Tag Archives: Mothland

Play Recent

Galaxy Brain

Grand Concert Anniversaire UdeM x SMCQ, Salle Claude-Champagne, 15 November 2025

Artist Véronique Girard and the composer Maxime Daigneault. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Is not Rome still Rome
Is not Los Angeles still Los Angeles
Are these really the last days of the Roman Empire
Is not beauty still beauty
And truth still truth
Are there not still poets
Are there not still lovers
—Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Time of Useful Consciousness

In advance of the publication of my first book, Mad Skills, my publisher Repeater Books and I devised a promotional campaign of publicity, ads, and memes to be deployed across social media. To that end, we designed a take on the popular “Galaxy Brain” meme, in which text captions accompany four image panels depicting increasingly illuminated human craniums.

The first caption read, “Discussing People;” the second one, “Discussing Events;” the third, “Discussing Ideas;” and the final galaxy-brain panel declared, “Discussing MIDI.”

2001: A Space Odyssey, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, Maison Symphonique, 19 November 2025

Ben Palmer conducts the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal in performance of the score for 2001: A Space Odyssey, 19 November 2025. Antoine Saito for the OSM.

According to film historians Robert P. Kolker and Nathan Abrams, an earlier and much more explicitly absurd treatment for Stanley Kubrick’s black comedy masterpiece Dr. Strangelove set the movie’s beginning in outer space, recounting the story from the perspective of an alien species that discovers Planet Earth shortly after a nuclear holocaust has exterminated all human life. Had this version of the picture been made, the first title card to scroll onscreen would have read: “Nardac Blefescu Presents … A MACRO-GALAXY-METEOR PICTURE,” a nod to Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.

Kubrick had originally titled the film The Delicate Balance of Terror, pilfered, apparently, from a paper of the same name that the American political scientist Albert Wohlstetter wrote in 1958 for the RAND Corporation. Kolker and Abrams note that Kubrick, regarded widely as a genius, had doodled a number of alternate titles for the film before registering Dr. Strangelove with Paramount Pictures — foremost among them, The Secret Uses of Uranus. Kubrick would incorporate these Sci-Fi Easter eggs into not only 2001, but also the ending of the 2001 film A.I. Artificial Intelligence, a story which Kubrick gifted to his friend and protégé Steven Spielberg.

Pulse Mag Issue #2 Launch, Cardinal Tea Room, 20 November 2025

NicheMTL publisher Ryan Diduck and Pulse Mag co-editor-in-chief Eva Rizk reading each other’s magazines. Photographed for NicheMTL.

The zombie apocalypse is not to be taken literally, as if the world should end up like a scene from some George A. Romero film, with the resurrected roaming the earth eating brains and defying death. Rather, the zombie apocalypse is a metaphor for capitalism, in which a non-living entity — capital — feeds on the planet’s life force, growing ever more powerful with the lives that it devours. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Anti-Oedipus refer to this as a “post-mortem despotism,” where an entity that has long-since died continues to exert authoritarian force over the living.

However, capital is not so much undead as it is never-having-lived and therefor can never be killed. Capital, like one of the all-time great cyber-zombie movie villains, on the order of the T-1000 in Terminator 2: Judgement Day, or the HAL-9000 in Kubrick’s 2001, has to be unplugged from its networks of command and control, neutralized. To execute capital, humanity will have to invent and implement radical economies of alternate value and exchange and slowly replace capital as our global operating system. Furthermore, we need to do this without capital reading our lips.

Impedance of the hyper-capitalist economy requires relentless activity in absence of a product, not destruction but non-production.

Hannah Claus, tsi iotnekahtentiónhatie (Tiohtià:ke), Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery, 19 November 2025 – 7 February 2026

Hannah Claus, Watersong (2025). Photographed for NicheMTL.

Outsmarting A.I. is a fruitless strategy because we created Artificial Intelligence to mimic the human mind. The fact that there is an inherent competition between us and our progeny is indicative of the fundamental conflict present in the human dramatic narrative.

We are born to fathers and mothers whom we will replace, and neither side is entirely comfortable with the arrangement. We self-organize in the form of states and immediately rebel against authority. The authoritarian ruler is not free either, because he is condemned to subdue his subjects. Though capital is not alive in any biological sense, neither is it free. It is, in effect, a slave to its own slaves.

To prevail in the conflict against an artificially intelligent adversary requires becoming-beast, a return to an unsentimental, irrational, and savage, operative mode. The antidote to Artificial Intelligence is not human intelligence, but rather, animal instinct.

M For Mothland with Brainwasher, Boutique Feelings, Mulch, Yoo Doo Right, and Annie-Claude Deschênes, 21 November 2025, La Sala Rossa

Boutique Feelings performs as part of M for Mothland at La Sala Rossa, 21 November 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

There is a brief scene early on in Kubrick’s 2001, a seemingly throwaway shot in which a cougar attacks one of the apes. The simian is unsuspectingly drinking at a shallow pond when, out of the blue, the wildcat jumps from an elevated cliff and assaults the hominid, provoking it into mortal combat. Kubrick cuts the scene before the audience sees an outcome to this battle. But it must be assumed that the ape loses.

Ostensibly, this might be Kubrick’s way of reminding the film’s viewers that humans were not always, and may not be again, at the top of the food chain, without natural predators, safe in our domination over the animal kingdom. On a deeper level, it may signify the order of chaos and possibility that the monolithic object directly opposes in its geometric and determinate perfection. The monolith for Kubrick is undoubtedly no less violent than the wildcat, cast down from above onto its innocent victims.

The monolith of 2001 is not a screen. It is not an antenna. It is not a tablet. It is not a commandment. It is not a repository. It is not an archive. It is not a mirror. It is not a machine. It is not a product.

The monolith is pure machine, pure repository, pure product. It represents order over chaos, the ultimate, the infinite, the real structure of violence. That is why it fascinates and terrifies the apes.

It is not the work of an alien. It is a symbol of alienation, alienness.◼︎

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: Antoine Saito for Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal.

Standard
999 Words

Feelings Sans Frontières: in conversation with Karim Lakhdar

‘Progressive’ has become a slippery adjective.

At one time, it possessed an unambiguously positive connotation. The idea of progress was associated with forward momentum. Progressive characterized clusters of artists who expanded upon musical generic conventions. Scientific and industrial progress carried with them the promise of better living through technology. Progressive described groups of people who embraced inclusive and diverse political values.

Today, though, in the wake of the post-truth age and a regressive undercurrent in politics and art more broadly, reactionary thought sullies progress. Retromaniacal threads mingle through music as cycles of commemoration and nostalgia suck up evermore cultural oxygen. A general mistrust of technology now fuels an impetus to return to some idealized atavistic era. And conservative politics have accrued a caché and co-opted principles that once were considered exclusively progressive.

These are emotional as much as rational debates. How do we feel about the notion of purity? Is it an accumulative or subtractive process? Is purity achieved through permutation or reduction?

Karim Lakhdar, also known as Boutique Feelings, embodies this opposition. His music is at once progressive and traditional. And his multicultural identity — half-Tunisian, half-Italian, raised bilingually in Montreal’s St. Leonard neighbourhood — informs his ideology and worldview.

“There is definitely a history in Montreal of bands on the precipice,” Lakhdar, 37, says. “I’ve always felt that growing up here, there’s lots of scenes, but there’s a lot of bands going outside the box. That’s Montreal’s trademark — this kind of melding of so many styles.”

Lakhdar has recently released an album entitled Shwaya, Shwaya (Arabic for ‘Slowly, Slowly,’) via the Mothland label. It deftly melds a melange of styles including Hip-Hop, Jazz, Psych, and Funk into something that he describes as “progressive.” Progress for Lakhdar evidently represents the freedom to experiment and combine rather than to reduce and return.

“There’s a lot of really interesting music happening here,” he says. “I think there’s this special thing about Montreal. It really has this flair to it. There is this camaraderie happening amongst musicians. There’s this really nice energy and specificity to it. I’m very pro-Montreal. I’ve always loved being here. It’s a giant melting pot.”

A self-taught musician and graduate of Concordia’s Electroacoustics programme, Lakhdar grew up listening to an unlikely combination of Arabic music, 1970s Soul, Classic Rock, and Rock that has since become classic. “I was influenced by my older cousins who lived on the same street. Whether it was The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, The Temptations, or Oasis,” he says. “That was a big one when we were kids. Music has always been peppered throughout my life.”

Lakhdar is a founder member of Atsuko Chiba, a more straight-ahead Prog-oriented outfit, and one of the first bands to land in Mothland’s stable.

“We started jamming with no intention,” he recalls. “We were always tired of waiting for people who really didn’t want to be there. So, we just started and it snowballed from there. Mothland approached us after that and asked us if we wanted to be a part of the label. Obviously we agreed. That’s something we’ve always wanted. And they’re great. We’ve always enjoyed working with them. They really give you the freedom to do what you do.”

In the past few years, Lakhdar has branched off as a solo artist with a unique voice and a more explicitly genre-agnostic operative mode.

“I’ve been creating my stuff all the time on the side without ever giving it a name,” he tells me. He released an eponymous EP in February and has now followed that up with his first full-length album, which launches 21 November at the M For Mothland showcase at La Sala Rossa.

“I recorded it mostly at my house, in my little office,” Lahkdar explains. “We have a studio with the band, but when it comes to working on my own stuff, it’s super spur-of-the-moment. That was the idea of the project, too, to keep things super simple. And really just to capture moments and feelings. We live in an age where you can make things sound incredibly good. You can move things to be perfectly in time. But I think we’re in a moment now where people are a bit annoyed with that. I didn’t focus on making things too crisp or too perfect.”

The relentless pursuit of technical perfection is creativity’s enemy. Either nothing is perfect, or everything is. It’s something that Lakhdar understands intuitively. “I don’t know if it was timing or tone or whatever it was I was after,” he says. “But a lot of the verses are not things that I did a hundred times. I’d write them, perform them, and that was it. Every time I would go back, it would always feel different. So, I ended up leaving a lot of things alone and doing things as they came. Really just leaving them there.”

“I have a duty to talk about politics.” Karim Lakhdar photographed by Aabid Youssef.

Quebec is one year away from a provincial election and seems torn between two competing paths: one reactionary, and the other more explicitly comprehensive and progressive. Montreal has just elected a new mayor, and New York has chosen the city’s first self-described Democratic Socialist.

“In any government,” Lakhdar suggests, “you should come to some kind of an understanding of what actually happens on the ground. Dialogue has to take place in order for things to work properly. You have to hear both sides. And the most important thing is to speak with people involved in that community — whether it be noise, or homelessness, or buildings that nobody rents — the people actually living the reality.”

We spend time talking about why it is that artists appear to feel a more profound sense of political responsibility than those in other professions — even politicians themselves.

“I have a duty to talk about politics,” asserts Lakhdar. “To me, it’s really important. Even if it’s not directly or specifically political, it’s always embedded in what I’m saying, or the music I’m creating. I can’t do one without the other.”◼︎

Boutique Feelings performs as part of M For Mothland, 21 November 2025 at La Sala Rossa, 4848 Boul. Saint-Laurent.

Shwaya, Shwaya is out now via Mothland.

Cover image: Karim Lakhdar photographed by Aabid Youssef.

Standard
999 Words

Cause & Effect: in conversation with Susil Sharma

Tribal allegiance is a powerful impetus behind the construction of various cultural scenes.

Particularly within independent music communities, a sense of individual identity has historically been shaped as much by rejecting as embracing competing conventions. Dance music afficionados aren’t so much into guitar-driven rock and roll; rock and rollers snub hop-hop; rap kids don’t listen to punk, and so on. Or at least that’s how these communities were once constituted.

But nowadays on the island of Montreal, diverse scenes are less islands unto themselves and at least mutually aware if not entirely accepting of one another. This interpenetration arguably makes for more exciting, innovative, and genre-acrostic music in which unexpected influences overlap and bleed into each other.

This is the case for Karma Glider, the shoegaze-inspired, post-punk-tinged, pop-inflected project fronted by Fredericton-born and Montreal-based Susil Sharma. A Canadian of Nepalese descent transplanted from the East Coast and making a mutant form of Britpop in a French-speaking province is exemplary of Montreal’s multivalent cultural Venn diagram.

Karma Glider’s Mothland-released debut LP is the evocatively titled From the Haze of a Revved Up Youth. Sharma, 37, realized it together with producer and engineer Joseph Donovan, and Adiran Popovich of Tricky Woo fame, who now operate Mountain City, a studio located in N.D.G.

“I’ve been recording with them for years,” Sharma says. “They really feel like partners in crafting sound. At one point I went a little Kevin Shields studio madness energy, getting obsessed. I took all the guitar tracks down and redid some stuff. I favour recording a little more and increasingly I’m trying to savour the writing process.”

The LP skilfully traverses the landscape of Sharma’s most potent influences. “I love My Bloody Valentine,” Sharma tells me. “I’m really into Spiritualized and Jesus and Mary Chain. Primal Scream. Being 15 years old in 2003, The Strokes are woven into my musical genetics. The Velvet Underground, The Stooges, Patti Smith — a lot of that New York proto-punk scene is really important to me.”

Sharma relocated to Montreal two decades ago, “for school, on paper,” he explains, and quickly fell into a musical life.

“I went to McGill for one semester,” Sharma says, “but I dropped out right away and joined a band. It just felt like something else was happening. I was working at American Apparel at the time. Vice was the preeminent media. It felt like Montreal was the place to be for a young person trying to make art.”

From the Haze of a Revved Up Youth reflects on that era with a sentimental but not saccharine nostalgic sensibility. Its songs are concise studies featuring melodic riffs and hooks that gesture both back in time and forward at once and set Karma Glider apart from explicitly retromaniacal fare.

“I’ve got two older sisters,” says Sharma. “They’re six and 12 years older and they were showing me a lot of punk music. Grunge. They were around for Nirvana and stuff. They passed on Fugazi tapes and Sonic Youth tapes. I was absorbing all of that when I was 14 or 15. Everyone else was listening to Top 40, and being into counterculture felt like an identity, a special thing, like you belonged to something.”

Sharma took sporadic guitar lessons from a family friend, but is otherwise an autodidact, he tells me. “Both my parents are from Nepal, so we got a lot of Nepalese and Indian music. There wasn’t much common ground. Everyone in the family likes Neil Young, I guess.”

Attending all-ages gigs became a formative part of Sharma’s youthful musical experience. “There was a dead zone in New Brunswick, but there were cool bands coming from Nova Scotia,” he recalls. “I loved Sloan and all the Murderecords stuff. In Fredericton, there was mostly a lot of speed metal and a lot of jam bands. It felt pretty detached from what else was going on.”

“That’s success now — belonging to this community on the grass-roots level.” Susil Sharma photographed by Yang Shi.

In 2005, Spin Magazine published a profile on Montreal’s music scene calling the city the “next Seattle.” Bands like Arcade Fire and Wolf Parade were leading a new wave of rock coming out of the post-Referendum depression that began on the Plateau in the late 1990s.

“That was a huge reason why I moved to Montreal,” Sharma says. “There was an energy to Montreal at that point that probably drew me. Then 10 years after there was another wave. Now there’s another wave. It’s such a cyclical thing. Especially because it’s a city of expats and it’s always reinventing itself.”

This city’s celebrated cultural scenes have perennially been a draw for artists like Sharma looking to achieve a measure of success and satisfaction. Those measures have evolved over the decades, however.

“When I was young, it was all about making it in this industry-standard way,” Sharma declares. “Now, I play small shows in all these venues where I’ve known the promoters and the bartenders and the musicians for years. That’s success now — belonging to this community on the grass-roots level. In our world now, that’s lacking. We’re pretty lucky in Montreal to be able to bond over something that at its core is done from an authentic place. The romantic endeavour,” he admits, “rather than a commercial enterprise is what attracts me.”

Montreal more than other cities seems to thrive on an outsider ethos that relies less on algorithmic forms of discovery and favours more organic sensations. This may help to explain why artists like Sharma thrive here: Montreal is a delicate ecosystem whose constant pressures also ensure art’s perpetual survival, adaptability, and resilience.

“There’s demonstrable proof that some artists have really altered the cultural fabric for good,” Sharma suggests. “I’ve been considering art more through the roll of criticism of capitalism lately. I think being born when I was, my idea of what an artist should be was based on commerce. Selling things. But there’s really a crucial role to play in the community and the local scene. I think authenticity and good music and word-of-mouth will never be replaced. People are looking for something more real.”◼︎

Karma Glider launches From the Haze of a Revved Up Youth Friday 5 September 2025 with Shunk and Poolgirl at Casa del Pololo, 4873 St Laurent.

Cover image: Susil Sharma photographed by Yang Shi.

Standard