Tag Archives: Montreal

All Dressed

Throwing Shapes: in conversation with Mathieu Arsenault

“’In the beginning was the Word …’ provokes one to ask, where was the image?”
—Bill Viola, “The Sound of One Line Scanning”

The typically tedious visual experience of attending an electronic music performance produces a perennial problem for audiences: what to do with one’s eyes.

For some reason, we find guitarists and drummers, keyboardists and vocalists striking poses and pulling faces more interesting to look at than producers and DJs twiddling knobs and riding faders.

Various contemporary artists have attempted to address this problem more or less spectacularly. Amon Tobin plays from within a three-dimensional cityscape. Tim Hecker disappears into a cloud of fluorescent fog. Autechre turn the lights off entirely. Most pedestrian musicians usually just project some sort of screensaver-like images to distract spectators from the fact that the cake is already baked in the proverbial oven.

But not Seulement. The pseudonym of the Montreal-based Mathieu Arsenault, Seulement embellishes his live modular synthesizer sets by cutting shapes — quite literally.

While Arsenault is busy behind a bank of machines, doing whatever it is that he does, hypnotic geometric patterns pulse and flicker away on a large screen, assailing his audience’s retinas with abstract, rapid-fire, stop-motion animation that simultaneously casts him in a glowing and dramatic silhouette. The solution is seizure-inducing and unsettling and ultimately satisfying.

“The strobing effect is not digital,” Arsenault explains to me over coffee on a recent Thursday afternoon. “It’s made by hand. So, let’s say I move a triangle. I move an actual cardboard cutout triangle on a light tablet. And then I use that animation as a guide to make the same thing but with another triangle shaped hole, the same size. And then I alternate them. So, the positive/negative flickering effect is made by hand.”

I am fascinated to learn about Arsenault’s handcrafted process in producing these captivating images, having been impressed by his audiovisual show, entitled Bricolage Architecture, presented in late March at one of Ateliers Belleville’s renowned ECHOS nights.

Young stars are born in explosions of light. And there was a collective sense that evening that we were all witnessing some extraordinary interstellar supernova.

Seulement performs at Ateliers Belleville 27 March 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

In person, Arsenault, 42, has an unassuming, unpretentious vibe, shy and polite amongst the caffeinated braggadocio of Caffè Italia’s regular crowd. Still, he adopts a proper Rockstar stance on stage, to the approval of his growing legion of admirers.

It may be that his homespun visuals relieve the pressure of being publicly scrutinized. Nonetheless, Arsenault projects a measured conviction in his ideas and work both as a musician and visual artist, neither under- nor overconfident, but refreshingly commensurate with his manifold talents.

“I’m really happy about this show,” he beams. “It’s a new direction for me. It’s the first time I use video for a show. It’s also the first time I don’t sing on stage. The previous show I toured (for the album EX PO) instead was synchronized with lights and had more vocal performance elements. But the more instrumental music of Bricolage Architecture is going to be on my next record. It’s the new chapter. I’m really excited about it. If it’s more exciting for me, it’s more exciting for the people listening.”

The music side of Arsenault’s routine consists of syncopated analogue synthesizer oscillations constructed with a Pop compositional sensibility. “They are definitely songs,” says Arsenault.

“For this project, I wanted to explore electronic music without having to rely on my voice as the main focus. It was a challenge for me because all I ever did was write songs. Even though I don’t sing on top of it, they’re still songs. That’s how I structure music in my head.”

Person sitting on stone steps wearing a red denim jacket and black leggings, looking thoughtfully to the side, with a storefront in the background.
“We project perfection on machine-made things. And in opposition, we consider the body imperfect.” Mathieu Arsenault photographed for NicheMTL.

Arsenault grew up on Montreal’s South Shore, drawing comics and listening predominantly to metal before drifting in his late teens towards electronic music. He played in a band called Technical Kidman which combined live and preprogrammed elements that provide an early clue to his solo work.

“It was kind of a weird name for the band,” he tells me, “because it sounds funny, but the music was so not funny. It’s hard to perform electronic music. It’s not ready out-of-the-box. With that band, we always wanted to avoid using a click. We had a very elastic feel.”

The “extra-dimensional” Montreal record label Mothland booked Technical Kidman for their first Distorsion Festival, and Arsenault has been associated with that collective ever since. He cites three other pivotal moments that guided him on his current trajectory.

“I saw Radiohead when they performed the Kid A / Amnesiac tour,” he recalls. “And that’s when I realized that maybe I didn’t want to make metal music. And after that, it’s when I listened to Godspeed You! Black Emperor. I bought Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada. I was 18 or 19 years old and I was like, ‘oh, I didn’t know you could make music like that.’ I had never heard anything like that. And then a bit later I saw Ryoji Ikeda perform at Elektra. At that moment, my band was making music and touring a bit. But when I saw that, I remember telling myself, ‘Right now, I’m not doing this kind of stuff. But one day, I want to do these kinds of audiovisual performances.’”

Arsenault’s act will please fans of Tony Conrad and Alessandro Cortini, Paul Sharits and Caterina Barbieri. The rub is that interesting imagery doesn’t need music, and interesting music doesn’t need imagery.

Audiovisual pieces can sometimes come off a bit like an everything sandwich where more is not necessarily better. But Seulement is more like a marriage of two equivalent and complementary artforms that could easily stand on their own but strengthen each other by virtue of their merger.

If there appears to be an academic angle to Arsenault’s work, that is because he is currently enrolled in the doctoral programme in Digital Music at Université de Montréal. “Bricolage Architecture is actually my master’s thesis,” he confesses.

“To me, the theory always comes as I make the work. The work rarely comes from a theoretical or conceptual place. Even though I really like conceptual work, it’s not what I do. The conceptual aspect of the work will always reveal itself. But I come from a more Rock music background. I make music in a very intuitive way. I always try to make something that makes me feel something. That’s the only guideline I have.”

Analogous to Arsenault’s craftwork cutout animation, he encourages and embraces defects and blemishes in his sonic production. “It’s bodily induced noise,” he explains.

“Instead of using oscillators as the basic material of the music I make, I use loops of my voice. And loops of flute — recorder flute. I’m not a good flute player. So, it’s very irregular. Even though I try my best to sing perfectly or play flute perfectly, it will never be as regular as oscillators.”

The post-digital tendencies in Arsenault’s output hint at glitch aesthetics and the fallibility of machines in an era when we expect functional seamlessness from our interfaces.

“I’ve performed the work in different parts of the world, and some people are touched by it,” Arsenault muses, “and they’re surprised that they’re touched by it. If you think about it on paper, it doesn’t seem like something very touching. It’s geometric shapes that flicker with synthy music. But I think because it’s all assembled by hand, it shows a certain vulnerable aspect. The fact that I try my best to emulate what the machine can do, and fail, is something that is very tragic. To me, it speaks to the search for perfection. I strive for — and a lot of people are trying to be — perfect. And this project is a way to cope that I cannot make a perfect work.”

What constitutes perfection for you, I ask?

“That’s a good question,” Arsenault replies. “I don’t know. Perhaps imperfection is perfection.”◼︎

Seulement performs Bricolage Architecture 17 April 2026 at CIRMMT’s Multimedia Room, 2nd floor, Elizabeth Wirth Music Building, 527 Sherbrooke O.

Cover image: Mathieu Arsenault photographed for NicheMTL.

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Graceland

Feu St-Antoine with Solitary Dancer and Tony Price, Le Système, 26 March 2026

A DJ setup featuring various electronic music equipment in a dimly lit venue with red lighting and a crowd dancing in the background.
Tony Price performs at Le Système. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“For reasons I cannot explain
There’s some part of me wants to see
Graceland.”
—Paul Simon, “Graceland”

We don’t much imagine today that people come back to life after death. But in Biblical times it happened with alarming regularity. Everyone knows the story about Jesus. Then, Lazarus is probably a close second in terms of resurrection notoriety.

Lazarus was laying lifeless for four days when Jesus commanded him to rise from the tomb. His family even warned Jesus that he was starting to stink. Coming back from the dead was a miracle. It was God’s will. But God doesn’t seem to will it lately.

If it were God’s will, who should be resurrected today? All politicians must be disqualified out of hand. All religious leaders have had their day. It should be people who had a lot of life yet left to live, people who died well before their time.

I would bring back Ian Curtis and Amy Winehouse, James Dean and Marilyn Monroe, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Sylvia Plath, Nina Simone and Prince, Sharon Tate and John Lennon. Give them all a hot shower and then throw a dinner party. Ask them what the other side was really like.

Wayfinders: au gré des sens, Montréal, arts interculturels, 2 April – 16 May 2026

Colorful wall projection of a person's neck and mouth in various hues, showcasing different angles and expressions.
Marelke Yee-Yin Lee & Marc Sabat, HANDS to MOUTHS (2018), Montréal, arts interculturels. Photographed for NicheMTL.

And they cried with a loud voice, saying, How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?
And white robes were given unto every one of them; and it was said unto them, that they should rest yet for a little season, until their fellowservants also and their brethren, that should be killed as they were, should be fulfilled.
—Revelation 6:10-11

On 11 April 2020, shortly after the Coronavirus crisis had shut down nearly every aspect of public life around the world, the Montreal Gazette reported that 31 people had died in Dorval at a long-term care home known as Résidence Herron. Staff fled the facility in droves at the onset of the pandemic and Quebec’s premier, François Legault, vowed that a criminal investigation should take place and sent in the military to clear the dead.

Legault prohibited all Easter-related celebrations the following day and proclaimed that Quebec would experience a “rebirth.” At that time, Legault, Quebec’s Minister of Health Danielle McCann, and public health director Dr. Horacio Arruda took to television for a daily news conference informing the public of the death toll and ever-evolving restrictions that Le Droit called “La messe Legault.”

On Easter Monday 2023, Legault again found himself amidst scandal when he retweeted a column penned by Journal de Montréal opinion writer Mathieu Bock-Cote suggesting that Catholicism to a large extent defines Quebec’s distinct “heritage.” Those critical of Legault maintained that the tweet was hypocritical in the context of Bill 21, the CAQ’s signature secularism legislation.  

On 2 April 2026, Bill 9, titled “An Act respecting the reinforcement of laicity in Quebec,” passed with the Parti Québécois’s support at the National Assembly. That same day, Legault delivered his final official address as Premier, wishing optimism for the next generation, saying: “We must hope that Quebec remains Quebec.”

Battements, Emmanuel Lacopo with Alexandre Amat and Geneviève Ackerman, Chapelle Saint-Louis – Le Saint-Jean-Baptiste, 23 March 2026

A performer singing passionately in front of an ornate altar with a guitarist seated nearby, surrounded by dim lighting and decorative architecture.
Geneviève Ackerman performs at Chapelle Saint-Louis. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“The myth of international solidarity is dead. God is a ghost!”
Carsten Regild & Rolf Börjlind, Occupy the Brain!

Arrythmia characterizes our current age.

In politics, this manifests in incompatible international governments vying for superiority, oscillating wildly between extremes of diplomacy and violence. In culture, arrythmia manifests in off-kilter rhythms and microtonal harmonies. From Jonny Greenwood’s Bodysong to Black MIDI to Angine de Poitrine, we can trace the recent lineage of asynchronous life in new patterns of chaos.

Mediaeval, Simon S. Belleau, Galerie Eli Kerr, 26 March – 16 May 2026

A person with wavy hair is viewing a small mirror mounted on a wooden wall, wearing a red jacket.
Gallery view of Mediaeval by Simon S. Belleau at Galerie Eli Kerr. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“The project is to theorize a kind of geoaffect or material vitality, a theory born of a methodological commitment to avoid anthropocentrism and biocentrism.”
—Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: a political ecology of things

One way to think about reincarnation that does not necessitate irrational leaps of faith or imaginings of being born again as a cat is through vital materialism. This hybrid philosophy also allows for the agentic potential of non-human actants exerting force upon the ecosystem. Indeed, the first law of thermodynamics could be described as the second coming for energy.

When living matter dies, its energy does not. It only changes into different forms of matter and energy — decomposing, becoming food, becoming fertilizer. The Christian concept of transubstantiation — bread becoming flesh; wine becoming blood — is rooted in a fundamental understanding that matter is always bristling with life and potential for new lines of flight.

St. John Passion, BWV 245, J.S. Bach, Chœur A&P with Ensemble Caprice, The Church of St. Andrew and St. Paul, 3 April 2026

A choir in red robes performs in an ornate church with a high vaulted ceiling and stained glass windows, while the audience faces the stage, some clapping.
Patrons applaud the choir of The Church of St. Andrew and St. Paul. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Things are going to slide, slide in all directions,
Won’t be nothing, nothing you can measure anymore.
—Leonard Cohen, “The Future”

In September 1752, Britain transitioned from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar and lost 11 days in the process. The Julian calendar miscalculated the solar year by 11 minutes and therefore slid off by one full day every 128 years. This affected Easter celebrations which eventually moved further away from the beginning of astronomical spring.

Western churches commemorate Easter on the first Sunday after the first full moon nearest the March equinox. The Eastern Orthodox Church, however, continues to follow the Julian calendar. So, Catholic and Orthodox Easter celebrations often fall on different dates, with the Orthodox iteration occurring this year on 12 April.

Passover generally falls on the first full moon after the vernal equinox. But due to the Metonic cycle, about 6939 days, it will arrive on the second full moon three times every 19 years.

If time wobbles rather than ticking by predictably as current re-evaluations of quantum spacetime suggest, there may be no faithful chronological measurement. The technics of civilization are breaking down. We might have more time than we thought.◼︎

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: The disco ball at Le Système. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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How Do You Spell Holiday?

Torching the Record: notes on Montreal’s Olympic Legacy

“In 1977, Mayor Drapeau gave birth to a beautiful baby boy.”
—Mike Meyers, Canada

On 5 February 1976, the front page of Montréal-Matin featured the grisly story of three men, Yvon Duchesne, Guy Montreuil, and his brother Jean-Pierre, who were found criminally responsible for a double murder that took place at Le Dôme nightclub on Sherbrooke Street on 10 January.

The killings were framed as part of a larger violent crime spree that began plaguing Montreal in the mid-1970s and was often associated with the city’s nighttime culture. Montreal’s reputation was growing internationally as a disco-dancing destination, second only to New York City. But the city’s vibrant nightlife also implicated drugs and sexual deviance, antagonisms to a squeaky-clean civic image.

Two trans women employed in nightclubs as “female impersonators” were stabbed to death in a St. Leonard apartment on New Year’s Eve, swelling Montreal’s 1975 murder toll to a record 110. And Jean-Pierre Montreuil had apparently been canvassing Le Dôme’s clientele for rolling papers prior to shooting Ronald Turcol, the doorman, and a 28-year-old customer, Nelson Dodier, who had attempted to prevent him from leaving after Montreuil smoked a joint in the bathroom.

Also visible on Montréal-Matin’s front page is the iconic M-for-Montreal Olympic logo designed by the graphic artist Georges Huel, a personal friend of then-mayor Jean Drapeau. Doubtless, Drapeau begrudged the juxtaposition of gruesome headlines alongside the forthcoming Olympic Games that he viewed as part of his legacy to vault Montreal onto the podium of prestigious cosmopolitan cities. Increased policing of the city’s nightlife ensued with especially harsh suppression of Montreal’s queer and unhoused populations.

A cartoon depicting an Olympic security guard with a helmet and weapon, speaking to a police officer. The guard has a humorous expression, and above them are the words 'OLYMPIC SECURITY' and 'BE DISCREET'.
Aislin, Olympic Security: Be Discreet, The Montreal Gazette, 6 May 1976. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Still, subduing the underground is just one of the underlying currents of Montreal 1976: An Olympic Feat, an impressive exhibition that opened this week at the McCord Stewart Museum.

Superficially, the show marks the 50th anniversary of Montreal hosting the Olympic Games. But the McCord Stewart’s assemblage of remarkable objects speaks less to nostalgia, metropolitan jingoism, or sport, and focusses more upon the aesthetic and political aspects of mounting the Olympics here — which is the far more interesting story. And neither does it pull any punches in its criticism of the hypocrisy, corruption, and cultural violence that swirled around the city at the time, and their reverberations today.

An extensive editorial cartoon collection from contemporaneous newspapers anchors Montreal 1976 and acts as an instructive historical throughline. While the topical humour is not immediately obvious to a generation that was not yet born in 1976, the sheer volume and acridity of satire that the Olympics produced is evidence of concurrent popular sentiment toward the Games.

A black and white photograph featuring a man and a woman standing in the street, each holding Olympic torches pointing towards each other. Both are dressed in casual athletic outfits, and there are buildings and cars in the background.
Exhibition view of Montreal 1976: An Olympic Feat. Photographed for NicheMTL.

The Oxford Olympics Study of 2016 found that Montreal’s was the highest cost overrun — at a staggering 720 percent — for any Olympic Games in modern history. “The Montreal Olympics can no more have a deficit than a man can have a baby,” Drapeau told the CBC in 1973. But by 1974, a full two years before any medals would be awarded, The Montreal Gazette’s Aislin was parodying what the city already knew with a caricature of a pregnant Drapeau on the phone to the abortion rights activist Henry Morgentaler.

According to the Oxford study, the Games cost about $6.1 billion adjusted for 2016 inflation, an average of $1 million per athlete. It would take Montreal more than 30 years to pay off the debt incurred, lending the Olympic Stadium its “Big Owe” nickname and inspiring some questionable strategies to raise the funds.

Among them was the extension and increase in the late 1980s of a special tax on cigarettes, capitalizing on Montreal’s repute as North America’s ashtray. It is toxic irony that encouraging tobacco consumption mitigated the government’s fiscal hangover for the advancement of sport.

A monochromatic illustration depicting two hands: one holding a cigarette and the other poised above an architectural model resembling a stadium.
R. Pier, Quebec Government extends and increases special tobacco tax to continue paying off deficit from 1976 Montreal Olympic Games, Le Journal de Montreal, 1988. Photographed for NicheMTL.

The McCord Stewart exhibition also highlights the sartorial and graphic elements that helped to identify the Olympics, featuring posters designed by Michael Snow, François Dallaire and Clermont Malenfant, and the famous marijuana button-emblazoned jean jacket conceived by Raymond Bellemare.

A display of costumes that the officials wore, as well as Radio-Canada’s loud outerwear, is a rich time capsule of kitschy mid-1970s trends and offers a yardstick against which to measure fashion’s cyclical inclinations. A blue t-shirt and white wide-legged rainbow-belted pant combination would not look out of place on today’s runway.

A display of a blue Olympics-themed t-shirt and white flared pants, showcased on a mannequin in a museum setting, with colorful garments in the background.
Exhibition view of Montreal 1976: An Olympic Feat. Photographed for NicheMTL.

While visual art was lauded for branding the Games, another scandal that would come to be considered the worst occurrence of art censorship in Canadian history tarnished the Olympics. The Corridart dans la rue Sherbrooke, a public installation of 22 juried artworks stretching from Atwater to Pie IX, was organized by the artist-architect Melvin Charney and coordinated by André Ménard of the Arts and Culture program of the Comité organisateur des jeux olympiques. A grant for $386,000 from the Ministère des Affaires culturelles du Québec provided funding.

Corridart was conceived to showcase works from prominent local artists including Françoise Sullivan and Pierre Ayot, and an open call to all Quebec artists received more than 300 submissions. A vernissage at the UQAM gallery was held on 7 July 1976 to celebrate Corridart’s opening, and the installation was scheduled to be on display until the 31st.

However, a number of the artworks were vandalized and several artists whose works were not included in the exhibition staged public protests against the granting process. Mayor Drapeau on 13 July ordered the exhibition to be dismantled and most of the pieces were damaged or destroyed.

A pair of old-fashioned phone booths next to a street, with hiking backpacks placed on the ground nearby. A sign on a pole is partially visible, and a gas station can be seen in the background under a cloudy sky.
The Teletron, Michael Haslam, 1976. Archives de la Ville de Montréal / VM94-EM0750-001.

Officially, Drapeau cited public safety. But many of the works contained veiled allegations against the government and alluded to outright corruption. Michael Haslam’s installation entitled The Teletron, for instance, consisted of a series of telephone booths that were programmed to play prerecorded messages — among them financial figures for how much the Games cost and speculation over where the money was actually going.

In the wake of the Corridart fracas, a dozen artists filed a civil lawsuit against the City of Montreal for $350,000. Litigation lasted more than a decade and resulted in a settlement in 1988 awarding each artist a paltry $3,000.

A woman in a flowing white dress stands still, holding a bowl, while a blurred figure in red shorts appears to be running past her. The text 'Montréal 1976' is displayed at the top.
Olympic Flame, 1975, François Dallaire & Clermont Malenfant. Photographed for NicheMTL.

The McCord Stewart exhibition ultimately tells a story of the 1976 Summer Olympics in which sport is a supporting actor in the Games’ sociocultural cast. Selling Montreal on the world stage came at an astronomical cost and arguably benefited the political players of the day more than the athletes or the public who cheered them on. A cruel twist is that Canada was shut out of the Gold Medal category for the competition’s entirety, the only host country in the Olympic record to do so.

There are elements to Montreal 1976 that will appeal to sports-lovers and families, tourists and casual cultural observers. But the McCord Stewart collection is delightfully nuanced, paying tribute to our history by offering an unvarnished and still-under-construction Olympic vision that honours Montreal’s complex and contradictory character.

Commemorating a half-century of the city’s Olympic legacy should celebrate both the highs and lows, recounting the crackdowns on nightlife and the destruction of important works of art, the corruption and cronyism, alongside the glory of victory.◼︎

Montreal 1976: An Olympic Feat runs through 7 September 2026 at McCord Stewart Museum, 690 Sherbrooke Street West.

Cover image: Gallery view of Montreal 1976: An Olympic Feat. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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The Problem of Pain

Viktor, dir. Olivier Sarbil, Cinémathèque Québécoise, 17 March 2026

The Wall Street Journal on 7 March reported that Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence had threatened social media users with harsh penalties under the country’s anti-espionage laws for making and sharing images or video documenting U.S. and Israeli strikes and their aftermath in the Republic. The Ministry characterized such prospective posters as a “fifth column,” or the enemy within. War photography, once universally understood as a reliable method of unshrouding the true faces and victims of conflict, has become suspect in its ubiquity, its susceptibility to disinformation, and its vulnerability to A.I. and deep-fake manipulation.

Images have the power to produce consensus and encourage something resembling collective memory. Especially single images that proliferate widely shape our impressions and recollection of events, particularly when we did not witness them ourselves. Think of the depiction of Phan Thi Kim Phuc fleeing a napalm attack in South Vietnam, or more recently, Thomas E. Franklin’s photograph “Firemen Raising the Flag at Ground Zero.” Like a tuning fork, seeing the second plane strike the World Trade Center’s South Tower on live television resonated with everyone in unison. These images immediately implant a sense of recognition in viewers.

“There is no such thing as collective memory,” writes Susan Sontag in her 2003 book, Regarding the Pain of Others. “But there is collective instruction.”

Julianna Barwick & Mary Lattimore with Myriam Gendron, Le Gesù, 18 March 2026

There are generally two types of pain: physical and emotional. It is impossible to feel another person’s pain, and so we are condemned to describe our pains using the best communication tools in our toolkits. We might tell the dentist that our toothache is a throbbing or a stabbing pain. Or we could draw lightning bolts shooting into aching shoulders on a diagram of the human body in advance of a massage.

Images might be the proper medium for conveying physical pain. Everyone visually recognizes an injury, a wound, or a scar, and empathizes using their own familiarities to conjure the memories of past distress. Sound, though, and music, specifically, is arguably the vehicle best suited to communicate emotional pain — the pain of mourning, of love lost, of failure, of separation from self and from God.

A singing voice invokes the universal truth of emotional pain and exorcises it.

Jean Cocteau, dir. Lisa Immordino Vreeland, Cinéma du Musée, 15 March 2026

“Hunger and force can never be conditions of productive activity. On the contrary, freedom, economic security, and an organization of society in which work can be the meaningful expression of man’s faculties are the factors conducive to the expression of man’s natural tendency to make productive use of his powers.”
—Erich Fromm, Man for Himself

Pain is a productive energy.

Physical pain prompts the body to identify its source and repair it. Emotional pain spurs action, too, to ameliorate the conditions which initiated the anguish. Analgesics can effectively blunt physical pain, but numbness is antithetical to the productivity that emotional pain potentially stimulates. Rather, it is necessary to feel emotional pain in its entirety — not to induce it, but neither to detach oneself from it — in order to make it useful.

The greatest artists didn’t thrive under conditions in which their basic needs went unmet. The notion of the “starving artist” is unproductive and anti-romantic. Art is unavoidably work and workers work best when they are fed and clothed, sheltered and rested. But a claim can be made for microdosing emotional pain in pursuit of creative productivity. Enduring emotional pain produces faith, and humanity cannot survive without faith.

Not an irrational faith in ideology, or technology, or capital, but a radical faith in the prevalence of goodness, beauty, and truth.

Champs de fracture, Bradley Ertaskiran, 19 March 2026

An industrial wall with a textured surface features four rectangular panels that resemble light-colored stone, arranged horizontally. Above them is a large blank area framed by the wall.
Gallery view, Dawit L. Petros, Bradley Ertaskiran. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Is the absence of a meaningful Self traumatic only when we expect its presence?”
—Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times

“…there is a destructive force that is in love or attaches itself to love—one that moves human creatures toward destruction and self-destruction, including the destruction of that which they most love.”
—Judith Butler, The Force of Non-Violence

Among life’s inexplicable paradoxes is that love is a source of pain. That emotion which should provide the utmost pleasure, that virtue which Jesus commanded of his disciples, contains within it the seed for immense suffering.

This is why love is a commandment and not just a suggestion — because none of us would do it willingly. And this is why true love is selfless — because the persistence of love’s subjective experience discourages it.

The Designer is Dead, dir. Gonzalo Hergueta, Cinémathèque Québécoise, 19 March 2026

“Human will becomes truly creative and truly our own when it is wholly God’s, and this is one of the many senses in which he that loses his soul shall find it.”
—C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

One of the defining characteristics that sets us apart from beasts is the human search for meaning. We comfort ourselves with sayings like “what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger,” and “everything happens for a reason.” And yet, reason in terms of rational thought cannot possibly justify or defend violence. Reasons are not inherently morally sound. The reasons for international wars, or for interpersonal conflict, are most frequently amoral and unethical — ego, greed, avarice, hatred, ignorance, shame.

Some things are fundamentally meaningless, and it is a fool’s errand to search for meaning in them. Moral deformity cannot be explained spiritually or scientifically. There is no lesson in birth, life, and death. These things exist independent of our inclinations to interpret them. Man’s search for meaning is entirely contextual and relative and contingent.

We have all experienced a child’s game of repeatedly asking “why?” Eventually, every adult on the receiving end of this perpetual question arrives at the ultimate answer: “just because.”

The painful truth is that there is no meaning; there is only understanding. Most of life passes us by misunderstood. Understanding this is the first step towards a state of grace.◼︎

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: Julianna Barwick and Mary Lattimore perform at Le Gesù 18 March 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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The Goddamn Weight of Dreams

Walter Scott “Heavily Greebled” and Megane Voghell “Jets de sauvegarde,” Fonderie Darling, 5 March – 10 May 2026

A large, abstract sculpture featuring organic shapes and vibrant colors, displayed in a contemporary gallery setting with textured floors and an industrial backdrop.
Gallery view of Megane Voghell’s “Jets de sauvegarde,” Fonderie Darling. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“One can only live while one is intoxicated with life; as soon as one is sober it is impossible not to see that it is all a mere fraud and a stupid fraud! That is precisely what it is: there is nothing either amusing or witty about it, it is simply cruel and stupid.”
—Leo Tolstoy, A Confession and Other Religious Writings

Among the most reliable strategies for coping with the seemingly relentless and interminable meaninglessness of contemporary life — the never-ending cycles of plague, war, famine, and death and the reiteration of these through ubiquitous media — is excess.

Drunkenness is a method of extending dreams into consciousness, or rather, of blurring the boundaries between dreams and waking life, the subconscious and the conscious.

One reason could be that dreams collapse time. In a 1975 study published in the journal Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology, researchers found that dreamers of especially bizarre or emotionally charged dreams experienced time at up to 1/100 of the duration of absolute time, meaning that a dreamer could feasibly live 100 dreamtime minutes in the span of one waking minute.

“Living the dream” is commonly held as a desirable goal. We chase after dreams and try to turn them into realities. Cinema emulates the dream state by projecting images and restructuring time and meaning onto a screen.

Cinema, therefore, is the most intoxicating form of media in which viewers become dreamers experiencing collective reciprocal hypnotism.

Quantificateur sonique vol. 4: Charmaine Lee + Maxime Corbeil-Perron, Fondation Guido Molinari, 28 February 2026

Installation views of Maxime Corbeil-Perron’s Nuit Blanche performance at Fondation Guido Molinari. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“A human being who should dream his life instead of living it would no doubt thus keep before his eyes at each moment the infinite multitude of the details of his past history.”
—Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory

In Carl Jung’s The Undiscovered Self, he recounts a child’s dream that she writes down in the form of a fairy tale in 12 stages and gives to her father, Jung’s colleague, as a Christmas present. Stage Six reads: “[Once upon a time, there was] … a bad boy with a clod of earth. He throws bits of it at the passers-by, and they all become bad too.”

This dream is atypical of an innocent little child’s reveries, vaulting into the archetypal realm. Jung recalls that the young dreamer died prematurely one year later and interpreted that her dreams were an adumbration or anticipatory shadow of death cast over her waking life. But Stage Six of the doomed girl’s dream foreshadows more than her own death. It clearly signifies the viral contagion of pure evil that warmongering represents.

There are two assumptions that this archetypal dream suggests but does not make explicit. First is that the boy is bad independent of his implicitly bad actions, i.e. throwing bits of earth. And second is that passers-by who are hit with bits of earth also begin throwing bits of earth.

Les Vespérales with Annie Bloch, Église du Sacré-Cœur-de-Jésus, 7 March 2025

A beautifully lit space featuring a white musical instrument with tall pipes, illuminated in red light, accompanied by two small stools and a chair, set against a backdrop of ornate sculptures and dark surroundings.
The LIMINARE at Église du Sacré-Cœur-de-Jésus. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“The cigarette is the symbol of a machine age in which the ultimate cogs and wheels and levers are human nerves.”
—“Going Up in Smoke” The New York Times, 24 September 1925

Cigarettes are suspiciously emblematic for our accelerationist, disposable, and self-destructive society. We burn through objects and ideas nowadays at such a heated pace that we rarely even remember what happened yesterday.

We chain-smoke people as well, using and discarding them like so many butts flicked into the gutter. “The rapider pace of civilization,” the 101-year-old Times editorial declares, “accounts for the extraordinary growth of the cigarette habit.”

Addiction is a condition that few people like to address. Addicts attempt to avoid it, preferring to believe that their habits are personal choices. And non-users or former addicts tend to sidestep the topic for fear of sounding sanctimonious or self-righteous.

But perhaps the best argument against smoking for the Bohemian radical is that to smoke cigarettes is to be subordinate to hyper-capitalism in its most toxic form. Cigarettes are counterrevolutionary.

In the marketplace of addiction, smokers are the commodities, not cigarettes. Human beings are infinitely renewable and insignificant to mercenary machinic exploitation. One is too many and a thousand is never enough.

Animals of Distinction, Jump Cut, Cinema Moderne, 10 March 2026

“What a thrill —
My thumb instead of an onion.”
—Sylvia Plath, “Cut”

In her article entitled “Traumas of Code,” published in the autumn 2006 issue of Critical Inquiry, the American scholar N. Katherine Hayles suggests: “as the unconscious is to the conscious, so computer code is to language.” Thus, just as the smooth interface of consciousness is only revealed when it is ruptured by unconscious traumas, computer glitches expose the seams in the fabric of our increasingly digital reality.

The film scholar Laura U. Marks in her 1997 essay “Loving a Disappearing Image” writes about the melancholia of glitchy moving images — diminished, faded, ageing, and decaying visual media that “flaunt their tenuous connection to the realty they index” — arguing that they “all appeal to a look of love and loss.”

What is startling about glitch aesthetics is their durability. At a time when fads and fashions in film and art more broadly turn over with aggregate haste, digital decomposition is perennially hip, a loss that paradoxically lingers. Perhaps this is because accelerated innovation spells accelerated obsolescence.

There is scarcely a city block nowadays upon which one does not encounter a flickering fluorescent light bulb or burnt-out LCD display or some form of seizure-inducing electronic glitch. In the malfunctioning cityscape, subconscious mourning is constant when technological breakdown is ever-present.

A bug in the system means that there must be a line of code missing somewhere.

Mon amour, c’est pour le restant de mes jours, dir. André-Line Beauparlant, Monument-National, 12 March 2026

Two people posing together on a red carpet with a colorful backdrop featuring the words 'LE FiFA 44'. The man is wearing a denim shirt and the woman is dressed in a red suit, smiling at the camera.
Robert Morin and André-Line Beauparlant at the premiere of Mon amour, c’est pour le restant de mes jours, Monument National, 12 March 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Selten habt Ihr mich verstanden,
Selten auch verstand ich Euch,
Nur wenn wir im Koth uns fanden,
So verstanden wir uns gleich.”
—Heinrich Heine, Buch der Lieder

In Ernest Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea, a seasoned fisherman risks life and limb to reel in the biggest fish in the ocean. But the fish is so mammoth that the fisherman has to tie it to the side of his boat to bring it ashore, and once he arrives, the fish is just a skeleton, sharks having picked it to the bone.

This tale contains competing morals and compelling insights. One is that avaricious forces will inevitably whittle down to nothing everything that is truly great. Another is that one should never let one’s proverbial pies cool on the windowsill because they will invariably attract unwelcome trespassers. Another is that there is only one fisherman and one fish, but practically infinite axiomatic sharks.

Still another is that fish are ancillary to fishing.◼︎

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

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

Cover image: Gallery views of Walter Scott, “Heavily Greebled,” Fonderie Darling.

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All Dressed

Mysterious Skin: in conversation with Genève-Florence

“The mask is the face.” —Susan Sontag, “On Style”

“Taste is constant; style varies from season to season.” —Bill Cunningham, “On Taste”

Fashion implies an accelerated mode of temporality.

Microtrends dominate social media nowadays — and even the media themselves are subject to fashion’s fickle whims. What is hot now seems to cool all the more rapidly as a result of the timeline’s impetuous, algorithmic turnover. Today, tomorrow more quickly becomes yesterday.

“Time keeps going, keeps going,” says the designer and textile artist Genève-Florence. “You try to catch up to it.”

A person dressed in a dark outfit is organizing or retrieving items from a wooden crate in a creative workspace, surrounded by cardboard boxes and a bulletin board with sketches and fabric samples.
Genève-Florence photographed for NicheMTL.

Florence is giving me a guided tour, circling a third-floor studio space in the Chabanel district that serves as the production and design headquarters for their eponymous fashion label, showing me a series of garments and objects that at once designate this specific cultural moment and appear timeless. Florence’s creations embrace a post-modern gothic look in intricately rendered clothing that is both rugged and delicate, rough and refined.

Material is strewn everywhere in assemblages categorized by composition. A wall of thread. A rusty metallic chain. Wooden shoe formers. Tools arranged by size and purpose. And fabric — lots of fabric.

Among Florence’s most preferred fabrics is leather, bolts and patches of which are rolled up and collected in several banker’s boxes on the floor. “When they kill the animal, there are often scars and discoloration,” Florence says, handing me samples of various shades of hides. “But these, they just keep the skin whole. The cows are very well treated. They don’t have a lot of scars from bugs and scratching.”

Spools of various colored sewing thread arranged on a wooden rack.
“People might not consider me an artist.” Photographed for NicheMTL.

I was introduced to Florence’s work through the artist Tomas Dessureault and was instantly enamoured with its techniques and textures. Pleated folds and braided laces embellish skirts, blouses, handbags, notebooks, and other articles that are more-or-less wearable or functional, but also formally appealing as pieces that would look equally at home in an art gallery.

“People might not consider me an artist,” Florence admits, preferring the title “craftsperson.” “Maybe it’s just me thinking that. But I want to just do a proper vernissage one day. I love spending time around people who are artists and passionate about what they’re doing, passionate about craft. What I’m doing is less about fashion and more about craftsmanship. I like to do everything. But I’m trying not to exhaust myself. You can’t do everything. I’m trying to figure out what to give, what to take, what I’m willing to give up, or what to not give away.”

A gray leather shoulder bag hanging on a clothing rack with several black garments and wooden hangers in the background.
“I grew up around a lot of clothes, but not in a glamorous fashion designer way.” Photographed for NicheMTL.

Florence, 23, is a rare breed, Franco-Albertan, born and raised speaking French in the Bonnie Doon neighbourhood of Edmonton, one of Canada’s unlikeliest bastions for Francophone culture. “My grandmother is from Brittany in the north of France and my grandfather is Quebecois,” Florence informs me. “On my dad’s side, my grandfather is Italian and my grandmother is French Albertan. People are always surprised when I tell them I’m French-Canadian but from Alberta. People don’t even know we exist.”

Florence’s interest in fashion manifested in drawings of clothing at around eight years of age and flourished after attending a community youth sewing camp. “After that, I was obsessed,” says Florence.

“My mom bought me a super-cheap $50 Brother sewing machine — basically, a toy from Walmart. I would go thrifting with my grandmother. I would buy clothes and bedsheets and make stuff with that for myself and my friends. Outside of school, that’s all I would do. My great-grandmother was a talented seamstress and embroidery and textile maker. I grew up around a lot of clothes, but not in a glamorous fashion designer way. It was purely about making stuff and being around objects that carried a lot of value for the people around me. Seeing that value,” Florence recalls, “it was important to preserve that.”

There is an impression of weighty history to each object that emerges from Florence’s workshop. Although they are pieces of high fashion, they betray a sense of slow time, often involving significantly more labour than their prices reflect. Still, exchange value is not the point.

“The connection of the hands to something greater than yourself.” Photographs for NicheMTL.

“I always had a very busy mind,” Florence reveals. “But whenever I would make things with my hands, it would be like peace. It would calm me down. I felt like there was purpose. Even if it took a long time to make something, the time you spend with the objects, you create a bond with them. I do like making ready-to-wear clothing. I like the process of making it. But it’s not my end goal. It’s just for the experience of making it. Becoming. That’s the purpose of it.”

During our visit, I gradually grow aware of the music Florence is listening to and inquire what it is. “It’s Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou,” she says, an Ethiopian mystic who died in 2023 at the age of 99. Florence, raised in a strict Catholic tradition, finds inspiration in the divine qualities of music, and specifically in Emahoy’s compositions, she says.

“It’s very spiritual music,” Florence explains, “and when I’m working, it feels very spiritual to me. The act of making with my hands, all my work is based on ritual and repetition. The connection of the hands to something greater than yourself. All the pleating I do is stuff that is repetitive and very monotonous. But when you’re doing repetitive things, you lose yourself in it. I’m not religious by nature. But things are not always based on reason. I believe in human emotion and the greater knowledge of ancestral history and the weight of everything around you. Everything has a place.” Florence pauses for a moment, examining the room. “I also like silence. I work in pure silence sometimes, with no distractions.”

The pieces that Florence creates each possess a soul, almost as if they were living manifestations, ritual magic made flesh. I ask about a blistered chair that commands attention in the center of the room.

A vintage chair with a textured burgundy seat and backrest, supported by a sleek chrome frame, positioned on a decorative rug.
Genève-Florence, The Flood. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“I call this chair ‘The Flood,’” Florence laughs. “It’s chemically treated. It’s a chemical reaction that disintegrates the leather and makes it shrink and dehydrate itself, the parts that are big and bubbly. To me, this chair is the opposite of control. I splatter the liquid and then it does what it wants. The thing with craft that I love so much is that it’s very human. It’s the most human. That’s how we evolved to where we are, using tools, and using what’s around us to build things and create a world around us. That’s what feels spiritual to me.”

Spirituality, focus, and devotion clearly characterize Florence’s designs and represent more than fashion, style, or taste. They represent the subjective experience of passing time — time in an age in which time itself feels unmoored. Florence speaks to the human condition and expresses an ageless wisdom that is surprising for such a young artist, and unheard of in the fashion world that is predominantly preoccupied with precisely defining trendiness.

“All my friends call me grandfather,” Florence says. “I always love old things, and I love being around older people. I like peace and quiet and when things are slow. I like to take time.”◼︎

Cover image: Detail of handbag designed by Genève-Florence. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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Play Recent

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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