Tag Archives: Le Vivier

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The Audience is Listening

Hush, Phasing (Simone Records), 4 March 2026

I was terrified the first time I heard the THX ident as a kid in a movie theatre. The discordant phasing effect of assorted synthesized tones and timbres coming through Surround speakers at increasingly high sound pressure levels was unsettling until I realized it was just a trailer and not an air raid siren.

Known as the “Deep Note,” there weren’t any other sounds like it at the time, so shockingly outlandish and alien. Those were the days of the MGM lion, Universal’s jingle, and 20th Century Fox’s iconic fanfare that dated back to the beginning of talking pictures.

The term “schizophonia,” which R. Murray Schafer coined, describes the split between audio and its source — that is, not immediately being able to discern the origin or authenticity of a sound. 1980s movie audiences easily recognized brass and timpani and had seen lions roaring before and knew what kinds of sounds to anticipate. THX’s Deep Note was truly schizophonic because it was impossible to conceive of and visualize what might naturally produce such a sound. It was neither orchestral nor acoustic, but rather, electric and decidedly digital.

Following the THX model, it became commonplace for corporations to commission such synthetic sounds as brand identities. Think of Intel and Apple, Windows and Nokia. These were not traditional jingles. They were effectively synthetic logos rendered sonically and turned into immediate targets for spoof and satire.

The scholar and composer Paul Théberge in his book Any Sound You Can Imagine describes the process by which sound itself has become commodified. “The subjection of the entire natural world to the order of production,” Théberge writes, finds “its expression in modernist music.” Yet, more than Edgard Varèse or Karlheinz Stockhausen, it was a little-known computer engineer called James A. Moorer who underwrote the wholesale industrialization of sound design.

NicheMTL Soirée with Roger Tellier-Craig, SonoLux, 24 February 2026

A person wearing a striped shirt stands behind a wooden DJ booth, surrounded by vinyl records arranged on shelves in a dimly lit room. The backdrop features orange lighting, creating a vibrant atmosphere.
Roger Tellier-Craig DJs at Subterra Lounge 24 February 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

When people go out, they generally like to hear music. This is why many bars and nightclubs hire bands and DJs or at least have a Spotify subscription (or if they’re very, very cool, a six-disc CD changer.) But people also like to talk and hear each other talking. To be able to do both is a big ask. The architects of SonoLux, a new boutique hotel in Old Montreal, have figured it out. The trick is to have an amazing sound system, sound-absorbing furnishing materials, and a visible decibel meter.

The basement lounge at SonoLux, called Subterra, brings together incredible hi-fi audio gear installed by Jojo Flores of Café Gotsoul and acoustic-minded design to create the perfect lounge, plush and inviting, in which patrons can listen to music and hear themselves, too. So, NicheMTL held our first party of the year there. Thanks to everyone who came, and thanks especially to Roger Tellier-Craig who brought his impeccable musical taste to share with all in attendance. A rare treat on a Tuesday night.

Mozart and the Elegance of Angela Hewitt, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, Maison Symphonique, 26 February 2026

A female pianist in a bright red dress smiles confidently while performing at a grand piano in front of an orchestral ensemble.
The Canadian pianist Angela Hewitt performs with the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal at Maison Symphonique, 26 February 2026. Antoine Saito for the OSM.

The author and piano tuner Anita T. Sullivan in her poetic book entitled The Seventh Dragon argues that the invention of the piano around 1700 introduced “keyboardness” as an essential feature of Western musical intonation. In my book Mad Skills, I refined Sullivan’s idea, coining the term “Claviocentrism” to define the cultural logic of equal temperament, or what we now understand as the standard 12-tone musical scale.

Since 1997 (and the immense popularity of Cher’s hit “Believe”) we have effectively erased any trace of microtonality in popular music. But in the 1790s, dissonance was a desirable characteristic of claviocentric composition.

Were Mozart to time-travel to 2026 and hear Angela Hewitt perform one of his piano sonatas, he might cover his ears not only from the deafening volume of the instrument but more so at the mathematically near-perfect balance of the modern piano’s frequencies and harmonies.

Contrechamps & McGill Contemporary Music Ensemble, Defining Space / Semaine du Neuf, Multimedia Room, Schulich School of Music, 27 February 2026

A group of musicians standing on stage after a performance, with audience members applauding in front. The musicians are dressed in black and include string and brass instruments, set against a modern concert hall backdrop with purple lighting.
The McGill Contemporary Music Ensemble performs at the Schulich School of Music, 27 February 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

When analogous notes are played simultaneously, listeners can observe the space between them as a phenomenon called “beats.” These kinds of beats are not made with drums — or Dr. Dre’s headphones — although they do demonstrate a rhythmic character. These kinds of beats are illustrated by regularly occurring modulations in amplitude at various frequency ranges.

For most of us accustomed to frequencies sounding “in tune,” beats can be annoying. The closer two notes are to each other, the more annoying the beats seem to be. But beats have their own distinctive qualities that we might consider interesting or even pleasing.

When samplers were gaining popularity and electronic dance music was concurrently emerging, a phenomenon occurred that began as a mistake and became an aesthetic. If a drum sample was accidentally triggered twice, it produced a characteristic phasing effect. Most electronic musicians learned to avoid the phasing beats phenomenon by ensuring that drum samples were triggered only once. But others, like Aphex Twin, turned the mistake into a style, as evidenced in the song Phlange Phace. Listen to how diverse occurrences of the rhythm either attenuate or accentuate certain frequency ranges.

The Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir Celebrates Arvo Pärt, Maison Symphonique, 15 February 2026

A choir in formal attire performing on stage, with a conductor and audience applauding in a modern concert hall.
Conductor Tõnu Kaljuste leads the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir at Maison Symphonique, 15 February 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

The idiom “preaching to the choir” means to try to convince a group of people who already agree with you and is commonly used in the pejorative as equivalent to “wasted effort.” But beginning from a place of agreement is where significant changes can sometimes occur, even to the most recalcitrant of beliefs. Common ground is the point of origin, not the destination.

Religious choirs are interesting because they obscure the signifiers they intend to elucidate, sometimes to the point of unintelligibility. “Indeed, singing is bad communication,” the scholar Mladen Dolar writes in his book, A Voice and Nothing More. Still, singing redoubles the signifier, multiplying its symbolic weight, ensuring that each chorus member is “on the same page.”◼︎

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: Leonard Slatkin conducts Angela Hewitt and the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, 26 February 2026. Antoine Saito for the OSM.

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Trick Rider

Sonya Derviz, Hover, Bradley Ertaskiran, 22 January – 7 March 2026

Sonia Derviz, Near, 2025. Oil and Charcoal on Linen, 200 x 240 cm. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.
—I Peter 5:8

Ghosts don’t have to be dead to haunt us.

The OED’s earliest definitions of the verb “to haunt” have nothing to do with unseen or immaterial forces. The first listed Middle English meanings, dating from around 1230 to 1588, simply denote: “To practice habitually, familiarly, or frequently; to use or employ habitually or frequently.”

Consequently, our habits haunt us. The things we use, consume, ingest, imbibe, and inhale haunt us. Haunting is a variation of recognition and frequency that helps us navigate the world.

Especially breath is associated with ghosts. One of ghost’s many synonyms, the word “Spirit,” is defined primarily as, “the animating or vital principle in humans and animals; that which gives life to the body, in contrast to its purely material being; the life force, the breath of life.”

Ghosts are merely traces, either material or immaterial, that evoke some living presence. Any persevering impression can be ghostly. A hair in the sink. The smell lingering on a pillowcase. A shadow. An echo. A tendril of smoke hovering in thin air. That which is irresolute and unresolved; that which is sensed but cannot be grasped; that which is stubbornly persistent; that which is more than nothing, but barely; that which is discerned and cannot be ignored.

Ghosts frequent and use and practice haunting in order to cheat death and endure.

Betty Pomerleau, Half Hitch, Pangée, 29 January – 7 March 2026

Betty Pomerleau, gallery view, Pangée. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Haunting, then, can be construed as a failed mourning. It is about refusing to give up the ghost or — and this can sometimes amount to the same thing — the refusal of the ghost to give up on us. The spectre will not allow us to settle into/ for the mediocre satisfactions one can glean in a world governed by capitalist realism.”
—Mark Fisher, “Not Giving Up the Ghost”

A possible future sliding out of view is an example of a living ghost. A broken promise. A missed opportunity. Unused potential. Unrealized immanence. We mourn some and celebrate others.

Because there are infinite lost futures, we live constantly amongst their ghosts. Frayed strands and knotted threads, they accumulate like clusters of dust and periodically must be swept away.

But still, some traces remain.

Totem Électrique XIX, Salle Bleue | Edifice Wilder, 29 January 2026

Jean-François Laporte performs at Totem Électrique, Espace Bleue | Edifice Wilder, 29 January 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“This rhythm is your world. It is the world as you contract it, almost in the sense in which you contract a condition, and exactly in the sense you contract a habit.”
—Brian Massumi, “Tell Me Where Your Pain Is”

The oscillations of resemblance and change that our world undergo constitute our experience of time. Think of the alternating periods of power of opposing political parties in the United States.

The modern neoliberal era began with Ronald Reagan’s ascension to the White House, followed by George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, and the first Trump tenure. Democrats Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden provided a contrapuntal sense of forward momentum otherwise known as progress to these Republicans’ periodic backward-facing impulses.

Trump’s slogan, Make America Great Again, is the most explicit appeal to a regressive cultural impetus, promising amelioration through reversal, better living through resurrection, the ultimate haunting. The problem is that the past cannot be reintroduced into the future without fundamentally rupturing both past and future.

Similarly in Quebec, the spectre of sovereignty in 2026 summons a noxious rhythmic nostalgia to 1980 and 1995, punctuated by gestures to Réné Lévesque, Jacques Parizeau, and Lucien Bouchard. I claim that Parti Québécois leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon’s suggestions of a third referendum are less about making Quebec independent and more about resuscitating a mythic history that never came to pass, moving into the future by rewriting the past.

That these oscillations are decreasing in frequency in Quebec and increasing in the United States suggests an arrythmia in the heart of global progress.

Matthew Feyld, Blouin | Division, 30 January – 21 March 2026

Matthew Feyld, Untitled, CP-04-26, 2025/2026, Acrylic and pigment on linen over panel, 20.3 x 20.3 cm. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Yet here’s a spot.”
—Lady Macbeth, The Tragedy of Macbeth

I once lived in a hundred-year-old house whose interior must have been repainted every ten or so years. In various places on the stairs, cracks and layers in the paint became visible. For instance, a pale pink gave way to whitewashed teal, and on top, a chocolate brown. Every decade was represented by a radically different choice in colour. My experience of time swelled whilst living in this house because I was constantly made aware of its history.

The house is gone now, demolished during Covid. And yet, I recall the thickness and specific order of these layers of coloured paint.

The Orchestra According to Duke Ellington and Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, Maison Symphonique, 22 January 2026

Hankyeol Yoon conducts the OSM at Maison Symphonique, 22 January 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“And if you’re on a horse trick riding in the mud and rain,
Can’t expect me to watch or ask me to explain.”
—Gord Downie, “Trick Rider”

It is no secret that I was once an unrepentant drinker of alcohol and drug user. These habits I imagined constituted fundamental facets of my personality. I used alcohol and drugs to assert my selfhood in opposition to the status quo. Normal, I thought, was boring. My experience of reality unfolded parallel to the experiences and realities of sober people. These substances were undoubtedly spirits that haunted me, although it is debatable whether I was the ghost or its nightly host.

Whenever I contemplated giving up drugs and drink, I feared that I would at once lose my singular sense of character, that I would suddenly become less interesting, more uniform, less unique. ‘How will I ever be able to socialize / be creative / stand out from the crowd without intoxicants?’ I wondered to myself.

Now that some distance exists between me and those habits, I ask myself the opposite question: How was I ever able to socialize / be creative / stand out with them?◼︎

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: From left: Megan Bradley, Tiffany Le, and Jean-Michael Seminaro documenting Sonya Derviz’s Hover at Bradley Ertaskiran, 23 January 2026.

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The Accidental Tourist

Patrick Watson and the Orchestre FILMharmonique, Maison Symphonique, 21 November 2024

Patrick Watson and the Orchestre FILMharmonique receive a standing ovation after their performance at Maison Symphonique, 21 November 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

In the filmmaker Luca Guadagnino’s adaptation of William S. Burroughs’s 1985 novel Queer, Daniel Craig, of James Bond and Belvedere Vodka advert fame, stars as Burroughs’s protagonist, Bill Lee, an ageing junkie absconding in 1950s Mexico City to avoid a possession-related prison term in the U.S.

Burroughs based Lee on a thinly veiled version of himself at a time when drug use and homosexuality were widely considered outlaw behaviours. Nowadays, there is nothing more normie. Burroughs, were he alive today, may have been shocked with these twists of fate.

Shifting social mores notwithstanding, Guadagnino wanted the film to have an authentic aesthetic, especially in terms of its costuming. According to a recent New York Times article, all of the actors’ greasy apparel worn onscreen was of the period, sourced from vintage clothing boutiques and flea markets, with the costume designer, Jonathan Anderson, creative director of luxury brand Loewe, unearthing a treasure trove of 1950s underwear right here in Montreal. Because of course there is a Montrealer harboring a peculiar obsession with historical skivvies.

“An addict has little regard for his image,” Burroughs wrote in the novel’s introduction. Ironically though, the image makers here had to devote outsize attention to details which the story’s real-life subjects themselves ignored.

Distressed clothing has proven fashionable now for decades, with torn jeans and threadbare sweaters from high fashion houses like Balenciaga and Saint Laurent commanding higher market and cultural value than crisp new garments ever could. The 2001 film Zoolander satirized this with its hilarious plotline of an haute couture brand, Derelicte.

“The Ugly American” defines a stereotype of Americans travelling abroad — obnoxious, arrogant, ignorant, and unwashed. One of my favourite Burroughs lines comes from the David Cronenberg adaptation of Naked Lunch in which Hans, the German Black Meat manufacturer, observes, “You know how Americans are. They love to travel. But they only want to meet other Americans and talk about how hard it is to find a decent hamburger.” Two-time president Donald Trump himself has been known to extoll the virtues of “great American food.”

Immigration has become the center of heated political discourse on both sides of the 49th parallel, the subject of tariffs and potential trade wars. But it must be said that of all the immigrant nationalities to Canada, Americans are the grimiest.

Dexter Barker-Glenn, Soul Manifest, Espace Maurice, 30 November — 21 December 2024

Curator Marie Segolene and the artist Dexter Barker-Glenn at Espace Maurice, 30 November 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

When I toured Cuba in 2007, Fidel Castro was still its leader. Americans were not permitted to visit the country. George W. Bush was still the worst U.S. president there had ever been.

Except for political propaganda, there was no Western style advertising anywhere. No Coca-Cola. No Apple billboards.

However, entering the capital, a gigantic mural relief of Che Guevara was visible against the side of Cuba’s Ministry of the Interior building in Havana’s Revolution Plaza.

Alberto Korda’s image has become a logo of sorts for revolution the globe over — so much so that Guevara’s visage is deflated of semiotic import, trapped in a t-shirt rather than elevated as an icon for social change. This is precisely where capitalism wants him.

Guevara wrote, “in moments of great peril, it is easy to muster a powerful response with moral incentives. Retaining their effectiveness, however, requires the development of a consciousness in which there is a new scale of values.”

Let’s call it “Acid Communism.”

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Habitat Sonore, Centre PHI, 21 November — 19 January 2025

Whenever I enter into an artist’s oeuvre late in their career, I feel like a dilettante. Such is the case with Nick Cave, whose music I was always peripherally aware of, but was never central to my experience. Being immersed in Cave’s latest album, Wild God, is enough to bring anyone up to speed and convert the most ardent non-believer.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor, MTelus, 26 November 2024

Godspeed You! Black Emperor perform at MTelus, 26 November 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Prior to the coronavirus crisis, I frequently fell ill whenever I travelled.

In 2018 and 2019, I attended the Unsound Festival in Krakow, Poland. And each time I returned home sicker than the sickest I had ever been. There must have been some wild Cold War-era bacteria floating around in one of those moody and disused old Soviet warehouses.

Everyone seemed to catch the bug, too. We joked that it was “Rave Flu.” But doubtless, festival settings where attendees are over-partied and under-slept, improperly nourished and potentially intoxicated, are cesspools of contagion and disease.

When it comes to convalescence, there is no place like home. Carl Rodd, Harry Dean Stanton’s character in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, relays a wise sentiment regarding tourism: “I’ve already gone places,” Rodd declares. “I just want to stay where I am.”

Paramirabo & Thin Edge New Music Collective, Chamberdestroy, Conservatoire de Montréal, 29 November 2024

Paramirabo and Thin Edge New Music Collective perform at Conservatoire de musique de Montréal, 29 November 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“If we choose to recondition our interpretation system, reality becomes fluid, and the scope of what can be real is enhanced without endangering the integrity of reality.”
―Carlos Castaneda, The Art of Dreaming.

“[[ ]] Level-1 or world space is an anthropomorphically scaled, predominantly vision-configured, massively multi-slotted reality system that is obsolescing very rapidly.
Garbage time is running out.
Can what is playing you make it to level-2?”
—Nick Land, “Meltdown.”

The gamification of lived experience is a common theme of the postmodern multiverse narrative. Late 1990s movies like Open Your Eyes, eXistenZ, and of course the David Fincher film The Game presuppose that we must play in order to participate in reality. Win, lose, or draw.

A generation prior, the comedian Bob Newhart set a precedent with the brilliant series finale of his eponymous sitcom in which Bob Hartley, Newhart’s character from “The Bob Newhart Show,” his previous programme, awakens to discover that the antecedent eight years — and an entire TV series — had all been an elaborate dream.

Anachronistically, the Newhart writers could have just as easily conceived of the Chinese Waiter’s last line in Cronenberg’s eXistenz.

“Hey… aren’t we still in the game?”◼︎

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: Dexter Barker-Glenn, Spectre (2024), Blotting paper, hydrochloric acid, potassium chloride, alpha amylase, protease, lactase, copper. 7.5 x 7.5″. 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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All Dressed

Point to Infinity: in conversation with An Laurence 安媛

“In the end, you are never really able to truly merge the two sides of yourself,” says An Laurence, the Montreal-based experimental artist. “They can coexist. But to find inner unity within yourself is also a quest you’ll never be touching.”

Laurence is describing the title of her recording, Almost Touching, named for the mathematical concept called ‘asymptote’: a straight line which stretches towards a curve without ever intersecting.

It’s theoretical geometry, says Laurence, “and also very interesting in terms of the philosophy of art.” But it could just as easily refer to the literal conditions of the post-covid era, in which we might feel reluctant to resume physical contact with the world. To Laurence, it ultimately indicates our ideas of nature, the elusive character of time, the eternal now.

“I realized that all the pieces on Almost Touching are about getting closer to an answer but never really being able to grasp it,” she says. “Like being in the dark and starting to see the form of something, and as soon as you think you understand the concept or the idea, it changes. Actually, you’re never able to grasp whatever you’re searching for.”

An Laurence is equally enigmatic as an artist. At 28, she’s a graduate of the programme in Arts and Technology at Université de Montréal. There, she studied creative programming, sound art, video art, and coding. She is also a curator, an audiovisual media producer, and a classically trained guitarist. Though classical guitar may not be the instrument that immediately comes to mind in today’s experimental music world.

“My first thought,” says Laurence, “was that even if I’m the best classical guitarist in contemporary music, I will not get so much work because it’s very niche. So I thought that I should record the pieces that really impacted me in the last few years, to show what it could be.”

That dedication paid off. Laurence’s courageous 2022 double album, Almost Touching, was lauded by au courant publications Foxy Digitalis and Musicworks Magazine.

Most recently, the contemporary music centre Le Vivier granted Laurence carte blanche to program an event entitled Do You Have a Minute? which gathers together the works of five avant-classical composers. Laurence specifically chose each piece in the concert because of its connection to time. “Music,” she says, “can make our perception of time really different.”

On paper, the titular work is a percussion piece with electronic sounds. But its peculiar aesthetic elements make it more than just a conceptual work. The composer, Thais Montanari, wrote Do You Have a Minute? for a soloist “so that the performer is stuck in a clock,” as Laurence explains.

“It’s a piece for a solo performer who walks in a circle twelve times around these objects, which are time markers. So there’s a metronome, there’s electronic timers, Newton’s Cradles — something that will make percussive, repetitive sound. The idea is about how to walk in the clock. It’s also about information overload — constantly wanting to know everything, and the obsession with time. Counting every second.”

Laurence’s work encourages us to engage in multiple competing temporalities at once, hearing fast and slow. She commissioned the Montreal pianist Gabo Champagne to compose a work around the idea of moss. Entitled Bryophytes, the piece interrogates our notions of acceleration.

“I had just finished reading Gathering Moss,” says Laurence. “It’s a book about moss, and it really mixes a scientific way of storytelling with philosophy. So I was talking to Gabo about this, and how long it takes mosses to exist, and how much effort it takes to exist, and how they’ve been there so long before us. Bryophytes is a piece for piano, percussion, guitar, and voice, but there’s some theatrical elements also, some performing texts, performing actions. It’s all about mixing beauty with the absurd. We are running so much and we don’t really know why.”

Photo: Studio Valaquia

Laurence is concerned with the cycles of nature and what constitutes the natural. “Everything in nature is very fascinating,” she says. “That’s where we all belong — we belong with those things that feed us and the things that allow us to live. In the city, we’re kind of far from it because everything we consume is coming from elsewhere. Especially during the pandemic, people — including me — started to want plants in our houses to feel better. But to look at those plants, I was like, they do not belong here. I knew there were lots of people going super intense on learning about the plants: what pH you needed, what kind of water, what kind of soil. And that’s all very interesting. But if you look outside, nobody cares about the actual ecosystem. The trees that we have, they are the plants that actually impact us. They’re there all the time and they impact the land we live on. All the flowers, all the weeds, all the bushes, all the mosses — everything. Those are the things we actually are a part of.”

Laurence’s creative vision borders upon the transcendental, her outlook engaged as much with philosophy as with beauty, as much with space as with time, and as much about existing in the present moment as a commitment to eternity.

“What we are is never really ours,” Laurence muses, “because everything we’re made of — like our bodies — comes from other people before. And when we’re going to die it’s going to go away. Not only our physical bodies, but also our knowledge, our thoughts, our traditions. All of this is not from us, but it’s going to pass through us. Culture is something that’s living, and something that’s living always wants to go on living. The culture that we carry wants to live and it uses bodies and beings like us to travel through time and space, to not cease to exist. If we didn’t have that heritage, would we be able to go through time?”◼︎

Do You Have a Minute? runs 19 & 20 April 2023 at La Chapelle Scènes Contemporaines.

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All Dressed

Permanent Waves: in conversation with Keiko Devaux

“The aesthetic theme throughout this opera is noise,” says Keiko Devaux over the crackling airwaves of a cellular telephone.

The Montreal-based composer and award winner, most recently, of the Juno for classical composition for her 2022 piece, Arras, is telling me about her latest production, a major new operatic work entitled L’Écoute du perdu, to be premiered across three performances at the Darling Foundry in February.

“It starts with the idea of turning a radio on. You’re lost in noise — the noise of space, the noise of silence — looking for a signal, and you tune into this signal.”

Devaux’s opera, co-presented with Group Le Vivier and Musique 3 Femmes, is something of a supergroup, too, a veritable who’s who of Quebec’s best and brightest talents, with mise-en-scène by the celebrated contemporary theatre director Marie Brassard; the Paramirabo Ensemble performing Devaux’s score under the conductor Jennifer Szeto’s direction; texts commissioned from the authors Daniel Canty, Michaël Trahan, and Kaie Kellough; sung by soprano soloists Sarah Albu, Frédérika Petit-Homme, and baritone Raphaël Laden-Guindon; Lucie Bazzo on lighting conception; scenography by Antonin Sorel; and with the legendary filmmaker and Godspeed You! Black Emperor member Karl Lemieux providing video imagery.

L’Écoute du perdu draws together a star-studded company and wrangling them is itself an impressive task.

“It’s my first big, ambitious, and really high-concept work,” says Devaux. “And being surrounded by such amazing artistic collaborators — I really mean it, sincerely. I was like, wouldn’t it be great if we could get these people? And then we got them.”

Devaux initially conceived of L’Écoute du perdu on the concept of wireless telecommunication, the rhythms of memory, and memory’s distortion via repetition.

“My whole doctoral thesis is about memory and its artistic and actual applications,” says Devaux, “so this is a theme that’s been running through quite a few of my pieces. My music, aesthetically, is very immersive. I knew immediately that I didn’t want a story, a linear story. I didn’t want a narrative. I wanted it to be based around different treatments of the voice, and because it was going to be based on memory, I didn’t want it to be one individual’s memory; I wanted it to have more of a universal appeal, a more fantastical appeal.”

L’Écoute du perdu is inspired in part by Devaux’s fascination with the Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi’s most famous innovation: radio. “I’m kind of an amateur science geek,” Devaux admits. “I read about brains and different phenomena in nature and stuff, and it’s very evocative for me, musically. And I’d come across the story of Marconi, who believed that sound waves never die, and perhaps one day we’ll invent a machine that can tap into these sound waves. It was such an evocative idea and I thought, this needs to be a large-scale work.”

A delightful incongruity exists, though, between Marconi’s wireless radio waves, which are ephemeral, and our understanding of memory, a more permanent, enduring repository for the entirety of human experience. L’Écoute du perdu’s experimental form and structure emphasize this tension with at times bilingual and at times non-lingual passages repeated, looped, stretched, and their corresponding musical movements varied through reiteration and distortion.

“When I was reading about memory, I came across the idea of episodic memories, or ‘flashbulb’ memories, as they’re often called in pop culture,” Devaux elaborates. “Memories have strong emotional links to them. We play them back a lot because they help develop a sense of self. And the more you play back a memory, the more you distort it. And I thought, that’s so beautiful — and sad — this idea that the things that are most emotionally important to us and self-identifying to us are the things that become most distorted. I mean, we remember them vividly. We remember the smell of something, or how something felt. But then you forget what colour something was, or how many people were in the room.”

Yet Devaux’s work is memorable, indeed, and a packed house on opening night concurs. L’Écoute du perdu is a world-class compositional achievement adroitly weaving acoustic and amplified strands and sonic and visual elements together into striking aesthetic unity.  

“It’s not like an ‘oh, you killed my father’ kind of opera,” Devaux explains. “It’s a more subtle thing we’re working with. You are connecting to a sound that’s invisible in the air. You’re remembering something. It’s evocative. I didn’t really want coherence in a traditional way. I didn’t want to serve an audience a story. I wanted it to evoke a really clear emotional arc or narrative, and for there to be a tension between the audience and the piece in terms of understanding. I wanted for it to be really focussed on sensation and emotion, but not in an overly acted way. Just in the way the words and the music are treated. And I wanted it to have a high visual impact. It’s taken on all these different dimensions as all these different people come on and dialogue about it and add their artistic expertise. So, voilà!”

In spite of her magic touch, Devaux is gracious and seems especially indebted when discussing the collaborations and meaningful connections she has cultivated.

“There’s a difference,” says Devaux, “between people just doing a gig, doing it well and professionally, and people really being invested in the piece. And there’s this real feeling that everyone’s really invested. There was a lot of thought put into our conversations right away — talking a lot about the concept with the singers. Voice is so personal. I don’t know about you, but I can tell, even if someone’s amazing when they’re singing on a piece that they don’t really love, or that they don’t even really get. These three singers get it.”

That unmistakable sense of being tuned into another wavelength is at the heart of Devaux’s work. “Heightened emotion brings this sort of distortion,” she says, “and yet it brings at the same time this really intense sensorial vividness.”

Devaux takes a beat, laughing. “And I thought, oh, this is kind of how I feel about my music.”◼︎

Cover photo credit: Robin P. Gould

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