — more that you ever dreamt of giving — and half of you ain’t coming back.”

I recite this speech to myself sometimes just for leaving the house.

It seems as if every quotidian operation these days has the potential to erupt into all-out war. And I hate to fight. But more than fighting, I hate to lose. Particularly in a battle I never asked for. Especially in a fight I did everything possible to avoid.

Adversity in life can strike at any time. Usually, it occurs when we least expect it, when we are least equipped to handle it, when our resistance is lowest. It’s as if the universe somehow knows when we’re down and picks that moment to kick. Then, we are faced with the choice to accept or reject it, to flee or to fight.

I propose that flight is no longer an option. There’s nowhere left to run. We are all living on the same planet, and when we are attacked where we stand, we have a duty to stand our ground. It is an obligation to defend ourselves. Because if we don’t, our attackers will attack again, and worse, they will move on to attack our neighbours, our friends, our family.

Survival is not a right. But surviving is your responsibility.

Rendez-vous sur l’Esplanade du Parc olympique, OSM, 14 August 2024

The OSM performs at l’Esplanade du Parc olympique, 14 August 2024. Antoine Saito for the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal.

If I never saw the sunshine, baby,
Then maybe I wouldn’t mind the rain —The Ronettes

The TV adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s sad science fiction short story, All Summer in a Day, traumatized me as a youngster. I recall that we watched it in junior high school. And why kids at such a tender age should be exposed to this specific depressing chronicle is now becoming clearer to me.

In the original tale, which was published in 1954 in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Venus is a planet beleaguered by constant rainstorms, with the sunshine only being visible for two hours every seven years.

The story centers on a class of Venusian children who finally get to see the sun for the first time, and an Earthling child named Margot, whom the cruel native Venusians lock in a closet, depriving her of the solar spectacle.

In the screen version, the director extends Venus’s sunless period from seven to nine years, presumably to punctuate the brutality of its moral. The ending is also altered when the children, apparently out of guilt, give Margot a bouquet of flowers that they gathered under the Venusian rays.

The message of this story is frequently interpreted simply that people behave with brutality towards those who are different from them, especially to immigrants, and towards those who have had enviable experiences. Margot came from Earth, where she routinely saw the sun, comparing its warmth to a fire in the stove.

But the underlying message is that we are compelled to behave with brutality to the great Other in order to understand the consequences of our brutal nature.

Nature is violent. When we strike out against it, nature strikes back.

Roundtable with Rito Joseph, Acouetey Junior Jocy and Leith Hamilton, Black Summer ’91, Fonderie Darling, 15 August 2024

From left: Leith Hamilton, Rito Joseph, and Acouetey Junior Jocy, Fonderie Darling 15 August 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

That which hath been is now; and that which is to be hath already been; and God requireth that which is past. —Ecclesiastes 3:15

The most powerful moment in an especially poignant symposium around Fonderie Darling’s Black Summer ’91 exhibition came when the civic leader Leith Hamilton admitted to the audience that competition within Montreal’s most marginalized communities had historically proven counterproductive.

Rivalry, for example, for grant money, or prestige, ultimately led to further rifts in already-divided communities, setting back the project of unifying and uplifting various diverse peoples within a system that colonialism and capitalism had already rigged against them.

Nothing is as useless as an angry peace activist. To arrive together we must walk together.

Fine Food Market with Nick Bendsza and Nikolas L.B., La Sotterenea, 16 August 2024

Nikolas L.B. performs at La Sotterenea, 16 August 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

All temporal goods are vanity and delusion; there must come a time when they are taken away and lost. —Solomon Ben Isaac Levi

Every time there’s an election, the familiar chorus through the campaign bluster is always the word “change.” Every candidate promises change. And yet it would be a greater challenge, verily an impossible one, to promise durability.

Change is inevitable. Indeed, the only constant in life is change. This is a cliché, a paradox that we take for granted and seldom truly stop to consider.

Life is a factory churning out change. Time’s chief function is to produce difference. It is up to human perception to ascribe value to the harvest of time, to determine whether this or that change is positive or negative — or both, or neither.

However, nature’s ruthless indifference suggests that there is no such thing as good or bad transformation. Furthermore, change as a process itself is ambivalent.

L Con with ciber1a, Ambient Music in the Park, 11 August 2024

Listeners gather for Ambient Music in the Park, 11 August 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

All the dreams and promises
That we give
We give away —INXS

Dream time differs from the experience of temporality in waking life.

We might sleep for only a few minutes and experience sprawling narrative dreams that seem to span over hours or even days.

Moreover, these dreams can feel convincingly real, altering our perceptions well into the morning, colouring our moods and shaping our interactions. What happens in a few seconds while we are asleep can have a lasting impact that resonates long after.

Which is the illusion: an instant or eternity?◼︎

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: Antoine Saito for the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal.

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Ring Them Bells

Errance, with Joël Lavoie, and Philippe Vandal, La Sotterenea, 25 April 2024

Left: Joël Lavoie; Right: Errance perform at La Sotterranea, 25 April 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“What good am I if I know and don’t do,
If I see and don’t say, if I look right through you,
If I turn a deaf ear to the thunderin’ sky,
What good am I?” —Bob Dylan

In The Divine Comedy, the well-known fourteenth-century Italian trilogy by Dante Alighieri, the poet Virgil leads the author through Hell and Purgatory.

Finally, Dante is pointed toward Paradise by Beatrice di Folco Portinari, a character symbolic of God’s loving grace.

It seems that Beatrice got the cushy job, while Virgil drew the short straw. Not only did “Bice,” as she was known amongst her squad, manage to avoid the underworld’s mud and blood and beer, but she also served as tour guide to just one — and obviously the best — of the three divine realms.

Virgil, on the other hand, had to pull a double shift in the Infernal rings and the apparently never-ending drone of Earthly life. Plus, there were no unions back then, so going on strike wasn’t an option.

Sara Mericle, Infinite Vessel, Ateliers Belleville, 22 April 2024

Sara Mericle, Net (2023), ceramic and metal. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Ye have sown much, and bring in little; ye eat, but ye have not enough; ye drink, but ye are not filled with drink; ye clothe you, but there is none warm; and he that earneth wages earneth wages to put into a bag with holes. —Haggai 1:6

Steve Bates, with Elizabeth Anka Vajagic, Mark Molnar, Timothy Herzog, and Sam Shalabi, Casa del Popolo, 29 April 2024

Steve Bates and friends perform at Casa del popolo, 29 April 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

From an ocean of noise, harmony differentiates itself.

Though noise and harmony are not mutually exclusive. Noise contains every frequency. Like sculpture, all that is necessary to reveal Heaven’s eternal song is to chisel the extraneous bits away.

Bourgie Hall’s 14th Season Launch, Bourgie Hall, 30 April 2024

Charles Richard-Hamelin performs at Bourgie Hall, 30 April 2024. Frédéric Faddoul for Bourgie Hall.

“THE TEMPERAMENT — MIDDLE — Circling and circling, I mold my temperament, urging the unruly into balance. Each interval must blend with the next interval, which must blend with the next … and back to the beginning. In the center we make a secret well together, this piano and I, to drown the leftovers. It is Nowhere.” —Anita T. Sullivan, The Seventh Dragon.

Beethoven’s Poetic Fourth Piano Concerto, Maria João Pires with The Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, Maison Symphonique, 24 April 2024

Maria João Pires performs with the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, 24 April 2024 at Maison Symphonique. Antoine Saito for the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal.

The clavier-style keyboard is a standard that brought music to the masses.

Yes, it’s a compromise. There aren’t any notes between its twelve tones, and there is a sense of bureaucracy about sitting down at what is essentially a musical desk, typing out a tune.

But the gift of portability and universality that the keyboard has given to the world is worth orders more than its conciliatory limitations. There is no other instrument that can bring a place to life, to fill a space with joy, wonder, and magic, quite like a piano.

A piano in the right hands is just enough of a music machine, no more and no less than perfect.

Quiet Night, 163 Av. Van Horne, 26 April 2024

Xander Simmons and friends perform at 163 Av. Van Horne, 26 April 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Happy are those who have what they need and no more.” —Saul Ha-Levi Morteira

In a time of war, famine, and death, it is vanity to seek out greater abundance when others are struggling for basic survival. But if one pursues only bare necessity, they will invariably find more than what they were looking for.

Such was the case last Friday evening when I attended what was billed as a “Quiet Night,” organized by Illy Duval in a cozy loft space on Van Horne. I arrived to find the room packed to the rafters with standing room only, except for a seat on the armrest of a battered old couch.

« Confortable? » asked the girl sitting next to me, smiling.

« Pas pire, » I replied, my legs awkwardly splayed akimbo.

Though I felt claustrophobic and couldn’t help but think, with scores of burning candles inserted precariously into empty bottles, of the Ghost Ship warehouse fire, I stayed and immensely enjoyed the music and the scene for as long as possible and ducked outside during an intermission.

Beneath the Van Horne overpass, I watched a group of skateboarders smoking weed and doing ollies and rail slides and was grateful for having had a reason to leave — both my house, and the gig I’d come to see.

Skateboarders underneath the Van Horne overpass, 26 April 2024. Filmed for NicheMTL.

Sandeep Bhagwati, How to inhabit these different temporalities?, Museum of Fine Arts, 21 April 2024

A patron rests in the contemporary art gallery of the Museum of Fine Arts, 21 April 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“People don’t know what they want any more. People are only sure about what they don’t want. The current processes are processes of rejection, of disaffection, of allergy.” —Jean Baudrillard, “The Violence of Indifference.”

The tyranny of mediocrity despises competition, finding every possible means to suppress it. The resistance of excellence, however, welcomes competition as the essence that makes the good better, the great greater still.

Lolina, with Man Made Hill, Tenses, and Please, Brasserie Beaubien, 27 April 2024

Catherine Debard performs as Tenses at Brasserie Beaubien, 27 April 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

We might imagine Hell as the past, Purgatory as the present, and Heaven as the future.

Certainly, there is an implied chronological teleology to history, where life is supposed to get better with time, progress bringing more knowledge as some ultimate form of truth emerges victorious.

This process appears to have reversed. Time is running backwards as the present reiterates Hellish precedents.

Alice De Visscher & Evamaria Schaller, Le Centre CLARK & Le lieu, Ateliers Belleville, 2 May 2024

Alice De Visscher & Evamaria Schaller perform at Ateliers Belleville, 2 May 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Alchemy is most commonly conceived as the transformation of lead into gold. But alchemy according to philosophers is understood as a spiritual process of transformation, embracing those parts of ourselves that we might think of as weaknesses and converting them into strengths.

Gold is the most precious of all earthly metals, superconductive, malleable yet solid, ambivalent, associated with the sun, the celestial body where universal life originates. The Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung wrote, “Just as the physical sun lightens and warms the universe, so, in the human body, there is in the heart a sunlike arcanum from which life and warmth stream forth.”

Springtime represents the return of the sun, and thus accelerates matters of the heart.

Spring Symposium, Librairie Saint-Henri Books, 25 April 2024

Patrons attend the Spring Symposium at Librairie Saint-Henri Books, 25 April 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

My idea of Heaven is a place surrounded by all words, where no thought or feeling is misunderstood, where there is total communication, a way to say everything.

My idea of Heaven is also a place where there are no words, where nothing requires understanding because all is already known, and language is an obsolete technology.◼︎

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

NicheMTL is Montreal’s independent source for this city’s most niche arts and culture. If you love what you’re reading, please consider subscribing.

Cover image: Sara Mericle, Sun Bleach (2023), porcelain and glaze.

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