Tag Archives: Orchestre Symphonique de Montreal

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Amethyst Deceivers

Esse Ran, “Mind Scanner,” Off Program (Humidex Records)

Félix Gourd aka Esse Ran performs at Parquette, 11 October 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Dreams are today’s answers to tomorrow’s questions.”
―Edgar Cayce

“Don’t let the little fuckers generation gap you.”
―William Gibson

Sooner or later, newer iterations will replace everyone.

The next generation has traditionally been understood as a de facto improvement upon its predecessors. But other than The Godfather Part II and Fletch Lives, what sequels have exceeded the quality of their originals? The film franchise of the American presidency is a case-in-point that 2.0 does not indicate a progression towards perfection.

The inevitability of replacement is cause for perennial concern as we fret over posterity. Fortunately, the future of techno, still the most forward-oriented musical form, seems to be in capable hands.

Irene F. Whittome, I am Here, Fondation Guido Molinari, 9 October – 10 December 2025

Irene F. Whittome « Histoire naturelle » (detail). Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Let your mercy spill
On all these burning hearts in hell
If it be your will
To make us well.”
—Leonard Cohen, “If It Be Your Will”

Recognizing patterns is a fundamental survival strategy. Remembering, for example, where food is found, or what the air smells like before a storm, can guide and protect us. All of life fits some pattern; there is no such thing as a random event. Zoom out far enough and you will see that what we perceive as chaos or chance is in fact divine design.

Daniel Lanois, Théâtre Maisonneuve, 5 October 2025

Daniel Lanois performs at Théâtre Maisonneuve, 5 October 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Flesh is the surface interface of a complex and messy machine known as the body. It at once conceals and reveals what lies beneath it. Being our largest organ, skin is the site upon which corporeal operation is located.

We conceive of and make our machines accordingly, knobs and buttons functioning as smooth superficial control panels for intricate and impenetrable devices. Who knows what goes on beneath an iPhone screen?

The only time carnal and machinic background processes rupture the exterior is when they malfunction. The glitch is a confrontation with restless activity and existential agitation.

Brahms & Dvořák: The Splendour of Romanticism, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal with violinist James Ehnes, Maison Symphonique, 25 September 2025

James Ehnes performs with the OSM at Maison Symphonique, 25 September 2025. Antoine Saito for the OSM.

And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes;
And there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying,
Neither shall there be any more pain:
For the former things are passed away.
—Revelation 21:4

On a recent trip to Prague, I had the opportunity to visit the tomb of Antonin Dvořák. It is located at Vyšehrad Cemetary, a short walk from the Basilica of St. Peter and St. Paul, an impressive neo-gothic edifice constructed in the late 19th century, which the Bohemian King Vratislaus II founded 800 years earlier. The grounds of Vyšehrad are immaculately manicured, evidence of attention to detail over the course of millennia.

In North America, we simply don’t have that kind of history. Ours is really Indigenous history, which Europeans sought to obliterate when they arrived on this continent roughly 400 years ago.

Indigenous history was never intended for preservation. Native Americans were largely nomadic and their monuments, like Totem poles, for instance, were deliberately imagined to fall back into the earth. Eternity is a European concept, whereas Indigenous people favoured infinity.

Observing Dvořák’s grave inspired me to theorize why we commemorate the dead, especially those whom we revered in life. Vyšehrad Cemetery contains a large population of notable Czech interments. Somehow, even though I failed to recognize most of the names on the list, this knowledge filled me with an extra sense of reverence.

In the Christian tradition, the conception of Purgatory defines the intermediate state between the death of the physical body and the soul’s salvation. Purgo, the Latin verb, means to cleanse. Purging is a form of purification, and also, when taken to extremes, a compulsive disorder.

Prayer for the dead implies a belief in resurrection, or at least in some kind of afterlife. Almost every culture in the world implicitly assumes that death is not the end. It follows, then, that our universal understanding of time is cyclical. How life after death might occur is a matter for the imagination.

We might rise from the grave like some cheesy zombie movie. Or we might live on in other organic forms, transubstantiating into another kind of matter: flesh decaying into soil; soil nourishing a flower; nectar feeding bees; and honey sweetening someone else’s imminent cup of tea.

Pay your respects to the vultures for they are your future.

Autechre with Nixtrove and Mark Broom, Société des arts technologiques, 24 October 2025

Autechre performs at the SAT, 24 October 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“During the paleotechnic period,” wrote the American historian of technology Lewis Mumford in his foundational book Technics and Civilization, “the increase of power and the acceleration of movement became ends in themselves: ends that justified themselves apart from their human consequences.”

What human consequences could Mumford have imagined from generalized acceleration?

The clock measured time and thus transformed it into an arbitrary unit of exchange.

The railroad enabled movement through space in a condensed period of time, quickening a passenger’s arrival in a new place, thus altering the natural experience and rhythms of travel.

Automated factories sped up the pace of production of consumer goods like cotton and sugar, bronze and steel, oil and gas, regulating the inventory of these commodities in the modern marketplace, thus making their value subject to temporal manipulation.

In the 21st century, we don’t remember or even consider a time before the evaluation of time. We only experience hints of organic duration in the form of unignorable biological cycles. After a period without food, we grow hungry. After a term of pregnancy, new life appears. After a season, snow falls.

The rest of the time, the railway, the factory, and the clock standardize time with increasingly granular precision, producing power by time’s spontaneous creation, and call attention to what Mumford described as the “maladjustment of function.”

More than autumn leaves or breaking glass, nothing makes you aware of the passage of time quite like a ticking metronome.◼︎

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: Félix Gourd photographed for NicheMTL.

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Gratitude

Suzy Lake, Distilling Resistance, Bradley Ertaskiran, 11 September – 1 November 2025

Suzy Lake, Distilling Resistance, Gallery View, Bradley Ertaskiran. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Wise words from the departing
Eat your greens, especially broccoli
Wear sensible shoes
And always say “thank you”
Especially for the things
You never had
—Coil, “Broccoli”

We often conceive of gifts as those things we receive in a state of gratitude, like presents we are given or give to others on special occasions, or special qualities or skills acquired through practice or bestowed upon us by some benevolent force. The words ‘talented’ and ‘gifted’ are used interchangeably to denote an abundance of capability, as in a talented artist or a gifted musician. Universally, we think of gifts as desirable.

But the truly valuable gifts are the ones we received and never asked for, or asked for and never received, or received and never desired. The experiences in life that teach us the most are those we would have never chosen for ourselves.

Josèfa Ntjam, swell of spæc(i)es, Centre PHI, 9 September 2025 – 11 January 2026

Josèfa Ntjam at Centre PHI. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“I’m not a beggar… I’m just a man passing through.”
—The Way of the Pilgrim

Some things we do over and over again in life and seldom have any memory of the individual events. Try to remember what you had for lunch two Sundays ago and it will likely be difficult because you have lunch every day.

Other things, we do only once and remember forever. Traumatic events, for instance, tend to stick with us, to mark us deeply, embedded in memory. Some things we spend a lifetime trying but failing to ever forget.

And some traumas, like bondage or genocide, live on in ancestral recollection, persisting across continents and generations. One lifetime isn’t long enough to heal these wounds.

Marlon Kroll, Travailler ensemble, Galerie Eli Kerr, 13 September – 25 October 2025

Marlon Kroll, Hard Drive, 2025. Pine, manilla paper, rabbit skin glue, nylon, motor, electronics, hardware. 80″ x 74″ x 330″ Photographed for NicheMTL.

And the Lorg God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him.
—Genesis 3:18

“I’ll be what I am
A solitary man”
—Neil Diamond, “Solitary Man”

In 2007, Sean Penn attended the Telluride Film Festival with his directorial feature, Into the Wild, a rather silly picture based upon the 1996 true story of the same name by Jon Krakauer.

In it, main character Chris McCandless, also known as Alexander Supertramp, abandons his family and relinquishes his worldly possessions to travel to Alaska to live an ascetic life. Because he is woefully ill-equipped, Supertramp promptly dies from starvation, but not before arriving at the profound realization that happiness in life is only meaningful when it is shared with others.

The joke amongst the staff that year was that Into the Wild and Soylent Green had the same moral: it’s people.

Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, La damnation de Faust, Maison Symphonique, 17 September 2025

Rafael Payare conducts Andrew Staples, left, and Sir Willard White, right, at Maison Symphonique. Antoine Saito for the OSM.

What’s gonna’ set you free
Look inside and you’ll see
When you’ve got so much to say
It’s called gratitude, and that’s right
—Beastie Boys, “Gratitude”

Everybody spread love (gimme some more)
If you want it, let me hear you say it (gimme some more)
—Busta Rhymes, “Gimme Some More”

Goodness is usually measured by two criteria.

The first is the ability to achieve another desirable outcome. For instance, it is good to work hard because you will in turn make money and in turn be able to afford a comfortable lifestyle, which is good. The goodness of the first action is determined by the functional goodness of the result. We might describe this as pragmatic goodness.

The second type of goodness is goodness for its own sake, goodness for no discernible purpose other than to be good. This type of goodness is often defined in absence of an action — not necessarily doing something good but rather not doing something that might not be good.

When someone cuts you off in traffic, for example, you have the capability and maybe even the right to honk your horn and give the other driver the middle finger. But there is an inherent goodness to not doing those things, a goodness that does not achieve the desirable outcome, such as retribution or revenge, a goodness in absentia, goodness for goodness’ sake. We might describe this as gracious goodness.

As the omnipotent force in the universe, God, or whatever you want to call the law of nature, has the power to strike us down at any moment. But it is good that it usually doesn’t. We might cultivate and practice gracious goodness in our own lives, beginning with ourselves and moving outward into the world at large, doing good by simply not doing.

Elisabeth Perrault & Marion Wagschal, Constantly Shedding, Perpetually Becoming, Pangée, 18 September – 1 November 2025

Marion Wagschal, Colossus, 2016, Oil on canvas, 81″ x 65″ Pangée. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“The real world is not this world of light and colour; it is not the fleshy spectacle which passes before my eyes.”
—Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception

O Give thanks unto the Lord, for he is good: for his mercy endureth forever.
—Psalm 107:1

What is natural might also be described as what is familiar.

Mark Fisher devoted a book-length study to differentiating the weird from the eerie. Neither of these phenomena seem natural to us, and thus they appear unfamiliar. The uncanny, however, is that which is either weird or eerie but also familiar and therefore comparatively natural.

We fill our time with attempts to perceive and interpret space and the things that occupy it, and ourselves in relation to these variables. We judge ourselves and each other upon arbitrary standards that are constructed socially and culturally and are subject to historical change.

One is known by the company one keeps, an age-old adage espouses. So, too, one is identified by their surroundings, the space that they occupy, the things that share that space, and the activities that transpire therein.

This is why gratitude and grace are of utmost importance. Whom or whatever is our company is that which reflects and shapes and constitutes us, that by which we recognize ourselves. And there is no greater gift than self-knowledge.◼︎

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: Suzy Lake, Distilling Resistance, Gallery View, Bradley Ertaskiran. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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All Dressed

Forever Young: in conversation with Marianne Perron

I am sitting in an otherwise unremarkable office, except for the majestic Heintzman & Company grand piano, a Canadian-made symbol of the melodious nature of operations herein and a testament to our symphony’s commitment to preserving local heritage.

Today, I have been granted rare backstage access at the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal to learn about the forthcoming season with Artistic Director Marianne Perron, who for more than a quarter century — spanning the careers of three conductors — has helped helm the programming priorities of Montreal’s oldest and most venerable orchestra. And while Rafael Payare is the Symphony’s newest public face, it is really Perron who pulls the strings.

Ironically, a broken violin sits on her desk.

“Yes, that’s mine,” she laughs, “and maybe one day I’ll get it fixed. But I never considered a career as a professional musician,” Perron tells me as she recalls her early life as a violinist. “I started lessons at age six. My mother conceived of it as just another part of getting an education. But I stopped at around 20. I love music, but it was not what I wanted to do. Honestly, I hate playing in front of an audience.”

Perron appropriately prefers to remain behind the scenes. Nonetheless, she is one of Montreal’s most inspiring women leaders, securing a coveted spot on the Women We Admire list, among other well-deserved honours.

Perron started with the OSM in 1999 as head of Education and Contemporary Music and continued climbing to her current role as Senior Director of the Symphony’s artistic sector, overseeing programming, community education, operations, production, and musician personnel. “Now, I am the head of all five of these departments,” she says with a smile. “So, voilà.”

The trick to success is making one’s job look easy — which it never is. And clearly, Perron is no stranger to hard work. She attended the Conservatoire de musique de Montréal, studying and advocating for contemporary music from Quebec and Canada, and later obtained a master’s degree in Musicology from the Université de Montréal, plus an MBA from the HEC with a specialization in cultural enterprises. So, her chops are impeccable from both the musical and management angles.

“There are many things I understand about balancing dynamics,” she explains. “It is always a question of balance.”

From left: Marianne Perron, Rafael Payare, and Philippe-Audrey Larrue-St-Jacques. Antoine Saito for the OSM.

Music, too, is about balance, and patterns, and cycles, and Perron inherently understands that the OSM is faced with balancing tradition and progress, the Classical repertoire and more contemporary works, and Montreal’s cultural specificity with that of the wider global stage.

“True, the OSM is not primarily a contemporary music orchestra,” says Perron. “But all the same, it is an orchestra that programs the works of new composers. Not all conductors believe that contemporary music is important. But for our new conductor, Rafael Payare, it is extremely important. It is really at the heart of his practice. At the Virée Classique and the outdoor concert at the Olympic Stadium, we have contemporary Canadian music. We are now programming more Latin American works as a tribute to our new conductor. And we also have an orchestra that is capable of playing Bach regularly. We are an orchestra that really plays 400 years’ worth of music.”

That historical range is integral to the life of the OSM. For Perron, it is perennially a challenge to program a season with an ear toward both history and the future.

“There are lots of things to consider,” Perron tells me. “We think about how to develop the sound of the orchestra. There are so many great things about Rafael Payare — his artistic sensibility, his talent. But also, his ambition for the orchestra. Rafael Payare has a sonic vision which is in sync with the OSM. We are not going to totally transform but just search for those existing elements to develop. Rafael has a particular interest in Post-Romantic Germanic works. So, we think of those things, as well as the elements we want to develop with the orchestra. We have lots of conversations. I think it’s wonderful that Rafael wants to perform, for example, Bruckner. And then someone says, ‘wait a minute, before we play Bruckner, we should play this and this.’ And that will take Bruckner to another level.”

Perron grew up in a Montreal household where Classical music was regularly part of the sonic backdrop.

“We went to a lot of concerts when I was a kid,” Perron recalls. “They had a series at the Piano Nobile at Salle Wilfred-Pelletier which was called Musique & Brioche. They were short concerts aimed at families, and they had muffins and croissants. I loved those. My family subscribed to the OSM. I was seven when my father took me to the Seventh Symphony of Beethoven. And that became my favourite piece when I was seven or eight years old. And ten years later, my father returned to Place des arts to hear the very same piece. But this time, I was in the Orchestre de Conservatoire as a musician. That was a great milestone.”

To reach out to younger audiences, the OSM is experimenting nowadays with the form of symphonic performance, coupling the orchestra with cinema, for instance, as they did previously with Jaws and The Red Violin, and will be doing again this season with Stanley Kubrick’s epic film, 2001: A Space Odyssey.

“The role of the music in that movie is so special,” Perron says. “It’s interesting because there are lots of moments where there is no sound, there is no music. The orchestra wants to play all the time, but silence is really where the ‘wow’ moments are in that film.”

“There is a suppleness that I think represents us here.” Marianne Perron and Rafael Payare photographed by Antoine Saito for the OSM.

And yet, hardly a silent moment passes in our conversation. There is plenty to look forward to in the OSM’s 2025-’26 season, and Perron is excited about all of it: the return of Barbara Hannigan; Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro; A German Requiem by Brahms with Kent Nagano; The Rite of Spring with pianist Bruce Liu; Gustav Mahler’s Fourth Symphony paired with Perú Negro by Jimmy López, the OSM’s Composer-in-Residence, to celebrate Black History Month.

The OSM has chosen to launch its season with The Damnation of Faust by Berlioz, a bold and symbolic choice that gestures toward the spiritual bargains of our age, and their potential perils.

“We always try to draw a link between the pieces we are programming or commissioning and current events,” Perron reveals. “Is there an exchange? Is there an echo?”

In an era of increasing divisiveness, Montreal is arguably North America’s most progressive metropolis, and a municipal model for achieving linguistic and cultural harmony.

“It’s really about the richness of the whole community together,” Perron notes. “Montreal is very fluid. It’s a very safe place. There is a lot of pride here, but it’s not pretentious. There’s a lot of curiosity and creativity, too. I feel like it’s a city that is open to the world. And I think that reflects in the Orchestra. There is a suppleness that I think represents us here. The Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal is a mirror image of that.”◼︎

The OSM’s 2025-’26 season opens with The Damnation of Faust, 17 September 2025 at Maison Symphonique.

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Joy & Pain

Alicia Clara, Daydream, Nothing Dazzled (Self-released)

“…dreams are the commonest and universally accessible source for the investigation of man’s symbolizing faculty…”
—Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self.

The year was 2003. I had enrolled for a second time as an undergraduate in university, believing that returning to school and obtaining a liberal education would be the ticket to my success. It was an honest mistake.

I had signed up for a semester-full of introductory courses: Sociology, Latin, Cinema Studies, Symbolic Logic, and Psychology. And it was during one of our first Psych lectures that the young female instructor presented a history of dream interpretation to the class. Our dreams, she said, were viewed differently by various philosophers and psychoanalysts throughout history.

Sigmund Freud, for example, believed that dreams were a combination of repression and wish fulfillment. Carl Jung thought that they served a highly symbolic function, which could only be deciphered through a complex series of relational and interpretational associations.

Or possibly, a cigar was just a cigar, and dreams could simply be the random cataloguing of the day’s conscious events as a librarian might reshelve a stack of unrelated books. One thing was certain, though: dreams undeniably possessed some causal link to current occurrences in everyday life.

Attempting to engage a more-or-less disinterested lecture hall of juvenile scholars, our instructor petitioned us by suggesting things that we might have recently been dreaming about. For instance, a conversation with a friend, or a dispute with a family member. But no one raised their hand.

She then tried to conceive of something more universal that maybe a majority of the class had encountered in our nocturnal reveries. As the United States under its worst president to date had just then invaded Iraq, she suggested that a number of us must have been dreaming lately about war in the Middle East. But again, not a glimmer of sympathy from her audience.

“Come on!” she said incredulously. “You mean to tell me that nobody in this room has been dreaming about Bush?”

Slowly, the class began to erupt in laughter as many of us silently thought, “well, actually…” Indeed, equally as many in attendance might have also been dreaming about Bush’s second in command, Dick.

The Voice of Nature with Beth Taylor, 5ème Salle, 17 August 2025

The mezzo soprano Beth Taylor performs at 5ème Salle with the OSM’s Virée Classique, 17 August 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“The soul of man is like water. First, it comes down from heaven, then it ascends into heaven; and again it must go down to earth in eternal change.”
—Hans Schwarz, On the Way to the Future.

The tension of history is that between a dialectical or upward-and-forward progression and a cyclical or sinusoidal up-and-down succession.

We know from observation and experience that nature passes through seasons in a circular momentum — summer becomes fall, fall winter, winter spring, and eventually summer returns.

But we also hope that the next season, the next year, the next century, will be markedly better in measurable ways — that progress will improve our lives, that technological advances will benefit humanity and unburden us from such antiquated incumbrances as labour and conflict, inequality and injustice.

Or, we look with nostalgia to precedent seasons, years, centuries to lament how much worse life has become, how we appear to have deteriorated and descended from some idealized age.

The disproportionate obsession with either the future or the past always seems to be strongest when the state of the present is at its weakest.

Karma Glider with Shunk and Poolgirl, Casa del Popolo, 5 September 2025

Guitarist Peter Baylis and vocalist Gabrielle Domingue of Shunk perform at Casa del Popolo, 5 September 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

As summer turns into autumn, the tendency is to revert to melancholy retrospection, re-examining the previous season’s satisfying times. There is an equal measure of pleasure and pain to this exercise, one in gratitude for agreeable experiences, the other with a sense of loss and longing for things passed.

“God whispers to us in our pleasures,” writes the theologian C.S. Lewis, “speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”

~Ondes~, Frotae with Ivy Boxall, White Wall Studio, 27 August 2025

Frotae perform at White Wall Studio, 27 August 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

The only constant is change. This is the paradox that confronts us continuously. The steady hum of electricity is merely an artificial distraction from life’s natural chaotic state. The desire to fix events in time — through recording or photography or cinematography or the written word — neglects the obvious and unavoidable truth that we ourselves are different every time we consult these texts. Not only do we never step in the same river twice; each time, the river fails to recognize our feet.

Organ Intermezzi with David Simon, The Church of St. Andrew & St. Paul, 28 August 2025

Organist David Simon performs at the Church of St. Andrew and St. Paul, 28 August 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Images of war saturate our media to such an extent as to desensitize the observer.

We are regularly bombarded with depictions of starving children clamouring to fill a dented metal receptacle with a ladleful of mushy gruel as if viewing this scene one more time will be enough to finally shock those of us fortunate enough not to be on camera into singlehandedly stopping these atrocities.

Of course, none of us want this — independently nor collectively — and none of us enjoy these images or condone them, and none of us can stop them alone. We are condemned, then, to watch them over and over with an increasing feeling of indignant vulnerability and survivor’s guilt. And yet, in order to survive and carry on with our lives we must, to a certain extent, ignore escalating atrocities and implicitly, in doing so, overlook them.

The American critic Susan Sontag in her 2003 essay Regarding the Pain of Others quotes Leonardo da Vinci at length, offering formulaic instructions for painting battle scenes:

Make the conquered and beaten pale, with brows raised and knit, and the skin above their brows furrowed with pain … and the teeth apart as with crying out in lamentation … Make the dead partly or entirely covered with dust … and let the blood be seen by its color flowing in a sinuous stream from the corpse to the dust. Others in the death agony grinding their teeth, rolling their eyes, with fists clenched against their bodies, and the legs distorted.

These could just as easily be directives given to war photographers from brazen if-it-bleeds-it-leads news producers in 2025.

It is relatively easy to portray physical pain. Representing the misery of helplessly witnessing it on an apparently endless loop, not so much.◼︎

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: Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, 27 August 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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Big Shiny Tunes

Sloan with Econoline Crush, Peachfest, Penticton BC, 9 August 2025

Sloan perform in Okanagan Lake Park, Penticton, BC, 9 August 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“The archive has always been a pledge, and like every pledge, a token of the future. To put it more trivially: what is no longer archived in the same way is no longer lived in the same way.”
—Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever

I spent some time in English Canada this summer and in doing so had the opportunity to see a band I’d never seen, Sloan, the celebrated Canadian alternative outfit that dominated MuchMusic throughout the bulk of the 1990s.

I was surprised, despite having never owned a Sloan recording, that I was able to identify hit after remarkable hit. Apparently, these earworms had made an indelible impression upon my memory merely from hearing them over and over. In a time before the internet, before streaming became the dominant way of consuming cultural products, repetition worked.

The archive of the internet in many ways erases or at best flattens memory. Just because every record ever made is available to access at any given second does not mean that we do. And if and when we do, we seldom remember them in the same ways we did during the physical media age.

There exists a theory, Freudian in origin, that archiving is the subconscious reaction to a morbid fear of death. But what to make of the impulse to archive without the intention of ever accessing the archive? Imagine the sheer volume of music that nobody ever listens to filed away on the web. In the record-store days, we called it dead stock. On the internet, let’s call it zombie inventory.

What good is preservation without repetition?

Orchestre Metropolitain at the foot of Mount Royal, 30 July 2025

Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts the OM at Parc du Mont-Royal, 30 July 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“…the music of a well-ordered age is calm and cheerful, and so is its government. The music of a restive age is excited and fierce, and its government is perverted. The music of a decaying state is sentimental and sad, and its government is imperiled.”
—Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game

Gustav Holst, The Planets, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, 15 August 2025

Rafael Payare conducts the OSM at Maison Symphonique, 15 August 2025. Antoine Saito for the OSM.

Many cultures believe that the world was created with sound.

“In the beginning was the word,” the Apostle John writes in the opening to his Biblical Gospel. Notably, it wasn’t nature’s noise that heralded all of Creation. It wasn’t a clap of thunder or an explosion. It was a human sound.

But neither was it a grunt or a cry. It was a word. And it wasn’t just any old word; it was the word. Word itself.

Words imply meaning. And thus, according to John, the beginning of the universe was also the beginning of language, frequency, harmony.

Christian Richer with Lowebrau, La Chapelle | Scénes Contemporaines, 2 August 2025

Christian Richer’s musical equipment setup at La Chapelle, 2 August 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

If we are to read any era by its music, then surely conflict and chaos must characterize the present one. There is no dominant set of aesthetic criteria to describe contemporary music as there has been in nearly every preceding generation.

We can listen back to almost any historical time and say with relative confidence that this style or that theme characterized its day’s music. Romantic, baroque; pop, punk, &c. Even during the so-called postmodern period, postmodernity exhibited some consistent defining characteristics: assemblage, palimpsest, irony.

We are living in an age when everything and nothing is true — facts are contested; falsehoods are simply data — and therefore everything and nothing characterizes our post-postmodern music. Music today is ambient in the truest sense — it is omnipresent, a constant hum that emerges to the fore only when it is observed, like a fridge that seems to start buzzing when you notice it.

In addition, today’s music is ambivalent, of multiple traditions, hybrid, non-binary. However, cultural production that advances in simultaneous directions does not imply a lack of direction. And the speed with which music manifests ex nihilo, almost spontaneously, indicates more about the present era than any aesthetic measures.

Forwards or backwards, we’re going nowhere fast.

VISIO & Orchestroll with Cecilia and Samuel Gougoux, Société des arts technologiques, 14 August 2025

Cecilia performs at the SAT, 14 August 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

They flutter behind you your possible pasts
Some bright-eyed and crazy, some frightened and lost
A warning to anyone still in command
Of their possible future to take care
—Roger Waters, “Your Possible Pasts”

There’s a common assumption, generally unchallenged, that the past is behind us and cannot be altered, whereas the future is in front of us and can. This might not be correct. I’m not just making some clever semantic argument here, either. I am, rather, talking about fundamental ways in which the past can be materially reformed, and the future is a foregone conclusion.

When you dwell on the past, it constitutes your future. Every morning is greeted with history. The past becomes the medium in which life is lived — like water for fish or air for us humans. If there is nothing that we can change about the past, then it is pointless to ruminate over it. And yet, the contemplative impulse exists. Why?

I claim that it’s because the past can be changed, has been changed, is changing constantly.

The further objects are away in space, the more slowly they appear to move. It’s called parallax — the apparent position of an object in relation to its line of sight. This also holds for objects in time. Our memories of things morph and mutate with each passing day, sometimes appearing clearer, sometimes disappearing completely.

The future, on the other hand, is something that the forces of capital would prefer to set in stone. “Futures” in financial terms, for instance, are standardized contracts that can be bought and sold.

Markets function on predictability. One way to reliably produce predictability is to induce instability. Therefore, anything that ensues following a period of disorder looks comparatively stable, in part because of the parallax effect. In this way, the past is broken, and the future is fixed.

If we repair the past, perhaps the future will again become unknowable.◼︎

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: Rafael Payare photographed by Antoine Saito for the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal.

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The Dark Canuck

Nico Williams, Bingo, Fondation PHI, 23 April — 14 September 2025

Nico Williams at the Bingo vernissage, Fondation PHI, 23 April 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Americans say no to drugs. Canadians say no thank you.”
—Susan Musgrave, You’re in Canada Now, Motherfucker.

I flew in July 2006 from Montreal to Victoria and drove from there in a rented Toyota about 25 kilometers south to a small municipality called Metchosin. The purpose of this trip was to interview one of the most famous incarcerated Canadians, the bank robber-turned-author Stephen Reid.

Reid at the time was a ward of the William Head Institution, known colloquially as Club Fed, a minimum-security correctional facility constructed at the lonely end of Vancouver Island’s southernmost tip.

Originally built as a 19th century immigration quarantine station, William Head might have been among the most picturesque sites for a prison, a remote and rugged stretch of oceanfront property perfumed with Douglas Fir and the saline breeze.

Reid was imprisoned, this time around, for the brazen robbery of a Victoria bank in 1999. But he had already earned a storied reputation as a member of The Stopwatch Gang, a crew of Canadian career criminals who had in the 1970s and ‘80s successfully pulled heists throughout the United States, making off with millions.

The gang earned their nickname in the newspapers because they carried stopwatches instead of guns, completing their jobs in under 90 seconds and escaping gracefully before law enforcement could respond to the 211.

What could be more Canadian than non-violent larceny? Reid told me they never failed to say ‘thank you’ to the guards as they strode out the door carrying Yankee Doodle’s hard-earned dough.

Catch Step HYA remix featuring Lunice (with EENO T and Magnanimous), La Chapelle | Scénes Contemporaines, 22 April 2025

EENO T and Magnanimous. Clémence Clara Faure for La Chapelle | Scénes Contemporaines

“By walking I found out
Where I was going.”
—Irving Layton, “There Were No Signs.”

Over the past several months, and intensifying during the Federal Election campaign, Canadians of all political stripes have been engaged in some deep soul-searching to define specifically what characterizes Canada as a sovereign nation.

“Not American” is of course the most obvious answer. But we can’t simply identify ourselves by what we are not. We must, rather, assert Canadian-ness as a series of distinct and affirmative characteristics.

It may be a surprise to learn that the Scottish have a version of poutine appropriately called “chips and cheese and gravy.” The British are also known for being polite. So, what makes Canadian poutine — or politeness — any different?

African-American Sound Recordings with SlowPitchSound and Dumb Chamber, Société des arts technologiques, 27 April 2025

Dumb Chamber performs at the SAT, 25 April 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“A Canadian is someone who drinks Brazilian coffee from an English teacup, and munches a French pastry while sitting on his Danish furniture, having just come from an Italian movie in his German car. He picks up his Japanese pen and writes to his Member of Parliament to complain about the American takeover of the Canadian publishing business.”
—Campbell Hughes, 1973.

Canadians pride ourselves on our inclusivity and the doctrine of multiculturalism enshrined in social policy since the first Trudeau’s term in office. We congratulate ourselves with the fact that slavery was never legally practiced in Canada, that ours was and continues to be a safe-haven nation for people escaping bondage and other forms of systemic oppression.

As opposed to the American melting pot, Canada is a mosaic, a puzzle that doesn’t just scramble disparate identities into one uniform nationality but instead incorporates each of them into a rich and panoramic tapestry.

Still, just because Canada never practiced slavery doesn’t mean that racism and discrimination didn’t exist here. They did — and continue today as we strive to shake the legacy of colonialism and reconcile historical injustices perpetrated on Indigenous land.

And yet, the present condition requires evermore nuance because Canada is not only composed of colonizers and the colonized.

My ancestors, for instance, were displaced in the late 1920s when Russia was actively colonizing the Indigenous people of Ukraine. First-person accounts by the first wave of Ukrainian immigrants, collected in a book called Land of Pain, Land of Promise, are filled with stories of gratitude for Indigenous peoples’ assistance adjusting to life in Canada.

An underlying monstrosity remains, however. The American writer William S. Burroughs described this irrepressible abomination as “The Ugly Spirit.” Righteous retribution for genocidal expansion from coast to coast to coast.

The Ugly Spirit is a stateless entity, unrestrained by borders, floating northward like a ghost or a virus, the immigrant to end all immigrants. Thinly veiled beneath the respectable surface of unblemished bureaucracy, white linens and starched shirts and sunny ways, peace, order, and good governance, savagery lurks.

Oscillating Spaces launch with curator Anneke Abhelakh, Canadian Centre for Architecture, 24 April 2025

Gallery view of Oscillating Spaces, CCA. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Canadian history could be a drug-free alternative to anaesthesia.”
—Mike Myers, Canada.

One of the most frequent adjectives used to describe Canadians internationally is “nice.” Nice isn’t boring, although we are known as that, too. Nice isn’t kind, although kindness could be considered a constituent component of being nice.

What nice really means in practice is milquetoast. When threatened, we tend to back down. When attacked, we prefer to concede defeat than to offend our aggressors with a fight.

There’s nice and there’s naïve. The most extreme example of the perversion of niceness is the departed Canadian author Alice Munro’s apologetic acceptance of her daughter’s sexual abuse. Munro would rather have overlooked horrible transgressions against her kith and kin than to upset the larger family order in protest. In her own mind, was she just being nice?

Tolerance is one of Canada’s most admirable virtues. But when we tolerate violence against us, we should discard our national reputation for being nice and adopt a tough and just disposition. In significant ways, the Orange Cheeto’s 51st state rhetoric is forcing Canada to grow a backbone, to stand our ground, even if it means abandoning some of our soft-touch image.

Così fan tutte, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, Maison Symphonique, 23 April 2025

The cast of Così fan tutte performing with the OSM, Maison Symphonique, 23 April 2025. Antoine Saito for the OSM.

“‘Cause in the forget-yer-skates dream
You can hang your head in woe
And this diverse-as-ever scene
Know which way to go.”
—Gord Downie, “It’s a Good Life If You Don’t Weaken.”

It is appropriate that the “Elbow’s Up” rallying cry galvanizing Canadians originates from hockey, Canada’s undisputed national pastime.

There was no question which country I was in when, during the intermission at an opera, the woman seated next to me leaned over and asked if I knew the score in the Habs game. On the ice, playing arguably the most brutal organized sport, is where Canadians exchange our mannerly habits for altogether snottier, bloodier, and more dangerous conduct.

Unlike baseball, which participants can play overweight and drunk, hockey demands strength, skill, speed, guts, grit. Like revenge, hockey is best served cold. The rink is the site of inspiring Canadian victories over both doppelgänger superpowers Russia and the United States.

Interviewing Stephen Reid in jail in 2006 was like playing in the Stanley Cup final for a writer and lover of good stories. Reid was simultaneously terrifying and charismatic, cunning and cultured, a formidable conversationalist and true Canadian captain on our proverbial national team.

Goal-scoring could be considered analogous to bank-robbing in the sense of slipping one past the authorities, armed with little more than will and determination, and grace, too.◼︎

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: Nico Williams, Uncle, 2023, 10/0 Japanese glass cylinder beads and 11/0 seed beads on thermally-fused/braided polyethylene thread, mother-of-pearl buttons, 124,5 x 73.7 cm. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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All The Rage

Joni Void & Quinton Barnes, La Lumière Collective, 21 April 2025

Quinton Barnes performs 20 April 2025 at La Lumière Collective. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Your time has come your second skin
The cost so high the gain so low
Walk through the valley
The written word is a lie.”
—Public Image Ltd., “Rise.”

The customary media scrum following the Canadian pre-election English-language leaders’ debate was abruptly cancelled on Wednesday 16 April because the Debates Commission could not “guarantee a proper environment for this activity,” it announced in a brief and vague statement.

The Commission’s executive director Michael Cormier didn’t elaborate on the reasons behind the decision. But most media observers pointed to the right-wing Rebel News group’s domination of the scrum the previous evening following the French-language debate at Maison Radio-Canada in Montreal. Rebel News was able to secure five questions while traditional outlets like La Presse and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation were each granted only one.

In a post-debate analysis with news anchors Adrienne Arsenault and Rosemarie Barton, David Cochrane, host of CBC’s Power and Politics, characterized the media group’s tactics as “rage-farming.”

Rebel News appears to be merging the strategies of American outlets like Fox and Breitbart with the MO of social media. Indeed, the “new” digital media have now capitalized for decades on inciting extreme moral outrage.

“The mission of Facebook is to connect people around the world,” stated former Facebook employee Frances Haugen in an interview with the CBS News programme 60 Minutes. “When you have a system that you know can be hacked with anger, it’s easier to provoke anger in people. Users say to themselves, ‘If I make more angry, polarizing, dividing content, I get more money.’ Facebook has created a system of incentives that divides people.”

Anger is an energy. But is it the right energy in a time when unity is more urgently necessary?

Pulse Mag Issue #1 Launch, Le Système, 17 April 2025

Ryan Diduck, left, and Pulse Mag editor-in-chief Jen Lynch at Le Système. Eva Rizk for NicheMTL.

It logically follows that if digital media arouse outrage, analogue media might offer an antidote. One reason for this may be the quantifiable time that users invest in media engagement.

The speed with which we access and discard online content encourages a general sense of agitation. When we slow down to read printed words, say, in a magazine, we cultivate a more deliberative mindset, one which stimulates empathy and understanding. These virtues are the building blocks of community.

Magazines inspire readers to read, share, and re-read. On the internet, never are any two given people literally “on the same page.”

Payare Conducts Mozart’s Moving Requiem, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, Maison Symphonique, 16 April 2025

Organist-in-residence Jean-Willy Kunz performs with the OSM, 16 April 2025. Antoine Saito for the OSM.

“If America (like ‘Vietnam’) was primarily the name of a war, we would understand its historical function far better.”
—Nick Land, “2014,” Outsideness.

Obsession with war is implicitly obsession with death. Regardless of whether a war is military or economic, hot or cold, the only product that war consistently generates is casualty. More than the axiom that war has no winners, war also renders life itself, even for those only peripherally involved, null and void.

Blood, contrary to popular belief, is not a form of fertilizer.

Persons with Cabral Jacobs and Bob Tape, Atlas Building, 18 April 2025

Persons perform at the Atlas Building, 18 April 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“A man complains of being hungry. All the time. Dogs, it seems, are never hungry. So the man decides to become a dog.”
—Brian Massumi, “normality is the degree zero of MONSTROSITY,” A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

Modernity is inextricably linked to capitalism because no other form of socio-economic organization demands perpetual novelty.

Yet, newness has no truth value because of its inherent arbitrariness. How long does a cultural text hold its currency? How long is a McDonald’s hamburger allowed to sit on the counter before it gets tossed in the bin?

A society that prizes youth culture, in so doing, sacrifices what is true for what is new. The acceleration of so-called innovation in truth is simply the hastened refresh rate of desire. Novelty correlates with functional dissatisfaction. Capitalism thrives on habitual frustration.

Normalcy exists antagonistically against novelty because as soon as normalcy is achieved, it is no longer by definition new. Therefore, hyper-capitalism requires hyper-normalization.

Furthermore, modernity exists in opposition to pragmatism because it is pragmatic to repair and preserve and it is modern to discard and reinvent. Therefore, there is no true conservatism under capitalism. In its place, we are provoked with austerity.

Plural Contemporary Art Fair, Grand Quai, Port of Montreal, 11-13 April 2025

Gallery views at the Plural Art Fair, Grand Quai, Port of Montreal. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“The greatest disorder that those who order an army for battle make is to give it only one front and obligate it to one thrust and one fortune.”
—Niccolò Machiavelli, Art of War.

Cities are modern sites for alternating periods of movement and stasis, speed, slowness, and rest. They are naturally contested and potentially violent terrains that frequently mimic fields of battle. Think of vying for space on the metro, or how quickly a queue tightens up when one of its members leaves.

The Romans routinely broke their armies up into three speed-dependent battalions. The first, the hastati, struck the quickest. If and when they failed, their ranks fell back into the second, the principes, which attacked more slowly. If and when they, too, were expended, they all absorbed into the triarii, who lumbered behind in the lengthiest regiments.

Their enemy would have to conquer three separate meta-armies operating in three unique temporal intervals in order to prevail. First there’s the tweet, then the retweet, then the legacy media story that rounds up the tweets.

Donald Trump’s shadow strategist Steve Bannon famously said in 2018 that political rivalry paled in importance to conflicts in information. Democrats were not the enemy, Bannon believed. The media were.

“Flood the zone with shit” was Bannon’s solution. In other words, advance as many competing viewpoints across as many media platforms as quickly and consistently as possible to destroy wholesale the concept of credibility itself.

A healthy republic depends not only on information but access and intelligence to discern its accuracy.

If democracy dies in darkness, fuck with the lights on.◼︎

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: Rafael Payare conducts the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, 16 April 2025. Antoine Saito for the OSM.

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