Tag Archives: Orchestre Classique de Montreal

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About Face

Orchestre Classique de Montréal with Marie-Josée Lord and conductor Kalena Bovell, Salle Pierre-Mercure, 5 February 2026

Marie-Josée Lord and Kalena Bovell with the OCM at Salle Pierre-Mercure. Photographed for NicheMTL.

What began anecdotally as suspicion about facial bias on social media was confirmed in 2021 when Bogdan Kulynych, a Ukrainian graduate student studying at EFPL University in Switzerland, proved a preference for lighter skinned faces in (the company formerly known as) Twitter’s cropping algorithm. Twitter’s photo-sharing system also seemed to like younger, slimmer faces more than older and wider ones, with those faces left out more regularly from image-based tweets. Women’s faces, too, enjoyed preferential treatment, appearing more frequently in Twitter’s new recommendation-based feeds.

Kulynych noted that these facial biases were not accidental but rather designed to maximize engagement and thus profit for the company. Twitter paid Kulynych a $3,500 reward for discovering the bias and apologized in a statement, claiming, “…we’ve got more analysis to do.” On 25 April 2022, before they could undertake that analysis, Twitter’s Board unanimously accepted Elon Musk’s hostile takeover bid for $44 billion.

Less than four years later, Musk has changed the name of the company to X — no relation whatsoever to the rating — and developed a subscription-based A.I. service that when prompted to do so creates sexualized deepfake images of real people without their consent.

Bibi Club with Fionavair, Pub Pit Caribou, 13 February 2026

Bibi Club perform at Pub Pit Caribou for Taverne Tour, 13 February 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Faces are the most instantly recognizable physical features humans have. A number of studies demonstrate that infants show a visual preference for their mother’s faces within hours after birth, effectively making babies the first and most reliable facial recognition software.

The subtlest facial movements can indicate avalanches of emotion, and we intuitively recognize, interpret, and act upon these behavioural cues. More than any other nonverbal signs, we build bonds and trust people based upon their faces and what they communicate to us.

During the coronavirus pandemic, witnesses were asked to testify in court trials wearing face masks, and criminologists questioned whether these masks would affect the credibility of their testimony. A group of American and Canadian researchers, including Vincent Denault from the Université de Montréal and host of the podcast Beyond Lie Cues, published an experiment designed to isolate masks as a specific variable affecting the believability of a witness’s testimony. To their surprise, they found that the difference was negligible.

As important as faces are for identification, it is not imperative to see a face to believe a story. Masks appear to conceal neither lies nor the truth.

No Hay Banda with Karen Ng and Ida Toninato & Jennifer Thiessen, La Sala Rossa, 9 February 2026

Jennifer Thiessen and Ida Toninato perform for No Hay Banda at La Sala Rossa, 9 February 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Guitar face” is the phenomenon of involuntary and often hilarious facial expressions that guitarists pull when performing on their instruments. But it can also be applied to other musicians, too, and even extended to non-musical pursuits. We’ve all seen someone sticking out their tongue or biting their lower lip when they’re involved in a complex task.

“Laptop face” is the increasingly common occurrence of a laptop musician expressing facial acrobatics whilst manipulating a trackpad or keyboard. Of course, there is also “saxophone face,” the extreme inflation of the cheeks which saxophonists cannot avoid. Among the rarer instrument faces is “viola d’amore” face, another level of spontaneous expression akin to a plate spinner adding heroic complexity to an already demanding feat.

Nights in Fairyland by Will Straw, Milieux Resource Room, 13 February 2026

Will Straw holds a copy of his book, Nights in Fairyland, 13 February 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

When we become attracted to another person, we are usually attracted first and foremost to their face. There can be other physical attributes that one considers striking, many of which are well-known and need not be relisted here. But the face is the interface beneath which the operating system functions, so to speak, giving an indication to its innerworkings and alternately concealing and revealing our true character.

“Gaydar” is the term generally applied to a person’s visual ability to accurately discern sexual orientation in women and men. Nicholas O. Rule and Ravin Alaei in the Department of Psychology at University of Toronto published a study in 2016 that suggests that the general population is able to predict sexual orientation at a rate better than chance, indicating that there are certain facial features more frequently attributed to gay people.

Urban Dictionary entries are instructive and reflect how real people variously define and use language. At the time of writing, there are several more or less sensational definitions of the term “gayface.”

One definition indicates that gayface is an almost obligatory “look that gay men have that enables other gay men to quickly identify them as ‘family.’” This definition suggests that gay people have better gaydar than straight folks. Another less anticipated entry defines gayface as a variant of blackface, in which a person problematically dons a particular genre of facial expression for derogatory effect. Still, another entry simply states: “Anyone that goes by the name of Joseph.”

Richard Avedon: Immortal: Portraits of Aging, 1951-2004, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 10 February – 9 August 2026

Jacob Israel Avedon (detail), Richard Avedon at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Photographed for NicheMTL.

The notion that time is art fascinates me. Age changes all things, and the ways in which age manifests materially could be considered instinctive creativity, nature as artist. This is why antiques are more valuable with their patina preserved.

Art restoration is its own artform and needs to be practiced sparingly and only when necessary to not lose the work of art to history in its entirety. A subset of art restoration is film preservation, for which students can study to earn a degree, most notably at the UCLA Film and Television Archive, the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation, or Toronto Metropolitan University in Canada.

Film, though, is a different medium than digital image reproduction and indicates an age even if it is entirely contemporaneous. 35-millimeter photographs taken today somehow convey a deeper sense of history than iPhone photos do.

Perhaps that is because they fix moments specifically in time, whereas digital images are infinitely manipulable. One can endlessly Photoshop a jpeg. But prints begin to show their age the second they’re struck, forever decaying.◼︎

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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: William S. Burroughs by Richard Avedon at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Photographed for NicheMTL

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Massive Lectures

Soldiering On: notes on nostalgia versus tradition

“It is because nothing is equal, because everything bathes in its difference, its dissimilarity and its inequality, even with itself, that everything returns.”
—Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition

“I don’t have any recollection of that at all.”
—Delbert Grady, The Shining

At this time of year, many of us are likely consumed with traditions.

For instance, hosting holiday parties and baking cutout cookies and sipping rum-spiked eggnog whilst wearing ugly sweaters and spinning Phil Spector’s Christmas album on vinyl have outlasted the ultrahip disdainful stance once held against these perennially problematic traditions.

Old-fashioned entertaining is hot again. So hot that an original shrink-wrapped copy of Martha Stewart’s 1982 debut book, Entertaining, was recently listed on eBay for $1,784.99. It seems as if the traditional decorating of yuletide evergreens is, well, evergreen.

Young people today appear more willing than previous generations to overlook, say, tree-hugging, or the Christian church’s misgivings, or Martha Stewart’s stint in prison for felony conspiracy, for the sake of revelling blissfully in the comfort of seasonal traditions.

And I’m here for it. I, too, have succumbed in 2025 to a host of holiday traditions that I once considered a tad naff.

What is it about traditions that are so ambivalently repellant and attractive? Why now is there a marked turn back toward them? And what is the difference between tradition and nostalgia?

Rafael Payare conducts the OSM in a performance of Handel’s Messiah. Antoine Saito for the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal.

Nostalgia to me is a misguided strategy for enduring the unendurable. A challenging present is apparently rendered tolerable by escaping into a mythologized past.

Retromania and poptimism characterized the first two and a half decades of 21st century cultural production in which the relative safety of reconfiguring historical fashions was preferable to the risk of devising new ones. The nostalgic compulsion at once mourns the loss of a better future and replaces the utopian imagination. “Those who can’t remember the past,” writes Mark Fisher in Ghosts of My Life, “are condemned to have it resold to them forever.”

Close to home, we are seeing the resurgence of separatist sentiments in Quebec and Alberta, a local franchise of nostalgia’s troubling recurrences.

On the global stage, we have recently witnessed the acceptance of poisonous nostalgia writ large in the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where the nostalgic embrace of Soviet-era imperialism is proposed as the solution to the sprawling 35-year disarray surrounding the union’s dissolution.

Similarly, the “again” that punctuates the campaign slogan that the despot-in-chief south of the border adopted is evidence that a return to some idealized nationalistic standard is preferable to facing an unpredictable, unrecognizable future.

These political specimens invoke the most terrifying precedents in modern memory. Germany in the early 1930s was gripped by nostalgic hysteria that enabled unspeakable horrors. And fuelled by cultural nostalgia, Stalin concurrently engineered a famine-genocide that decimated Ukraine.

It is tempting to conflate nostalgia with tradition. Trump, like Joseph Stalin and Adolph Hitler, veils his reactionary ideologies in a mock defence of the latter.

Culturally speaking, the popularity in 2025 of, for example, the band Geese — a sevenfold throwback to The Strokes, and Television before them, and Iggy and the Stooges before that — could be considered an affirmation of traditional Rock & Roll when it is really more like skipping stones over lake nostalgia.

The recurrent subject of authenticity is moot as a marker of value, too: there is no doubt that both Rock and Roll and genocide are authentic. Tradition relies equally upon authenticity to produce its legitimacy. Still, nostalgia and tradition for me represent the opposition between security and freedom, the tension between control society versus genuine liberation.

Here, we must pronounce a distinction between nostalgia and tradition.

Consider these two polarities against the fight-or-flight instinct, the classic responses to stress triggers. Doubtless, the uncertainty of contemporary life is a source of significant stress. Yet, where nostalgia is analogous to flight, a retreat from the frontlines of progressive momentum, tradition represents the fight for some nonetheless forward-facing stance through social cohesion and historical continuity. Nostalgia withdraws, while tradition soldiers on.

The Nutcracker in performance at Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier. Sasha Onyshchenko for Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal.

Personally, I have three Christmas traditions that are less an expression of nostalgia for me, and more an articulation of stubborn perseverance.

The first involves attending a performance of Handel’s Messiah. This year, I accomplished this tradition twice, once at Maison Symphonique with the OSM conducted by Rafael Payare, and again the very next day with the Orchestre Classique de Montréal’s annual rendition in the crypt of St. Joseph’s Oratory. Although I have heard this Oratorio dozens of times, the tradition of it ironically immunizes me against menacing forces that lie beyond my control, insulating me from the interminable doomscroll.

My second holiday tradition is to see The Nutcracker, the ballet choreographed to Tchaikovsky’s renowned suite. I ticked this one off my holiday list on opening night thanks to a luxurious performance by Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal at Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier.

This tradition has its origins in early childhood, when my parents took me and I would inevitably fall asleep during the first half, the kaleidoscopic visual aesthetics and hypnotic sonic rhythms lulling me in my comfortable auditorium seat with abundant winter heating into near-narcotic repose. Now, it is a new Christmas tradition to watch other people’s children slumbering through the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy.

Third and likely counterintuitive is my annual screening of The Shining. More than It’s a Wonderful Life, Kubrick’s masterpiece is a Christmas movie par excellence. Don’t @ me.

Plus, this particular holiday tradition I realized just now speaks most directly to the concept itself of nostalgia versus tradition. “The nostalgia of The Shining,” writes Fredric Jameson in a 1981 essay, “takes the peculiar form of an obsession with the last period in which class consciousness is out in the open.” Jack Torrance is an avatar embodying the return of the repressed, now manifesting in the MAGA movement’s nostalgic preoccupation that in effect has underpinned capitalism’s violence in every one of its miserable iterations.

Through the exercise of tradition, I identify three important impulses: chemistry, preservation, and ritual. Chemistry precipitates a reaction and must be performed in a similar way every time to produce the desired result. Something like baking Christmas cookies. Preservation — words in print or music on vinyl — ensures the recognition of vital forms of sociocultural memory and the immediacy of material presence. And ritual, like decorating trees, is the irrational incantation of magic that serves to reorder chaos, just as the moon’s gravity reorders the ocean’s turbulence here on earth.

While pragmatic in function, these three impulses supersede logic and transcend analysis. And yet we analyse. Because it is tradition.

Instead of viewing nostalgia as a net negative, I prefer to interpret it as a harbinger of revolution. Nostalgia always precedes the triumph of the impossible. Traditionally, we tend to go back just before breaking through. Tradition is immanence anticipated. It resists melancholia, decline, failure. The antidote for simulation is reality, if even reality relived.

This is why I routinely revisit The Messiah, The Nutcracker, and The Shining — and Christmas baking and holiday entertaining and Martha Stewart. Not out of sentimentality for some bygone past, but rather, with a hope that the future, unshackled through chemistry, preservation, and ritual from the past, will once again achieve its traditional greatness.◼︎

Cover image: Bernardo Betancor photographed by Sasha Onyshchenko for Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal.

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999 Words

High Fidelity: notes on multiple Messiahs

He that hath ears to hear, let him hear. —Matthew 11:15

Faith is a word with a number of competing definitions.

Most commonly, we use it interchangeably with the word ‘belief,’ to describe our confidence in something intangible. These beliefs, too, can vary in significance.

We’re not certain, for example, of something as inconsequential as the metro arriving when it’s late — which in Montreal is often. We take it on faith.

Increasing on the scale of importance, we can’t be positive that our plane won’t crash. But we have faith that it will land at its intended destination, and so we faithfully climb aboard. We can’t be sure that a romantic partner won’t betray us. We must believe that they’ll be faithful.

Perhaps a more apt synonym for faith might be ‘adherence.’ Audio culture proves instructive in this definition of fidelity. When we say, for instance, that a recording is ‘high-fidelity,’ what we mean is that it adheres faithfully to the original sound.

A pristine 180-gram vinyl spun on a hi-fi sound system may make us believe, if wishfully, that Miles Davis could be right there in the room. It accomplishes this because the record adheres precisely to the veritable timbre of Davis’s trumpet.

Or, we could say that this or that performance of the Messiah adheres more or less to Handel’s score and original libretto and therefore is more or less faithful.

Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Anna-Sophie Neher, and Emily D’Angelo perform Handel’s Messiah at Notre-Dame Basilica. François Goupil for Orchestre Métropolitain.

Likely few if any of us who listen to Miles Davis ever witnessed him play live. And nobody attending performances of the Messiah nowadays saw Handel. But we believe that these recordings and performances adhere to the original — that they are in one way or another faithful.

Three recent holiday season performances in Montreal of Handel’s Messiah espoused various degrees of what we might call fidelity. First, there was the Orchestre Metropolitain’s sober Messiah rendition conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin on December 11th at Notre-Dame Basilica. Then, there was the Orchestre Classique de Montréal’s solemn version which Roï Azoulay conducted in the crypt of Saint-Joseph’s Oratory on the 12th. And finally, there was two-time Juno winner Maestro Matthias Maute’s fast and loose iteration with Ensemble Caprice on 22 December at Maison Symphonique.

Each possessed their virtues. But the ultimate conundrum remains: was one Messiah most faithful to Handel’s initial idea? The answer to this riddle depends upon an assortment of factors.

First is the location. Since Handel’s Messiah is a work of Christian theology, it should probably be performed in a church. This rules out Maestro Maute’s version.

Then, the question becomes, in which church should it be performed? Notre-Dame Basilica was constructed in the Baroque style, nearer to Handel’s historical timeframe and aesthetic tradition. But because of its ornamental composition, the massive reverb of a larger auditorium like Notre-Dame’s muddies all of the score’s intricate notes. Plus, the Messiah is technically an oratorio, which logically demands an oratory. So, the crypt at Saint-Joseph’s emerges as the early frontrunner.

The Orchestre Classique de Montréal performs Handel’s Messiah in the crypt of St. Joseph’s Oratory. Brent Calis for the OCM.

The second factor is the performance itself. Although it has been adapted over the centuries for enormous orchestras and choirs, Handel wrote the Messiah for a decidedly modest, chamber-sized ensemble of only nine instruments: two trumpets, two oboes, two violins, viola, basso continuo, and timpani. The Orchestre Metropolitain comprises nearly 40 musicians, whereas the OCM and Ensemble Caprice are less numerous, producing a tighter, more focussed, and more faithful sound.

However, each of the three sections ought also to be performed in their entirety, without interruption. Ensemble Caprice took liberties with the compositional structure, omitting a handful of segments for brevity, and both the EC and the OCM’s audiences applauded after nearly every individual piece. Maestro Nézet-Séguin literally frowns upon ovations between refrains. So, the OM probably remained more faithful to Handel’s original intentions.

Another factor is how closely the performance sticks to the piece’s compositional spirit. Handel’s score was written in only 24 days, which some scholars interpreted as celestial inspiration, and others, including librettist Charles Jennens, regarded as careless haste. Either way, it is a work reflecting exuberant joy, revolving around the famous Hallelujah chorus, perhaps the best-known piece of western music ever written, and should be executed with equivalent boisterous enthusiasm.

Despite Nézet-Séguin’s irrepressible gusto, the Orchestre Metropolitain’s performance topped the running times at over three hours, a long show by any measure. Comparatively, the Ensemble Caprice’s concert sped by in under 80 minutes. The OCM’s rendition, however, moved at a lively and consistent pace and spanned a reasonable two and a half hours.

The Orchestre Metropolitain provided no information about the period of the instruments upon which its members performed. But the OCM was careful to publish a list in its programme notes about the provenance of each stringed instrument, including the age of their bows, and Maestro Maute went so far as to emphasize that Ensemble Caprice featured historically consistent instruments.

Ensemble Caprice performs Handel’s Messiah at Maison Symphonique. Tam Lan Truong for Ensemble Caprice.

Consequently, it’s difficult given the above criteria to judge which Messiah was indeed the best. If we gauge by the venue’s acoustics, the OCM at the oratory doubtless wins. But if we decide through adherence to the score, the OM’s note-for-note reproduction demonstrates superior fidelity. And if we factor in the oratorio’s energetic essence and attention to its epoch, Ensemble Caprice prevails.

Herein lies the metaphor: it seems that the problem is not the idea of Messianism, but the notion that we should adhere to only one. Is a multiplicity of Messiahs possible? As Rabbi Robert N. Levine suggests, could we be them?

The Abrahamic Jews supposed that a divine Messiah would unite their tribes and usher in a new post-sin consciousness. Jewish Christians 2000 years ago believed that Jesus of Nazareth was the guy. A few centuries later, Muslims thought that Jesus was satisfactory, but that Muhammad was the true and ultimate prophet.

If God created us in His image, then we each have the potential — and the responsibility — to be the Messiah we want to see in the world. That requires a higher fidelity.◼︎

Cover image: The vaulted ceiling at Montreal’s Notre-Dame Basilica. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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Memories Trapped in Time

Sarah McLachlan with Feist, Place Bell, 20 June 2024

Sarah McLachlan rehearses during soundcheck at Place Bell, 20 June 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Nowadays, the first thing that we do when a performer appears onstage is pull out our phones and start snapping photos. To the extent that it’s become cliché, people don’t watch or listen to concerts anymore, preferring instead to capture and replay and transmit them.

Photographs, the American critic Susan Sontag wrote, “do not explain; they acknowledge.” Before Sontag, the photographer Diane Arbus observed that “a photograph is a secret about a secret.”

When we share photographs online, or take them for ourselves for posterity, we’re revealing the most quotidian secret — that we looked at something without seeing it. We listened to something without hearing it. We experienced something simultaneously from a place of aesthetic interest and safe emotional distance, the camera eye within the eye of the storm, looking out.

Photographs freeze moments, only to be thawed out moments later.

Yoo Doo Right with Shunk and Aspirateur, La Sotterenea, 12 June 2024

Shunk perform at La Sotterenea for the Suoni per il Popolo Festival, 12 June 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Owning the means of production used to be a surefire antidote to capitalist exploitation.

But, like a virus, capitalism demonstrates strategies that after hereditary reiteration become impervious to resistance. One such tactic is to devalue the product, making the means of production irrelevant.

Musicians, for instance, benefited in the 1980s and ‘90s from the advent of home recording equipment and the explosion of “prosumer” electronics. Rather than rely upon expensive instruments, major labels, and costly studios, bands could produce professional-sounding records domestically with cheap gear, burn them themselves to CD, and distribute these CDs within independent retail networks.

Then, musical recordings became untethered from media, making it unnecessary to buy CDs. In absence of the product, costs fell, and value evaporated.

What value was left over moved up the productive chain to the platform’s manufacturers — computer and software makers, namely. First Apple, then Spotify, extracted value out of the physical product. Now, artificial intelligence is extracting every bit of residual value from virtual products, too.

With nothing to continue to produce it, and nobody left to consume it, capital can only cannibalize itself into ultimate starvation. Capitalism prioritizes its own survival over that of even its own participants, dooming it as a societal model.

There is nothing cheaper than infinite wealth.

Maureen, Concordia University MFA Grad Show, Ateliers Belleville, 12 June 2024

Three Tableaux, Pablo Perez Diaz and Paras Vijan. Part of Maureen IX Concordia MFA Grad Show, Ateliers Belleville, 12 June 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

The first mammal to be cloned from an adult somatic cell was Dolly, the sheep. It is indicative that those who thought it would be smart to clone animals should have chosen such a symbolic inaugural species as sheep — to keep the slaughterhouses in business, I imagine. They’re not going to start by cloning wolves, are they?

Backxwash with Quinton Barnes and Magella, La Sala Rossa, 21 June 2024

Quinton Barnes performs at La Sala Rossa for the Suoni per il Popolo Festival, 21 June 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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

In his landmark metaphorical novel, The Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison warns against smoking marijuana.

“To see around corners is enough,” Ellison writes. “But to hear around them is too much; it inhibits action.”

The time for action is upon us. Still, in Canada, we spend half our lives hibernating from extreme cold. Now, we’re spending the other half hibernating from extreme heat.

However, as Ellison reassures us, “A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.”

Une Vie à l’Opera: Hommage à Joseph Rouleau, Orchestre Classique de Montréal, Maison Symphonique, 18 June 2024

The Orchestre Classique de Montréal performs with Soprano Aline Kutan, Mezzo-Soprano Mireille Lebel, Tenor Eric Laporte, Baritone Philippe Sly, and Conductor Jacques Lacombe at Maison Symphonique, 18 June 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

As a child, my mom used to sing me a little song. Its words went like this:

“I have two apples and I am glad / you have no apples and that’s too bad / I’ll share my apples ‘cause I love you / and now you have a nice apple, too.”

Anything can replace “apples” in the lyrics.

The moral of this song, of course, is to teach children that one is enough, especially when your neighbour has none.

What I didn’t realize as I got older is that literally nobody else knows this song. When I went to school and started to share my proverbial apples, the other kids snatched both of them and said, “what else you got?” So, I took to hoarding apples, building walls around the orchard, not letting my pies cool on the windowsill.

Though recently, I’m beginning to remember the wisdom of that song. It’s not about teaching kids to share apples or whatever. It’s about love as life’s true motivator.

The only way for us to survive as a species is to give more and accept less. We’re told that that’s counterintuitive, but intuition is precisely what instructs us that incessant accumulation cannot possibly prevail. That little voice inside, what once was called “conscience” or “ethics,” is the suppressed sixth sense.

Erika Angell with Sarah Rossy and Kahero:ton, La Salla Rossa, 17 June 2024

Erika Angell performs with Mili Hong at La Sala Rossa for the Suoni per il Popolo Festival, 17 June 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

In the David Lynch-directed 1997 film Lost Highway, the saxophonist Fred Madison and his wife Renee receive a series of mysterious surveillance videotapes delivered anonymously to their doorstep. The recordings become increasingly vexing as each new tape reveals more and more of the couple’s private lives.

The police officers whom the Madisons call in to investigate these unexplained occurrences immediately begin to suspect that Fred himself may be responsible for producing the recordings. They ask him if he owns a video camera, to which Madison responds in the negative. He refuses, Renee confirms, to keep one in the house.

“I like to remember things my own way,” Madison declares.

The flatfoot persists and Madison elaborates, “How I remember them. Not necessarily the way they happened.”

The German author W.G. Sebald’s first novel, Vertigo, written in 1990, opens with a similar theme. A young French officer in Napoleon’s battalion, Marie Henri Beyle, finds in his recollections as an older man that the engravings of fine views that he collected on his youthful conquests began to stand in for his actual memories. Beyle’s impressions “had been erased,” Sebald writes, “by the very violence of their impact.”

It seems as though media — whether early 19th century engravings or late 20th century videocassettes — serve to fix our memories of places, faces, and events in time. We assume that the past, unlike the future, is already written, unalterable, especially in the presence of material evidence. Courts certainly favour photographs over testimony, for instance, as two people’s accounts often differ, sometimes wildly, depending upon their varying perspectives.

Is it possible that in absence of images, history can be as vertiginous as the road ahead, that detours through the past are conceivable, that just as we can’t anticipate whatever may be around the next corner, the unexpected works both forwards and backwards?◼︎

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

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

Cover image: Erika Angell performs at La Sala Rossa for the Suoni per il Popolo Festival, 17 June 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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At State’s End

Moishes, 5 November 2023

The hype was overwhelming.

Advertorials in all the major (and minor) newspapers — about the renovations; about how much money the chandelier cost; about the relocation of some storied Montreal institution. As if they had dismantled the entire Jacques Cartier Bridge and rebuilt it piece-by-piece on Square Victoria. Who wouldn’t want to try it out?

The first time I went to the new Moishes, the ambiance was over-the-top, a caricature of Montreal’s corporate and financial elite, drinking and dining and swine-ing in luxury, ironically adjacent to the site of Montreal’s Occupy Wall Street and Maple Spring sit-ins in 2012, and today looking right smack in the face of the masses who find it harder and harder to afford the basic quotidian necessities, never mind drop a hundred bucks on a steak.

I sat at the bar and ordered a filet mignon and fries. Directly across from me sat a gentleman of about sixty years of age, who was joined momentarily by, shall we say, a young lady of the evening — and then, a few moments later, by another. I might have been embarrassed, disgusted, and impressed in equal measure. The audacity.

But this is not about prostitutes. It’s about meat.

Moishes was supposed to do one thing and do it right: serve a perfect steak, preferably with fries. Perhaps they were still working out the kinks. But that day, my fries arrived cold, and the filet was hockey-puck overdone.

Moishes had apparently nailed every detail of absurd fine-dining opulence — the renovations, the chandelier, the guy with a hooker on each arm — except for the food.

Fortunately, though, this story does have a happy ending. I was invited back by an overly apologetic manager and am pleased to report that Moishes now has the food sorted, too. So, if you’re the kind of person who drives a dirty Lamborghini SUV in the wintertime and likes life a bit bloody, I cannot recommend the place highly enough.

Tribute to György Ligeti, Jean-Michaël Lavoie conducting musicians of the OSM, Bourgie Hall, 4 November 2023

Ligeti’s unsettling 20th century Classical works have gained popularity in the public consciousness in part due to their inclusion in famous film soundtracks like 2001 and The Shining, directed by Stanley Kubrick, and more recently, in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return.

But Ligeti’s orchestral music is cinematic enough on its own to summon in the imaginary an interdimensional portal, or some deranged lunatic’s interior mind. They are enough to affect you on a visceral level, enough to make your stomach turn in sympathy with their wonderful cacophonous atonality.

Esmerine, La Sala Rossa, 2 December 2023

Esmerine perform 2 December 2023. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Esmerine was the first band I ever saw perform live in Montreal, in about 2004 or ‘5, at La Sala Rossa. It was to support the launch of their latest album, Aurora. The bar seemed vast to me at that time, and the band possessed a reverent mystique, percussionist Bruce Cawdron solemnly caressing a xylophone with cello bows, emitting a glass-like drone, conjuring an enchanted atmosphere in this surreal space.

You could still smoke indoors in those days. That might have been part of the effect.

This time around, nearly 20 years later, the air was clearer, but the room appeared smaller somehow, more intimate. The band was set up in front of the stage, not on it. I perched myself about six feet away and listened as they played me back in time to my first Montreal gig and a baptism of sorts into a very special scene of talented artists. I felt lucky to be there then. I still do.

Afterwards I spoke with Cawdron. I told him about the Aurora show 20 years ago and what it meant to me, and furthermore, that prior to Esmerine, I had never seen anyone play a xylophone with bows before. Cawdron, gathering XLR cables into neat coils, winked and said, “you still haven’t seen anyone play a xylophone with bows, because this is a marimba.”

Monnomest, Productions Supermusique, Espace Orange, 23 November 2023

Le Vivier showcases some of the nuttiest, wackiest, nichest contemporary music in Montreal, and although the group was founded in 2007, I had never heard of it before this year.

Maybe it’s because the English and the French experimental music communities don’t intersect much; maybe it’s because I simply wasn’t paying attention to anything until after the pandemic, when I started paying attention to everything. But still, it reminds me that there are always whole worlds in this city to discover.

Hidden Intention, Error 403, 25 November 2023

Ky (right) and Eejungmi (left) perform 25 November 2023. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Loft parties are an integral part of Montreal’s fertile nightlife and Hidden Intention, the newish series of DM-for-address get-togethers organized by Nennan’s Amy Macdonald, is a promising continuation of that longstanding tradition. If you want something done, do it yourself.

Roger Tellier-Craig, Conservatoire de Musique de Montréal, 7 December 2023

Roger Tellier-Craig performs 7 December 2023. Photographed for NicheMTL.

It’s high time that Roger Tellier-Craig is taken as seriously by Montreal as he takes his work. There is no more dedicated artist to the lineage, the craft, and the precision of an artform.

Tellier-Craig’s sounds are presented, aptly for this media-saturated and constantly distracted generation, suitably out-of-context. Some of them sound metallic and sharp; others wet and cold; others still seem warm, soft, and round. But none of them ostensibly have origins. There is no guitar to be found in there, no snare drum, neither rhyme nor reason, save for Tellier-Craig’s own immutable internal rhythms.

Handel’s Messiah, Orchestre Classique de Montreal, St. Joseph’s Oratory, 14 December 2023

The Orchestre Classique de Montréal performing Handel’s Messiah in the Crypt of St. Joseph’s Oratory. Photographed for NicheMTL.

As a child, I believed that justice existed independent of us. There was some universal set of rules that governed right and wrong, and sooner or later, those rules would be applied. If you committed fault, you would eventually face this thing called justice. You couldn’t just invade a sovereign nation, say, or commit genocide, because justice would prevent it.

As I get older, however, I have come to understand that justice is something we ourselves make or break. There may be some common, universal sense of right and wrong, but it is human people who have to interpret and apply it. If something unjust happens and nobody stops it, justice cannot magically step in.

Justice is not the light itself; rather, truth needs the light shone upon it to become just. In pursuit of justice, we either direct or misdirect that light.◼︎

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Fat of the Land

Moishes, Rue du Square-Victoria, 29 June 2023

An entirely new sensation recently came over me.

I won’t say who or how I learned the news, but I discovered last month that someone who had very badly trolled me online — one of the few people who actually made threats, and about whom I filed a number of unanswered reports to Twitter, leading me in no small part to leave that platform entirely — has died. A person who wrote that they would harm me has departed. Dead dead deadski. Gone. Split. Outta here. Afterlife, kids. I wished them dead, and they died.

Only Scorpios and the Germans have a word for this.

Carmina Burana, Orchestre Classique de Montréal, Maison Symphonique 20 June 2023

The OCM closed out its season with a rousing rendition of Carl Orff’s cantata, Carmina Burana, otherwise known as the soundtrack to every action movie between about 1984 and 2010, when it achieved peak cliché status.

A new orchestral work by Maxime Goulet, entitled Fire & Ice, inspired by the devastating Montreal ice storm of 1998 and commissioned by director Taras Kulish, preceded the Orff performance. No shade to ’98, but we’ve already endured an equally wicked ice storm, several heat waves, and ongoing apocalyptic forest fires as if 2023 has been one giant hold-my-beer meme.

War soundtracks are either from a soldier’s perspective or from the sidelines. The front-line fighter wants to hear something that charges him up — like Russia’s favourite, The Prodigy.

Whereas the armchair spectator craves something more emotional and dramatic, like William Ryan Fritch’s heartrending, ambient soundtrack to this slickly produced New York Times documentary.

Russia provides the war, The Times provides the score.

Jim Holyoak, Gargantuans, McBride Contemporain, 25 May – 30 June 2023

On 6 December 1969, a free concert was mounted at the Altamont Speedway outside of Tracy, California. The lineup featured a who’s who of 60s psychedelia including Jefferson Airplane, Santana, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, The Grateful Dead, and The Rolling Stones. The event’s organizers billed it as the Woodstock of the West, promising peace, love, and all the dope that anyone could desire.

The security detail, however — the Oakland chapter of the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang — was not on the same trip. As night fell, the Altamont concert descended into chaos, resulting in numerous injuries and deaths.

A Hell’s Angels member repeatedly stabbed Stephen Stills in the leg with a bicycle spoke, and the lead singer of the San Francisco band the Ace of Cups, Denise Jewkes, suffered a fractured skull when a bottle was tossed in from the crowd.

Meredith Hunter, a black teenager, took a knife in the back after he charged the stage with a pistol. He succumbed to his injuries.

Hunter’s target was unclear. Was it simply revenge for an earlier skirmish, or did the devil’s sympathizers somehow possess this man in a lime green suit?

Inevitable, 540 St. Laurent Blvd, 26 June 2023

Everything I know about Italian food I learned from either Francis Ford Coppola or Martin Scorsese. I recall an appearance by Scorsese and his mother, Catherine, on an episode of Late Night With David Letterman to promote the film Goodfellas. Mrs. Scorsese had baked a pizza for Letterman’s audience and was cutting it with scissors. Dave remarked that she wasn’t using a knife or a pizza cutter, and she informed him that to scissor was the preferable method.

I immediately noticed that Mr. Arciero used scissors to slice his pizzas, too. This affirmed its legitimacy to me. I’m not Italian; I’m Ukrainian. But Italians and Ukrainians have the same word for tomatoes, which makes us practically comrade paisans. And dare I submit that Italians know better what to do with tomatoes. We use them as sauce for cabbage rolls. Italians mix them with basil and spread them on fermented dough. And damn, it’s delicious.

There isn’t any pretence about Inevitable. No ultrahip font or incandescent bulbs with glowing filaments exposed. Just Italian goodness made by some fellas.

Maison Margan, 370 Place Royale, 27 June 2023

Yevgeny Prigozhin, the hot dog king of Moscow, has increasingly been employing divisive, populist rhetoric in public, saying things like, “The children of the elite smear themselves with creams, showing it on the internet; ordinary people’s children come in zinc, torn to pieces.” 

Though Prigozhin is no ordinary person. He’s a billionaire with a private army that would make David Koresh’s compound look like a carnival in a parking lot. Prigozhin is decidedly a member of the elite.

But he is so ugly. His skin is rough and ruddy. You know what’s decadent? Those teeth. Someone could use a makeover.

Screenshot from a New York Times Opinion Video entitled “A Salute to the Honest(ish) Russian Warlord.”

Prigozhin and madmen like him would rather the elite’s children come in zinc, torn to pieces, too, than, God forbid, ordinary children smear themselves with creams on the internet, even though there’s nothing decadent in the strictest sense of the word about a good cream smearing from time to time.

Rather, self-care resists decay. This is why lipstick was such a coveted commodity after World War II. Cosmetics might have even stimulated the Baby Boom and the period of peaceful Western prosperity that followed.

At the beginning of the Ukrainian invasion, I volunteered at St. Sophie’s Cathedral, helping to organize the immense and generous volume of community contributions to incoming Ukrainians displaced by war. Coats, clothes, boots, books, games, furniture, cups, saucers, dishes, cutlery, soap, shampoo, body cream.

My eyes fell upon a wooden bowlful of toiletries donated by a local luxury hotel. A woman who had come to the church with her two children picked out a tube of body cream from the bowl as if it were a precious gem or an orchid.

This woman was by no means elite. But nor was she ordinary. She was in a church basement in Montreal selecting a donated tube of hotel body cream under extremely extraordinary circumstances.

We are fortunate in this city, despite having to navigate between orange cones and languages, to have nice things. We deserve nice things. Everyone does. Even Yevgeny Prigozhin. Let’s oppose zinc and ordinary children torn to pieces, not body cream.

Grace means beauty amidst brutality. It is not an end, but a means to one.◼︎

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The Smile’s Returning

Orchestre classique de Montréal, Illuminations, Magali Simard-Galdès, soprano, Pierre-Mercure Hall, 5 March 2023

In a recent interview with The New York Times, Mel Brooks, the 96-year-old comedian, revealed that even at his age, he doesn’t shy away from controversy. Still, in 2023, Brooks isn’t afraid to tell a good Hitler joke.

Laughter can be the best medicine in even the sickest of times. But Brooks prefers to wield humour as a weapon. Being Jewish helps. It gives Brooks, and all Jewish comedians, a pass. Seinfeld did Nazi jokes, and in an episode of The Larry Sanders Show, opposite a young Jon Stewart, Jeffrey Tambor played a satirical game show host, in head-to-toe Hitler regalia, named ‘Adolph Hankler.’ But that was back in the 90’s, and a full fifty years after World War II.

Is it too soon to start making Putin jokes?

In the future, will it be considered politically incorrect to dress up as Putin, to get all oily and shirtless and ride a white horse, to wear Russian army surplus, to crack wise about the invasion of Ukraine? If so, I am glad that I’m Ukrainian. That means I’m covered for the foreseeable future from censure for mounting my long-planned musical, Springtime in Bakhmut.

Jerry Seinfeld believes that comedy is the closest we can come to justice. It’s impossible to fake a laugh. A joke is either funny or it’s not. Comedy is the real battlefield, and the funniest jokes always settle the fight.

The OCM’s 83rd season continues through 20 June 2023.

White Boy Scream + Wapiti/Pauly, La Salla Rossa, 13 March 2023

After the L.A.-based experimental opera singer Micaela Tobin’s outstanding performance as White Boy Scream on Monday night at Sala Rossa, conversation turned to the term “diaspora.” Somebody wondered aloud where the word comes from. I submitted that it refers to the Jewish dispersion across the globe: it stems from the Greek, diasperiō — to scatter, to spread out. And it has come today to refer to any dispersion of a people around the world: there is an Irish diaspora, a Filipino diaspora, a Ukrainian diaspora, even a French diaspora. Though colonization doesn’t technically count.

The way that cultures flow through the world and end up where they do is as fascinating a study as any natural phenomenon. It’s like watching a cloud of milk dissolve into a cup of coffee, tendrils wisping and disappearing and, in doing so, altering its entire texture and flavour. The reasons behind diasporic impulses are just as interesting to consider: war, oppression, and tyranny often drive people away; but hope, opportunity, and freedom are beacons that everyone can recognize, and that everyone seems to understand, even if we can seldom define and communicate these abstract notions adequately.

What diaspora really means is being an outcast. Displacement. Exile. Still, everyone agreed that it is a beautiful and lyrical word. Someone else suggested it sounded like a kind of elaborate garment. A cape of some sort, perhaps. On next year’s red carpet, will every Oscar nominee be draped in a Dior diaspora?

Bakunawa is released via Deathbomb Arc.

Mark Takeshi McGregor, H​ō​rai (Keiko Devaux), Starts and Stops (Redshift Music)

Following a triumphant foray into the experimental opera world — because classical and experimental music can only benefit from this overdue alliance — the Montreal composer Keiko Devaux goes from strength to strength with this contribution to a stellar compilation album by the flautist Mark Takeshi McGregor. These works combine the flute, one of the oldest-known instruments, with some of humankind’s most advanced modes of music-making. The results are profoundly moving and underscore the idea that history is not linear, that technology is not synonymous with progress, and that we can find harmonies in unexpected sonic configurations.

Starts and Stops is released via Redshift Music.

ALL HANDS_MAKE LIGHT, We Live On A Fucking Planet And Baby That’s The Sun, Darling The Dawn (Constellation Records)

The other day, a guy got on the metro, sat down right next to me, and lit a stick of incense. I was incensed. I said to the guy, have some sense and put out that incense, you insensitive bastard!

Darling The Dawn is released 21 April 2023 via Constellation Records.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor, with Moor Mother, MTelus, 9 March 2023

When Montreal’s unofficial house band announced their return in 2010, I vaguely remember that they did so with an apologetic metaphor hand-written on a yellow page torn from a notepad. Something about having left the bicycle outdoors all winter. The bike was meant to stand in for the band getting tuned up after a long, inactive period — locked to a stop sign, gears tarnished, rusty chain hanging loose from a weathered old frame. Or words to that effect.

Montreal’s indie rock scene possesses a characteristically rough, unpolished aesthetic, which Godspeed helped to define — a jangled and raw approach to playing live, to making recordings, and in general to assembling sound. The Emperisti — bands like Arcade Fire and Wolf Parade, as well as electronic acts that Godspeed’s artistic ethos influenced, like Tim Hecker and Marie Davidson — at once reflect and benefit from this image, this archetype of corroded Montreal culture.

If Godspeed was a rusty bike in 2010, they are verily a finely tuned machine in 2023. It sounds as if they might even intentionally fuck up, inserting wrong notes to undermine our expectations, to ruin the audience’s anticipatory gratification. But just when you think that they might have forgotten the song, the band thunder back, composed, in unison, and produce that serrated edge sound for which they are known the globe over, and than which there is nothing heavier.

Late capitalism might have produced Godspeed, but hyper-capitalism refined them. Their anthemic post-rock, tuned, tightened, and road-ready, never fails to lift our skinny fists, and spirits.◼︎

Godspeed You! Black Emperor is on tour through 29 April 2023.

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