Tag Archives: Montreal

999 Words

Un Oiseau Rebelle: notes on the location of culture

Culture, like blood and other life forces, circulates around the globe as if through a body.

There are certain locations, like New York or London or Paris, that seem more likely to originate culture, whereas other places, like Chicago or Manchester or Montreal, we might recognize more as receivers or interpreters of culture.

Population plays a part in determining whether a location originates or interprets culture. Larger cities tend to be engines of culture, with sympathetic administrative institutions and cultural infrastructures to incubate it.

Demographics is another indicator of where original cultures are more prone to occur. University cities, for instance, with higher numbers of young and enterprising residents tend to cultivate more unique cultural forms.

A confident and vibrant foundational culture, based upon things like shared language, identity, and history, is another significant condition that a given location might be more apt to originate rather than receive culture.

We frequently assign greater value to original cultures and to the locations that nurture them. Cultural insemination suggests a primary vital élan, whereas a secondary, supporting role is reserved for cultural dissemination. But a different kind of power can be found in locations that receive and reinterpret culture — that of revision, or what Homi K. Bhabha calls, “new and hybrid agencies and articulations.”

A dramatic scene from an opera featuring a man kneeling and reaching for a woman in a bright pink dress with ruffles. The woman appears concerned, while a group of silhouetted figures observes in the background against a blue sky.
Arturo Chacón-Cruz and Rihab Chaieb perform Carmen at Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier. Photographed by Vivien Gaumand for Opéra de Montréal.

The time lag inherent in cultural transmission opens up a temporal space for imperative interventions and interpretive interference. As cultural forms travel from New York — or London, or Paris — to wherever they end up, they evolve in significance and transform in transit. In the time it takes for culture to arrive, it both loses and accrues meaning.

Techno music that originated in Detroit or Berlin but now resounds, for example, out of a stereo in a middle-class bedroom in the Montreal suburbs, may become less about representing art’s postmodern mechanical reproduction than about corporeal phenomenology and the body’s rhythmic regulation. The heartbeat during the depths of a Canadian winter is more immediate than the assembly line or the factory floor.

Taken out of context like this, cultural forms may superficially be misinterpreted or misunderstood. But those apparent interpretational deficiencies are themselves acts of agency that insert new cultural knowledge and multiply possible readings and meanings. Reception, then, is also always a new productive act. Reading is rewriting. And rewriting takes place in the time lag of transmission.

Ralph Ellison writes in his novel Invisible Man about the 20th century Black American experience of temporality. “Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time,” Ellison says, “you are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead.”

Primary culture seems to set the temporal cultural pace — think of the phrase “New York minute” — whereas feeling behind or outside time is a condition common to receptive cultures. Hence the racist pejorative, “CP time.” The reclamation of the temporal sense, I believe, is the origin of the saying most commonly attributed to the Hip-Hop lexicon, which has now migrated to the MAGA Right in America: to “know what time it is.”

Physical travel still takes time, although much less since the 19th century than it did in every century before. But ideas and information today travel with near instantaneity and require practically no time to be received, read, and rewritten. Therefore, there is no longer any location of original culture, since it is constantly and everywhere being produced, circulated, and reproduced. And yet, there are certain places that still persist as cultural centers.

Is the idea of cultural centrality itself an artifact of time lag, just waiting to be read, rewritten, and understood anew? Are ideas also products, subject to the same regulation as commodities, with a short initial shelf life and increasingly rapid successions of cyclical marketplace revaluation?

The reality is that time arrives in waves, and like waves, time is subject to tides. Time is not a straight line, nor is it a cycle. It is a current, a frequency, a living bandwidth that carries culture on it like a radio frequency carries signal. We are each tuned to slightly different times.

Crowd at a live concert with enthusiastic fans cheering, some people are crowd surfing above them, creating an energetic atmosphere.
A crowd surfer rides the Angine de Poitrine audience at Club Soda 18 April 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

What precipitated this line of thought was Laura Snapes’ interview in The Guardian this week with Angine de Poitrine. First off, culture is not supposed to originate in Saguenay. But it is acceptable when it is a revision of culture that originated elsewhere, like a misreading of Frank Zappa or King Crimson. And for a New York minute, Saguenay becomes a center of culture.

It is ironic that this so of-the-moment band is also, aesthetically speaking, all about timing, frequency, and ambiguity. Now that Angine de Poitrine have arrived in London, they can reset their loop pedals and properly impose upon cultural temporality their own brand of CP (coloured polkadot) time. How long this micro-moment lasts remains to be seen. In a time of TikTok, when everyone wants to know what time it is, the clock is ticking…

I also had time this week to contemplate Bizet’s Carmen, a cultural text with comparatively longer staying power, but one which has undergone a series of re-readings and rewritings through the sands of time.

It is probable that, in its time, Carmen was conceived as a cautionary tale against liberated femininity. The Prosper Mérimée novella from which Bizet’s opera is adapted begins with a quotation from the Greek poet Palladas: “Every woman turns sour, twice she has her hour, one is in bed, the other is dead.”

Theodor Adorno in his essay “Fantasia sopra Carmen” writes that Carmen celebrates “eruptions from civilization into the unknown,” rejecting the bourgeois expectations of work and productivity, adherence to commodified temporality and inevitable domesticity. “The Fate which rules and which nothing can halt,” Adorno asserts, “is the primeval and pre-intellectual force of sexuality itself.”

It took 150 years for these thoughts to migrate from Paris to Frankfurt to Montreal.

You can always escape a place. But you cannot fly faster than time. And you can never overtake an idea.◼︎

Cover image: Rihab Chaieb as Carmen photographed by Vivien Gaumand for Opéra de Montréal.

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How Do You Spell Holiday?

Practically Magic: in conversation with Myriam Bleau

“What one man calls God, another calls the laws of physics.”
—Nikola Tesla

The visual artist and Montreal-based musician Myriam Bleau, stone-faced until this moment, grins mischievously, lighting up the screen of a Zoom call from Barcelona. She is talking about the gamut between science and magic and recalls an aphorism that she cannot quite properly attribute.

“Don’t quote me on this because I can’t remember who said it, but it’s something like, if you see cool technology for the first time,” she paraphrases, “it feels like magic.”

Tech companies, our new Gods in the 21st century, have leaned heavily upon this rhetoric. When Steve Jobs first introduced the iPhone at the MacWorld conference on 9 January 2007, he proclaimed that the device “works like magic.” The Fortune magazine contributor Shawn Tully in 2025 coined the phrase “Musk Magic Premium” to explain why that particular billionaire’s valuation is based more upon future speculation than current performance.

Truly, so much innovation is entwined nowadays with magical mythology — which is overtly masculine, the purview of the visionary bro-genius. But Bleau’s work eviscerates all of this narcissistic machismo.

“A lot of people don’t know because I don’t advertise it,” she declares, “but I’m very radical, politically. I’m always trying to trace a line between a lot of different thoughts that I have about technology. And I’ve become such a radical feminist over the years. I really look for integrity in the work that I do. Not to sell away what’s really important. That to me is political.”

A DJ performing on stage with vibrant laser lights projecting the word 'hypmbioty' above.
“There was always a tech development part to my projects.” Myriam Bleau photographed by Bruno Destombes.

Myriam Bleau will inaugurate Montreal’s traditional Tech Spring season this Friday with a double bill performance alongside Alva Noto, co-presented by MUTEK and the Society for Arts and Technology. Entitled Hypermobility, the show deploys lasers that her electronic sounds trigger to create shapes and words which are projected overhead in sync with the music.

“Don’t worry,” Bleau says reassuringly, “a few years ago, I did a laser safety officer course. A lot of people are scared of lasers, but I don’t scan the audience. It’s really rare that there’s any problems happening.”

Hypermobility, Bleau informs me, is more an audio-visually formalist study than a laser lightshow spectacle. “It’s meant to feel like you visualize the sound,” she says. “The way that I do it is really angular. It’s kind of like a sculpting exercise for me. I always try to approach it like an étude. Not that I always manage to have that purity of intention. But that’s what I’m looking for.”

The concept behind Hypermobility probes the politics inherent in the circulation of bodies for tourism and trade. A hierarchy exists to the perceived necessity of certain individuals to move around the globe, and it seldom favours artists.

“Right now, the arts are trying to push against travelling,” Bleau laments.

“There is this push towards being environmentally friendly, which is nice in theory. Now, festivals in Europe are asking me to prove that I have a tour around that date because they don’t want to encourage people just going for one show. But sometimes I need to survive by going to do that one show. There’s this whole system of guilt-tripping people. In theory, it is a lot of carbon footprint when I travel. But there are a lot of other people who don’t actually need to travel, and artists physically need to. So, the question of hypermobility has many different aspects to it.”

A DJ performing on stage with vibrant blue and purple laser lights projecting from the back.
“The literature aspect of it was a part of the conceptual part of my project.” Myriam Bleau photographed by Bruno Destombes.

Bleau, 38, grew up in Montreal with a distinct inkling that she would pursue a creative path.

“From a very young age, I wanted to do music,” she recalls. “I also studied literature, so the literature aspect of it was a part of the conceptual part of my project. At first I thought I was going to be more of a musician. I studied jazz guitar as an undergrad. I was into weird free jazz experimental stuff. Then I did my master’s in electroacoustics at Université de Montréal, and then I got more into electronics. But I don’t operate in academia,” she says. “I’m a freelance artist.”

Solidarity with the DIY movement has served as a guiding principle to Bleau, who recently collaborated with the interdisciplinary dance choreographer Nien Tzu Weng, and is in Barcelona to work with Mónica Rekić, an artist who makes miniature robots and handmade electronics, some of which are visible on the Zoom call just over Bleau’s shoulder.

“I have a group of friends that do similar things and I feel like we inspire each other,” Bleau says. “I guess it’s most of the people who are doing weird audiovisual performance things.”

The prosumer turn in the early 2000s ushered in a groundbreaking new era where it became more accessible to incorporate novel technologies in the arts.

“There was always a tech development part to my projects,” Bleau explains.

“But now, what’s happening with technology? Everything is about A.I. The technology is more complicated and the resources that you need to feel like you’re doing anything innovative is just unattainable. So, I think around the pandemic, I shifted towards not wanting my projects to feel innovative, and more towards being critical of technology. I use technology in a subversive way, and that subversion is also feminist. It brings the attention away from the tech and more toward what it represents, socially.”

The social construction of technology is the theory that, for Bleau, perforates the tech-bro bubble. But she is less interested in theory than practice, teasing out corporeal liveness from within the electronic pre-programming.

“In my performances, I kind of embrace the glitch everywhere,” Bleau says. “It’s always something that interests me. But I don’t exploit the glitch of the machines. I am inspired in a very literary way. I draw words, and for me, it’s more about the visual energy. The words are glitching out during different letters, and you can see subliminal words in what is written. And what is written is political.”

The political allegories implicit in Bleau’s work may not be immediately discernible. But they are alive and present in each and every gesture, pixel, and waveform.

“I like using metaphors,” she tells me. “I try to have all these little things that connect together. Sometimes I will sneak in little messages. But I still want the work to operate as a work of art. I don’t want the political message or the agenda to be what makes it a great piece.”

For Bleau, it seems that demystifying the magic around performing with technology — making God physical — is paramount to transporting tech back down to earth. There is no product launch-style hyperbolic hype to Bleau’s pieces, no sleight of hand intended to cast a spell upon her audience.

“Do we need to create a sense of authenticity about what we’re actually doing?” Bleau asks rhetorically.

“I try to create this contract where you understand what’s going on. And I’m not going to mess up this contract. You can always see very clearly what’s going on. That’s how I approach my projects these days.”◼︎

Myriam Bleau performs with Alva Noto 8 May 2026 at Espace SAT, 1201 Boulevard Saint-Laurent.

Cover image: Myriam Bleau photographed by Bruno Destombes.

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The Structure of Spirit

Angine de Poitrine with René Lussier and Robbie Kuster, and S.R.U.F, Club Soda, 18 April 2026

Silhouette of hands forming a heart shape in front of a spotlight during a live performance.
Angine de Poitrine perform at Club Soda 18 April 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“The meaning and potential achievement of a group composed of two people cannot simply be transferred to a group entity consisting of an undetermined multitude of people.”
— Siegfried Kracauer, “The Group as Bearer of Ideas”

In every age, certain ideas ebb and flow, rising and falling in patterns which we might describe as “spirit.”

Individuals originate ideas that other individuals take up and share. Together, these individuals form groups that realize ideas to a lesser or greater extent in the material and virtual world. Individual ideas alternate in impact based upon group behaviour.

The Germans, of course, have a more specific word for this phenomenon — “zeitgeist” — combining the words for time and temperament, refining the precise meaning as the spirit of the moment.

We tend to believe that any given idea’s popularity is a marker of its value. That is why we are concerned with bestsellers lists for books, and musical top ten charts, and box office figures for films. The greater number of individuals that adopt and echo an idea, the more we revere that idea and find it fascinating and might want to participate in it. This is how ideas gain momentum and become the spirit of an age, the zeitgeist of a culture.

Nonetheless, whether an idea is good or not is independent of its popularity. Some terrible ideas historically garnered immense traction, and other great ideas missed their original moment entirely. Vincent van Gogh was overlooked during his lifetime, only to be subsequently reconsidered a genius. Yet, enough Germans supported Adolph Hitler to make his ideas among the 20th century’s defining zeitgeists.

Popularity, then, is not the metric upon which history should or does evaluate ideas.

The Torlonia Collection: Masterpieces of Roman Sculpture, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Until 19 July 2026

A marble statue of a youthful male figure holding a lyre, standing on a pedestal, with a historical landscape backdrop featuring classical architecture and additional figures.
Statue of Apollo, 2nd c., Collezione Torlonia, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Politically, we are still stuck in the systems of thought of the Greek and Roman slave states, no matter how much we rant about ‘democracy.’”
—Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism

There are two extremes that form the polarities of an idea’s popularity: everyone is doing it, and only one individual is doing it. Somewhere along this continuum is where most ideas are located.

The notion, however, that individuals are free to take up certain ideas or not is illusory. There comes a moment in the lifespan of any extremely popular idea in which ignoring it is no longer an option. Disregarding a big idea can have consequences that adversely affect individuals and ostracize them. There is a stigma against not going with the crowd. And nobody wants to be the only one to have missed out on a good idea.

Social status is often linked to an individual’s enactment of popular or unpopular ideas. But there is just as often an inverse correlation between status and popularity. Coca-Cola, which everyone consumes, commands a lower rank than niche, artisanal beverage brands. Until the artisanal brand gains popularity, it is associated with a sense of discernment and taste.

The margins of society are always the testing grounds for mass culture. It is popular to hold unpopular opinions. Which unpopular opinions become integral to the zeitgeist, and how, is an alternative definition of democracy.

Paola Pivi: Come check it out Lies lies lies, Centre PHI, Until 13 September 2026

A collage of various images displayed on a grid surface, featuring people, nature scenes, animals, and urban environments.
Gallery view of Paola Pivi: Come check it out Lies lies lies at Centre PHI. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Success is fatal.”
—David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd

Establishing an idea in absence of an alternative is the realist’s strategy to reinforce an idea’s popularity. Capitalism is the obvious example, the mode of economic organization proper to a monolithic spiritual culture.

However, capitalism exhibits another curious paradox: it functions on the everyone-is-doing-it extreme of the popularity spectrum, but it trades in the only-one-individual-can-do-it cachet that characterizes the egoist zeitgeist at the other end.

Capitalism masks its social construction beneath a veneer of atomized self-actualization. The second-order paradox that acts as capitalism’s failsafe is that the alternative to individual success must necessarily be collective failure.

Bizet’s Carmen, Opéra de Montréal, Salle Wilfrid Pelletier, 2-12 May 2026

A woman in a black shirt embraces a seated man in a suit, both engaged in an emotional moment during a rehearsal. The background features wooden crates and a simple stage setting.
Rihab Chaieb and Dante Mullin Santone perform at a dress rehearsal for Carmen at Place des arts. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Without delirium and confidence, capital could not function.”
—Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism

Ideas can produce addiction as powerful as any drug. And like drugs, ideas can be synthesized and purified down to their most potent forms.

In fact, simplicity is the hallmark of many of the world’s most addictive ideas. High-concept narratives and three-chord pop songs tend to resonate most deeply in the subconscious, as infectious as nursery rhymes, encouraging repetition and positioning themselves perfectly for mass approval. As the center reinforces itself and self-organizes, the margins are cleaved away like corn husks, exposing the chaotic uniformity of the kernels.

Art Souterrain, Place Ville Marie, Until 10 May 2026

A man stands in a room filled with yellow decor, gesturing towards a table while another man in a virtual reality headset interacts with the environment.
Gilles Tarabiscuité demonstrates Réalité dés/augmentée 2.0 (2025) at Art Souterrain. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“I could leave you, say goodbye
Or I could love you, if I tried
And I could
And left to my own devices, I probably would.”
—Pet Shop Boys, “Left to My Own Devices”

Virality in our era is synonymous with zeitgeist. Memes today, more than any other medium, capture the spirit of the moment.

In January 2026, a clip from Werner Herzog’s 2007 documentary Encounters at the End of the World went improbably viral. The scene depicts what Herzog describes as a “deranged penguin” running away from the colony and apparently towards certain death. The clip became a meme and was shared on social media by the Trump administration in the context of the U.S. president’s threats to annex Greenland.

The impetus to defy acceptable behaviour exemplified by this meme is portrayed as simultaneously admirable and suicidal. And yet, the nature of mimesis is a kind of mob mentality, the fuel of smouldering populist movements that are perennially in danger of igniting into fascism.

What would happen if everyone went in their own direction, like so many deranged penguins, heading toward an uncertain future, but certain that the popularly prescribed future is untenable? Some adherence to the crowd ensures our collective survival. Too much can doom us en masse. But not enough could doom us individually.

Perhaps a clue emerges in the maturity of ideas. In addition to their popularity, we are inclined to give more symbolic weight to progressive ideas over traditional ones. Novelty and contemporaneity are prized as innocent and original and uncorrupted by time.

A “progressive” polity, writes Richard Sennet in The Culture of the New Capitalism, “is one in which all citizens believe they are bound together in a common project.” Sennet elaborates: “The new institutional order eschews responsibility, labelling its own indifference as freedom for individuals or groups on the periphery.”

The truth is, there are no peripheral groups or individuals. There are only black polka dots or white stripes.◼︎

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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: Angine de Poitrine perform at Club Soda 18 April 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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Bookish

This Montreal Manifesto: notes on Melissa Auf der Maur at the Blue Metropolis Festival

If you aren’t familiar with Melissa Auf der Maur, her story fits almost perfectly into the archetypal Hero’s Journey.

Auf der Maur is a photography student and bassist in Montreal when she’s asked to join Hole. She refuses the call but meets Courtney Love who becomes a sort of mentor. From there, Auf der Maur embarks upon her 1990s rock adventure of glamour, grime, addiction, grief, and Dave Grohl love. She is transformed and eventually “retires” from the music industry and public life to start a family. She reemerges with her memoir, entitled Even the Good Girls Will Cry, and on her book tour, makes a glorious return to her hometown, with her family seated in the front row.

I love these kinds of stories. They feel so epic and mythical. At her launch, held 30 March at the SAT as part of the Blue Metropolis Festival, Auf der Maur acknowledges this: “I call myself ‘Grunge Cinderella,’” she says, “because it doesn’t make sense that I was at Bifteck and a week later I was on stage at Reading Festival in front of 65,000 people.”

There’s an exciting contradiction that surrounds Montreal’s successful international cultural exports — Céline, Leonard Cohen, Arcade Fire, Grimes, Denis Villeneuve, Cirque du Soleil — which lends to their reverence and ubiquity. Montreal might be a big city, especially by Canadian standards, but it’s actually quite cozy. My friend’s new boyfriend was taught by my mother in elementary school; another friend grew up playing hockey with Sophie Nélisse; a past interview subject is currently dating someone I went on a date with; I recognize Instagram mutuals doing background work in Montreal productions; and almost everyone in Montreal has a Xavier Dolan story. (I’m waiting for mine, Xavier.)

This is reflected in our tight-knit creative industries and communities, which display remarkable resourcefulness and talent. There is gossip, rivalry, and drama, but also consistent efforts for collaboration, mutualisation, and solidarity. Discussing her parents’ adoption of Montreal and their life-long devotion to its culture, Auf der Maur tells the crowd, “I saw that life is about what you do with everyone. It’s not just your family or just your plan.”

A performer gestures towards a screen displaying a historical black-and-white image, while standing on stage in a theatrical setting.
“There’s something that is happening here where you protect who you are.” Melissa Auf der Maur photographed by Nadia Trudel for NicheMTL.

Like in many other places, opportunities here are limited, especially for the monolingual anglophones who have long been drawn to Montreal’s cheap rent and cultural cachet, following their mass exodus in the late 20th century, along with the city’s economic dominance. There is a ceiling to what can be achieved in Quebec — lower than the Canadian ceiling which is of course lower than the seemingly non-existent ceiling of American cultural hegemony.

Canada is a small country in a big body, and Quebec is its limb that survives amputation, developing its own star system and maintaining its French. Auf der Maur fittingly writes in her memoir, “In many ways, Montreal has stayed fixed somewhere between 1942 and 1982.” At her book launch, she seems to elaborate on this thought. “There’s something that is happening here where you protect who you are,” she says, “which is obviously deeply Quebecois.” Maybe that’s why Montreal has served as a place of transition for so many.

This transition space is depicted in Chandler Levack’s new movie Mile-End Kicks, which follows Barbie Ferreira as an aspiring music critic from Toronto who spends a summer in Montreal circa 2011. Soon, Ferreira’s Grace finds herself wondering, “Why do French people hate me?” as Devon Bostick’s Archie explains that Montreal is a place for young people to be poor artists and students before leaving to get serious, grow up, and contribute to society. They don’t make efforts to learn French so they can’t work. They depend on money from their parents. They take, and take, and take, leaving as soon as the city has nothing left to offer them. They will then paint the city as quaint or exotic — from elsewhere.

I’m a native Montrealer. I grew up in Anjou and then Ahuntsic. I went to school in Rosemont, St-Leonard, and NDG. Now I live in Ville-Marie. I used to bike to work at SSENSE’s office in the historic garment district and I used to take the entire orange line to get to my job in the industrial sector near the Orange Julep, where I once chaperoned a bride at the end of the night.

My dating history was born in the Old Port and has featured dangerous post-picnic driving down Mont-Royal, trespassing into stadiums and abandoned buildings, and even a tour of the West Island. I hiked up to the Oratoire St-Joseph and visited the cloistered nuns for my confirmation. Now I visit my great-grandparents in the Mont Royal cemetery and I only go to church for drag brunch.

I grew up next to the oldest church on the island. The sounds of Friday prayer from the mosque next door have replaced the comfort of its bells. When I turned 18, I went to the Village, taking the same bus at the end of the night as I’d take in the morning to get to my internship at Maison de Radio-Canada. Time marches on.

Two women seated on stage, engaged in conversation with a microphone. Behind them, a large screen displays abstract shadows. The stage is dimly lit with blue lights.
“There’s a world where in Montreal, you can have a better life.” Melissa Auf der Maur photographed by Nadia Trudel for NicheMTL.

I love Montreal deeply. I’m trying to build a life, a career, and relationships here. This has meant looking abroad for paid freelance writing opportunities, sacrificing travel to pay my rising Montreal rent, and trying not to get too attached to the Canadian, American, and French expats that surround me.

Coming-of-age narratives are largely capitalistic — they dictate constant growth: I’m already in a relatively big city so I should move to a bigger one with more opportunities to work in media or publishing.

Sometimes I resent these successful Canadian exports, bemoaning that their abandonment hinders the progression of our own cultural sectors. I wonder what would have happened if our country’s comedians didn’t leave to form the foundation of American comedy. There’s a sense of inferiority that infects Canadian culture. It creates stars who grind their way into American, European, and now Asian markets, and it nurtures a stubbornness for those determined to be successful in Canada.

In Montreal, however, there is a self-assurance that prospers thanks to our increased cultural distance. We’re outsiders and we rejoice in it. As Auf der Maur tells the crowd, “I was in Chicago when I explained Montreal to people who don’t know it. I explain that these are people in love with life. They are not working for the man. They were freelancers, and there’s a world where in Montreal, you can have a better life.”

To love Montreal is to love all its flaws and shortcomings as a big city that isn’t too big, with cultures that taunt and flirt with their divide and a transience that’s as tragic as it is thrilling.  Within its confines and embrace, you can be an artist, but you couldn’t sell your soul even if you wanted to.◼︎

The Blue Metropolis Festival runs 23-26 April 2026.

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Desire

Lèche-vitrine, Art Dressé, Espace Transmission, 8-18 April 2026

Catherine Machado performs The Maintenance Worker at Espace Transmission, 8 April 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL

The fear of the wicked, it shall come upon him, but the desire of the righteous shall be granted.
—Proverbs 10:24

The British slang “window-licker” is a derogatory term for a person with diminished mental capacities. It is akin in meaning to the “R” word and considerably more offensive. It indicates the propensity of mentally handicapped people to do foolish things, like, for instance, lick windows.

Since the release of the 1999 Aphex Twin single “Windowlicker,” however, the expression has taken on another connotation: unconsummated desire. The song’s video, which has not aged well, especially presents overt themes of longing which suggest a covert toxicity that accompanies objects of desire. There is an implication as well that desire itself is mindless, that wanting is a form of weakness, ripe for control.

“Window licking” in the 21st century has come to signify still another type of desire — the desire for the representation of an object. “Windows,” after the Microsoft operating system, are what we commonly refer to in the act of looking-through onscreen. Window shopping and window dressing are no longer practices reserved for meatspace. And what appears within the digital window can be infinitely adjusted, altered, augmented, or may in reality not even exist.

The digital world, among other dubious consequences, has exponentially multiplied and convoluted “window licking,” not only in meaning. Nonetheless, the variation of sense in the circuits and wires and distributed networks of interconnected machines always has real-world consequences.

Artificial Intelligence: The Ultimate Disrupter, McGill Institute for the Study of Canada, Mount Royal Center, 10 April 2026

Panel discussion titled 'Artificial Intelligence: The Ultimate Disrupter' at Centre Mont-Royal, featuring four speakers seated on stage with a large screen displaying event details.
From left: Cory Doctorow, Astra Taylor, Yoshua Bengio, and Nahlah Ayed. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“I don’t need anything. I want.”
—Mr. C., Twin Peaks: The Return

At a recent conference on A.I., Director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada Daniel Béland identified two categories of power: power over and power to.

Power over, Béland loosely defined in the negative as the power of one person or group or nation to subjugate and control another. Power to, he described in the positive as the power to assist or overcome or empower another subject.

Judging by the standing-room only crowd, the potentials and perils of A.I. are of immediate interest and acute concern to a broad swath of luminaries across the disciplinary spectrum. I was seated between a retired McGill Engineering professor and the head of a public relations team from a Montreal-based startup, and each of these individuals listened with discernable alarm, as if there were some secret code to be cracked in the participants’ responses.

Artificial Intelligence, like any technology, has the potential to demonstrate, and the capacity to exert, both types of power. In the hands of some users, A.I. could be a force for capital ‘C’ Control in the Burroughsian or Deleuzian sense — protocological, algorithmic, inhuman domination that subjugates us through a series of automated if-then propositions. In other hands, A.I. possesses the power to ease the burden of impossibly tedious or time-consuming labour, to liberate us from work that has always posed an obstacle to progress and growth.

The problem is that human beings designed and implemented A.I. in our own image, so to speak, and as such it aims to satiate our wants more than our needs. A.I. has its own essential desire. It desires to satisfy our desires — if you like this, then you’ll love that — and inoculate us in doing so against the virus of dissatisfaction.

The Intense Leningrad Symphony by Shostakovich, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, Maison Symphonique, 15 April 2026

A full orchestra performing on stage, featuring musicians playing violins, cellos, and other instruments, with sheet music on stands and a conductor directing the performance.
Rafael Payare conducts the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal at Maison Symphonique, 15 April 2026. Antoine Saito for the OSM.

Over the counter, with a shotgun,
Pretty soon, everybody’s got one.
—U2, “Desire”

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberal government made headlines this week by being the first in Canadian history to secure a majority outside of a general election. Through a series of floor-crossings and byelections, the Liberals now occupy 174 out of a possible 343 seats and can operate until October 2029 without facing the threat of a no confidence vote.

Conservative party leader Pierre Poilievre described the Liberal mandate as undemocratic, accusing the party of coordinating “dirty backroom deals.” According to Poilievre, Carney orchestrated his majority by force, using vaguely anti-revolutionary coded rhetoric: “Mark Carney is saying to Canadians: ‘Your vote does not count,’” Poilievre declared on 9 April in Richmond, B.C.

The Liberals’ byelection sweep recalls the famous anecdote about the conversation between Lenin and Trotsky on the eve of the October Revolution in November 1917. According to legend, Lenin, in a fit of uncertainty, asked Trotsky, “What will happen to us if we fail?” To which Trotsky was said to reply, “What will happen to us if we succeed?”

“An act proper is not just a strategic intervention into a situation, bound by its conditions,” writes Slavoj Žižek in Living in the End Times, “it retroactively creates its conditions.” Carney is in the process of performing a similar soft socialist revolution in Canada and, given the populist surges underway in Alberta and Quebec, I for one reluctantly have to admit that I don’t hate it.

Quatuor Molinari : Musique à voir, Fondation Molinari, 29 March 2026

A string quartet performs in front of an audience in an art gallery, with red abstract paintings in the background.
Quatuor Molinari performs at Fondation Molinari, 29 March 2026. Tomas Dessureault for NicheMTL.

“The Buddhist will tell you: ‘All life is pain.’ Pain comes from always wanting things.”
—‘Sally’ Moltisanti, The Many Saints of Newark

We are under the impression, mistaken in my opinion, that if we were only to consume the correct media, desire the proper commodities, collect the right art, listen to the authority-approved music, watch the acceptable films, belong to the prestigious clubs, trust the most reliable experts, keep the most important company, and engage in the most sophisticated sexual escapades, our wanting would be absolved and our suffering effaced. Because if we only want the righteous things, we shall receive them.

Still, it’s not the things that we desire that make us righteous or not; it’s the wanting.

Plural : Foire d’art contemporain à Montréal, Grand Quai du Port de Montréal, 10-12 April 2026

A woman stands beside a large mural depicting a blue depanneur storefront covered in graffiti, with rain falling down.
Gallery view, Jasmin Bilodeau, Dépanneur 2025, photograph printed on polypropylene. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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

The old “wheelbarrow” joke, which I have told many times, hits different in the age of ICE and bears repeating.

A man crosses the border every day carrying a wheelbarrow full of sand. And every day, the crossing guard at his checkpoint dutifully sifts through every grain of that sand and finds nothing.

Day after day, month after month, year after year, the same man transports his wheelbarrow full of sand over the border, in the face of the same increasingly confounded crossing guard, sifting to no avail, evermore certain that he is being deceived by some ingenious smuggling scheme.

Finally, the crossing guard reaches his last day on the job and implores the man with the wheelbarrow: “Please, I’m retiring tomorrow. You must tell me what it is that you have been smuggling through my checkpoint!”

To which the man replies, “I thought it was obvious. I’ve been smuggling wheelbarrows.”◼︎

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: Fatine-Violette Sabiri, Portrait d’une chambre orientale, 2022, Édition 2/3 + 1AP, inkjet printing on archival paper, 24 x 36,” Galerie Eli Kerr, acquired by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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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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Play Recent

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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