Tag Archives: Orchestre Symphonique de Montreal

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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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999 Words

Strange Wind

As long as my breath is in me,
and the spirit of God is in my nostrils,
my lips will not speak falsehood,
and my tongue will not utter deceit.
—Job 27:3-4

Breathe!
Breathe, you fucker!
Children gasping the second-hand air
Death and desperation
We’ve got to cut the lies with truth
We breathe.
—Ministry, “Breathe”

My yoga practicing friend repeatedly instructs me to breathe.

Because sometimes I forget. In stressful situations, or when I’m concentrating on some complex task, for whatever reason, I have to consciously prompt myself to inhale.

Nobody breathes online. We’re all hanging on bated breath attached to screens with trembling fingers, preparing for the next inevitable news-related shock, winded and waiting to exhale. Scrolling is a doomed and breathless exercise.

A number of events and exhibitions with breath as their central — or at least peripheral — theme have recently refocussed my attention on wind and air. In doing so, these remarkable experiences have encouraged me to meditate on and reconsider what is sacred about what we might describe as spirit.

The first is a matinée performance that the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal presents on 20 March, featuring the OSM’s principal clarinettist Todd Cope playing Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in A major. Nothing reminds us of the importance of breathing quite like watching a virtuoso wind musician blowing the audience away with his craft. It is inspiring to witness an artist so in command of his breath, so practiced, doubtless having spent countless hours breathing life into the soul of his instrument.

Mozart completed his Concerto only a few weeks before he died mysteriously and prematurely in 1791 at age 35. This work, then, is literally his last gasp and in retrospect has to be read as Mozart’s final word, written, as it were, on the wind.

In an age long before electrical amplification and recorded music, hearing works performed live would have been the only opportunity to experience them. There is no way today to accurately imagine the gravitas of silence during an era when sound could not simply be dialled up and shut off, when music travelled dryly on airwaves rather than awash in endless torrents and streams.

The thing about breath is that it is not infinite. Angélique Kidjo and guest conductor Elena Schwarz photographed by Gabriel Fournier for the OSM.

Later in the evening of 20 March, the OSM stages the day’s second concert by the Beninese French vocalist Angélique Kidjo, singing Ifé, Three Yorùbá Songs, set to a score written by the American composer Philip Glass. Glass’s iconic compositional aesthetic is machinelike and industrial, entailing a mechanized enactment from its performers, firing like a motor on all cylinders, and superficially at odds with the body’s organic demands.

Kidjo’s vocal performance is a masterclass in acute control, the breath of song aspiring to near robotic perfection. And yet, the human vessel, swinging and swaying, is an unparalleled instrument, one that digital artifice could never accurately reproduce.

Kidjo signals to us that the body is ultimately beyond the binary, never entirely off nor on, always oscillating somewhere between these two poles, exposing their relational arbitrariness and functional impossibility.

The thing about breath is that it is not infinite. The fact that it ends gestures to our fallibility and impermanence. Nonetheless, we strive to extend it through technological means.

During the coronavirus pandemic, the protection of breath was paramount, and ubiquitous in the obsession with personal protective equipment and ventilators, adequate circulation and sufficient social distance. We held our breath as we passed by strangers, forgetting — or wilfully ignoring — the fact that we all breathe the same air, that we are all mortal.

COVID interfered with the interconnected rhythms of our breathing in multiple and profound ways and initiated a period after which each breath was measured and catalogued, a daily statistic to be charted and tallied.

I recognize the endurance of breath in Simile Aria, the cluster of suspended pneumatic organ sculptures that the artist Maggy Hamel-Metsos has installed in the cathedral-like main hall at Fonderie Darling. These breathing machines are at once gathered together and isolated, like the social bubbles we were reduced to during the depths of the COVID restrictions.

Detail of Simile Aria by Maggy Hamel-Metsos at Fonderie Darling. Photographed for NicheMTL.

We can recall that even church choirs were prohibited out of legitimate concern for human health and safety. Still, it is impossible to postulate what was lost with the inability to breathe in harmony together. As the exhibition text notes, Hamel-Metsos’s work reconstitutes “pain as a symphony,” summing up life as “a set of sounds measured out by the cadence of our breath.”

In Fonderie Darling’s adjacent space is a confounding “liturgical-optic” triptych of intricate paintings entitled Absoluité by the artist Numa Amun. These three works depict overlapping human figures that represent out-of-body experiences, the soul transcending the material plane, the spirit giving way to the ethereal pull of the divine. Curator Milly A. Dery explains that Amun’s works attempt to signify something that is usually invisible: the space between life and death; the physical and the astral realms; the convergence of knowledge and faith.

What we experience through the limited spectrum of sensory perception is surely only a fraction of what exists. But the body is what we have been given to contain the indefinable and thus must suffice. The spirit is what ruptures the absolute.

Detail of Réveil dans la mort (2020-2021) by Numa Amun at Fonderie Darling. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“The wind blows where it wishes,” it is written in John 3:8, “and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”

The profound and universal truth of this scriptural passage is that nature possesses its own will. So little of life is within our control. And this makes our choices all the more important if we want to evolve morally and spiritually. The boat with a slack sail is destined to be tossed to and fro on the whims of the waves.

We cannot know when we will run out of breath. We can only remember and remind one another to breathe, consciously and deliberately.

There is something in the air that enriches and enlivens us. Call it spirit.◼︎

Cover image: Angélique Kidjo and guest conductor Elena Schwarz photographed by Gabriel Fournier for the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal.

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The Silences That We Live Together

Green Fuse, Claire Milbrath, Pangée, 18 January – 1 March 2025

Claire Milbrath, Skagit Valley, 72×36 inches. Photographed for NicheMTL.

A day drags endless to its close;
While years like arrows flown
Pass fleeting by and snatch away
All values that we own;
—Taras Shevchenko, Three Years

گردن (Gardan), xodkaar x No Cosmos, Bandcamp (Self-released)

Noise is the common auditory denominator of the postmodern experience.

Escaping the constant, ambient din of traffic, sirens, construction, beeping machinery, droning screens, and ubiquitous music is practically impossible in any urban metropolis. Even amidst supposedly silent settings, there is always somewhere an air conditioner buzzing, a 60Hz grounding hum, a faucet dripping, a compressor running. Just try and find a quiet place in the city and you will inevitably encounter some sort of noise instead.

Talking is one of the most ever-present forms of metropolitan noise. There is hardly a place to go for humans to be together in silence. Libraries, perhaps, are supposed to be void of conversation. But they seldom are. Empty churches are pregnant with impending sound.

Whispering is arguably noisier than talk at regular volume, our ears attuned to stifled speech in order to catch some meaning, wet s’s and popping p’s exploding in volume in contrast to the airy whispered utterance.

We feel the need to express the minutiae of emotion and experience. But love emerges in the silence between people. As Quentin Tarantino wrote for his character Mia Wallace to observe in the 1994 film Pulp Fiction, “‎That’s when you know you’ve found somebody really special. When you can just shut the fuck up for a minute and comfortably share silence.”

Silence is empty sonic space. And the postmodern subject seems ill at ease with the notion of emptiness. Into emptiness creeps uncertainty and the potential for psychic rupture. And so, we fill our spaces with objects, activity, noise, and chatter.

It is ironic that a preferred term to describe a forceful verbal expression is “sounding off.”

Approximately 760 kg of Public Property, Pedro Barbáchano, Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, 18 November 2024 – 16 February 2025

Approximately 760 kg of Public Property, Pedro Barbàchano, Hall Building, Concordia University. Photographed for NicheMTL.

The 2003 National Film Board documentary entitled Totem: The Return of the G’psgolox Pole tells the absurd and frustrating tale of a totem pole that was ostensibly stolen from the Haisla people in so-called British Columbia in the late 1920s, and the community’s ultimately fruitless efforts to repatriate it from a Swedish museum where it eventually ended up.

The Haisla first produce a replica pole to replace the original. But efforts stall when the village is unable to raise enough funds to build a space that could adequately preserve the relic — one of the Swedes’ conditions to relinquish it.

Of course, preservation is antithetical to Haisla tradition anyway, totem poles traditionally erected with the understanding that they will inevitably decompose, along with everything else, back into the earth.

The film is a story about the location of power in western society, and the imposition of arbitrary values on diverse and marginal cultures. Posterity and reverence are neither universal nor measurable concepts that we can impose upon or transfer from one society to another.

When something of value is taken from a nation — whether treasure or territory — only those people are capable of experiencing its loss.

Tchaikovsky’s Lustrous Violin Concerto, Sergey Khachatryan with the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, Maison Symphonique, 20 February 2025

Rafael Payare conducts Sergey Khachtryan and the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal. Antoine Saito for the OSM.

In the autumn of 1933, around 117,000 Russian peasants, mostly volunteers, began to arrive in eastern and southern Ukraine to repopulate and “Russify” Ukrainian geographic areas that Stalin’s forced famine-genocide, known as Holodomor, had devastated. These Russian settlers were under the impression that their presence was necessary and that they would be welcomed with transportation, food, and fertile land.

But many of them experienced a contrasting reality upon arrival: eerily empty villages, infestations of mice in the farmhouses and fields, and linguistic hostility from the locals who remained. Then, they were subjected to milk and meat taxes, and as a result of hardship upon hardship, most of this first wave returned to Russia by 1935.

However, second and third waves followed in 1935 and ’36, and they were not voluntary. Secret police officers and locals were enlisted to prevent the new Russian arrivals from escape. Ukrainian-language theatres were closed, and the performance of Ukrainian music was restricted to only three cities: Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Odessa. The Donbas region, according to Sergio Gradenigo, the Italian diplomat in Kharkiv, was undergoing rapid cultural replacement at the level of policy.

The enforced influx of Russian nationals into eastern Ukraine ensured the generational success of “fifth columns,” clandestine agitators from within who interfered with and undermined Ukrainian authority in the region. Nonetheless, by 1991, more than 80% of the Donbas’s residents supported Ukrainian independence from the former Soviet Union.

Yet, as industries were privatized following the collapse of state-run enterprise, corruption and consolidation of wealth and power resulted in Russian oligarchies that took control of the Donbas and further destabilized it. By March 2014, pro-Russian demonstrations escalated into a war between Ukrainian national and Russian-supported separatist forces.

29 ceasefires have been declared since then, with none of them abating the conflict.

This process began in the early 1930s with the intentional starvation of Ukrainian peasants and Stalin’s forced migration of poverty-stricken Russians to replace them. Has this war been going on for three years, or 100?

Judy, Jeremy Young, Cablcar (Halocline Trance)

Bullies crave attention.

It doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad attention, just so long as they are the centre of it. As well, giving bullies the silent treatment can too often have the opposite of its intended effect, enraging them to lash out even more aggressively, demanding that they receive their due response.

As the old axiom goes, violence begets violence. But what strategy to deploy when silence begets violence? You can’t outshout a loudmouth. But you can withstand bullies with bravery.

The world just witnessed a masterclass in expert perseverance.◼︎

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: Claire Milbrath, Green Fuse, gallery view. Photographed for NicheMTL

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Objet petit a

Joyce Wieland, Heart On, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 6 February 2025 — 4 May 2025

Joyce Wieland, O Canada, 1970, Lithograph in red on wove paper, 57.4 x 76.4 cm. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“…there is no language in existence for which there is any question of its inability to cover the whole field of the signified…”
—Jacques Lacan, The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious.

In the wake of the Super Bowl halftime spectacle that the rapper Kendrick Lamar performed on 9 February, which was, of this renowned un-Canadian sporting institution reportedly the most-watched edition, likely due to multitudes tuning in to see whether or not there would be a third and ultimately successful assassination attempt on Donald Trump, the catastrophic U.S. President and billionaire blowhard, a flurry of frothy media commentary emerged, the kind of chatter that passes in our intellectually insolvent neoliberal era as “cultural discourse,” regarding the intention and interpretation of the political statement the artist was apparently making in the act.

Lamar clearly designed the elaborate show to entice spicy takes.

Almost all of these observed Lamar’s lowercase ‘a’ on a diamond-encrusted chain and proposed what it meant: the Amazon logo, perhaps, or a nod to his production company, or another sly swipe at Drake’s supposed penchant for minors.

Still, none entertained the possibility that a deeper meaning should be discerned by delving into any unintended or subconscious reading.

Kendrick Lamar performs at the Super Bowl LIX Halftime Show, Caesars Superdome, New Orleans, 9 February 2025. Gregory Shamus/Getty Images.

Curiously, no hot take that I read invoked the 20th century French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, which seems a glaring oversight, since obviously the chain at once signifies and is the signifier of Lacan’s “Objet petit a.” The pendant is literally a small ‘a,’ and as an object of desire, it also represents the anxious lack sought in subjective otherness. This to me screams peak America.

Did Lamar explicitly intend to elicit this analysis? I don’t want to underrate the dude. He did win a Pulitzer Prize. But I harbour my doubts.

Nonetheless, it doesn’t matter whether it was intentional or not. Because as any philosopher of art understands, poetry, and art more broadly, as Wimsatt and Beardsley observed in 1954 in The Verbal Icon, “is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it.”

For Lacan, the “Objet petit a” is “what falls from the subject in anxiety,” and, more simply, “the cause of desire.” For the Buddhist, it may also be the source of all suffering.

HRT, Taverne Tour, La Sotterenea, 7 February 2025

HRT perform at La Sotterenea, 7 February 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“The fundamental substance of an epoch and its unheeded impulses illuminate each other reciprocally.”
— Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament.

It is fascinating that Trump is the first sitting American president to attend a Super Bowl game, and highly symbolic to the neofascist form of politics that he represents. The Olympic Games in Berlin in 1936 were central to Hitler’s display of power, too. The objectification of bodies in Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia is as unambiguous as the marching columns of red, white, and blue, Black performers that formed and reformed around Lamar.

Doubtless Trump viewed this spectacle unfolding for his own personal amusement because Trump, with the exception of McDonalds cheeseburgers, is composed of pure unconscious desire, pure id.

L’enfant et les sortilèges, Opéra de Montréal, Théâtre Maisonneuve, 8 February 2025

The cast of L’enfant et les sortilèges onstage at Théâtre Maisonneuve, 8 February 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“A little man does not know he is little and is afraid to know.”
—Wilhelm Reich, Listen, Little Man!

America functions on the libidinal drive. It is so repressed that it represses its own repression, which is only revealed to itself in fantasy and horror and violence. It is ironic that digital language is called hypertext, because the nation’s native language, rather, is subtextual. This is why artists like Lamar layer their true messages in code, and why critics fall all over themselves to attempt to decode them as if performing some elaborate reciprocal gymnastics routine. Of course, this process only produces more anxiety in the form of surplus unfulfilled desire.

It took Trump all of a few days to reveal his overt desires upon assuming the presidency for a second time. In addition to Muntzing (or should we now call it ‘Musking’?) the government apparatus as if he were pulling out circuit boards from a HAL 9000, Trump finally verbalized his imperialist impulses to territorially expand America as he had enviously seen Vladimir V. Putin doing for three years. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Trump called the move “genius,” and doubtless, he could scarcely wait to demonstrate his own, however unstable his cognitive processes had become.

Ravel and Prokofiev with Weilerstein and Payare, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, Maison Symphonique, 12 February 2025

Alisa Weilerstein performs with the OSM at Maison Symphonique, 12 February 2025. Antoine Saito for the OSM.

“Desire begins to take shape in the margin in which demand rips away from need…”
—Jacques Lacan, Subversion of the Subject.

The Panama Canal, Greenland, and Canada are all in Trump’s crosshairs, and we would be wise to take the threat seriously, because Trump disguises his expansionist desires not as wants but as needs. America needs to absorb these sovereign territories for the sake of national security, or of economic security, or of restorative balance and retribution. These are the same excuses Putin used to invade Ukraine, and that Hitler used to invade Poland. But what they repress is the Objet petit a, that which Trump — and America — lacks, and which will never be satisfied.

Benjamin Appl & Eric Lu, Schubert’s Swan Song, Salle Bourgie, 13 February 2025

Benjamin Appl & Eric Lu onstage at Bourgie Hall, 13 February 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Of Children in Swaddling Clothes
“O cities of the sea, I behold in you your citizens, women as well as men tightly bound with stout bonds around their arms and legs by folk who will have no understanding of our speech; and you will only be able to give vent to your griefs and sense of loss of liberty by making tearful complaints, and sighs, and lamentations one to another; for those who bind you will not have understanding of your speech nor will you understand them.”
—Leonardo da Vinci

The intentional fallacy extends past poetics and penetrates into politics. There were far graver motivations, for instance, for George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan than to prevent terrorism and root out weapons of mass destruction. There were generational fixations that served as factors.

And there are much more sinister explanations behind, say, Musk’s double Nazi salute following Trump’s inauguration. Unlike Kendrick Lamar’s deliberate obscuring of overt political symbolism, Musk’s was laid bare for all to see — and immediately excused by him and his apologists as unintentional. For Lamar, what audiences had to decipher was its real message. For Musk, what they unequivocally witnessed was not.

If the time to be alarmed was not before 5 November 2024, it is certainly now, as Trump and Musk alternate at behaving on a national scale like sexually frustrated frat boys with GHB prescriptions. There is no critical or analytical skill necessary to crack their code, and no thinly veiled good intentions behind which to hide. The word ‘alarm’ comes from the French, à l’arms.

If Canada has any saving grace, it is that America, in its perpetual repression, already has a 51st state — the permanent state of anxiety.◼︎

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: Installation view of Joyce Wieland’s Flag Arrangement, 1970–71, knitted wool.

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Catching the Big Fish

Traceable, Nubian Néné, MAI, 15 January 2025

Great art makes space for ideas.

It might be interesting to learn about an artist’s personal life, or to consider the cultural context within which their artwork was conceived. But what is actually important about any work, whatever medium or form it takes, is whether it cultivates deliberation.

After the affective impact is experienced, what is left are trace elements of contemplation.

Mahler’s Sixth Symphony with Payare, Maison Symphonique, 16 January 2025

Maestro Payare conducts the OSM’s performance of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony at Maison Symphonique. Gabriel Fournier for the OSM.

Comedy and tragedy are two sides of the same coin. There is always a drop, like the yin and the yang, of one inside the other. It is impossible not to recognize the sadness behind a frantic laugh, or to find calamity a bit hilarious.

An apocryphal story that circulated about Twin Peaks concerns the pilot episode’s premiere at the Telluride Film Festival in 1989. At the most devastating moment, when Sarah Palmer learns of her daughter Laura’s death, the audience apparently erupted in laughter.

The tendency toward cascading misfortune is a source of particular humour. Whenever a situation deteriorates from bad to worse, we cannot help but be amused. It’s a specific kind of schadenfreude, the discovery of a perverse sense of pleasure in regarding the pain of others.

Yolk, Two Readers and Music IV with Ashley Mayne, Gloriah Amondi, and James Player, 9 January 2025

Guitarist James Player performs at Yolk’s Two Readers and Music IV. Photographed for NicheMTL.

So-called “smart” technologies often aren’t.

Why would you want the door to your washing machine to automatically lock as a childproofing feature? What if your child was locked inside the machine?

As I write this article, Microsoft Word has restarted of its own volition and automatically enabled something called “Copilot.”

Copilot, ostensibly, is Microsoft’s Artificial Intelligence integration that can answer questions and summarize sentences and compose calls to action, as if every piece of writing should be some listicle about 13 restaurants you need to try whilst visiting Montreal. Or whatever.

The worst part about Copilot is that I can’t seem to figure out how to disable it. Every time I start writing a new paragraph, there it is, a little icon blinking at me, like Clippy on cocaine, prompting me to click on it, and by clicking on it, to train it to think like I do.

Get this through your artificially intelligent simulation of a head, Microsoft: the only copilot I need is God.

Janis Rafa, Landscape Depressions, Centre Vox, 17 January — 1 March 2025

Still image from The Space Between Your Tongue and Teeth, 2003, Janis Rafa, Centre Vox. Photographed for NicheMTL.

It may come to pass that animal intelligence will soon surpass human intelligence in the form of instinct.

We have begun to rely so heavily upon machines to do our thinking for us that inherent flaws are compounding and multiplying in our own faulty faculties. We are failing to recognize that within the systems of machinic control with which we have surrounded and propped up ourselves, there is an unseen disciplining apparatus at work that imprisons our physical and even our mental gestures.

The only escape may be to lean on intuition, relaxing our fingers on the Ouija board gadget and allowing the machine to exorcise its own ghost.

Alexandra Streliski, Salle Wilfrid Pelletier, 17 January 2025

Alexandra Streliski onstage at Salle Wilfrid Pelletier. Photographed for NicheMTL.

The standard piano has twelve notes across seven and one quarter octaves on only 88 keys.

That’s a surprisingly small number of sounds for an instrument that sits at the centre of Western musical composition. But limitation is paradoxically liberating, permitting virtually infinite combinations.

There are no wrong notes on the piano. It just depends on what song you’re trying to play.

David Lynch (20 January 1946—15 January 2025)

“Experience the joy of doing. And you’ll glow in this peaceful way.” —David Lynch, Catching the Big Fish

David Lynch, aside from being one of the most compelling filmmakers in the brief history of cinema, was also a painter, a photographer, a musician, a furniture maker, and a proto internet pioneer.

Before there was such a thing as social media, Lynch sold monthly subscriptions to his website, davidlynch.com, whereupon he would post what we now call “content” — absurd short videos of Japanese girls talking about bananas, and people in domestic environments wearing enormous rabbit masks, and Lynch himself delivering daily weather reports from his home in Los Angeles. He also sporadically responded to questions that his subscribers would email in.

To say that I was a David Lynch fan in the early 2000s is an understatement. I was determined to become an artistic Renaissance man just like him. I had sought out and seen all of his films. I had watched every documentary and read every book about him that I could find. I even paid for a subscription to his website. And thinking that he might hold some sort of secret to becoming a brilliant artist, or at least a key to how to get into film school, I decided to send him a question.

A few subscriptions cycles later, Lynch thoughtfully answered it. I was thrilled to hear my hero acknowledge my existence, much less offer me some sage advice.

David Lynch in 2003 offering advice.

Soon afterward, I went out and made a film, moved from Edmonton to Montreal, attended and graduated from film school, continued on to complete a master’s degree and Ph.D., pivoted from filmmaking to writing, and launched a niche publication that combines cultural criticism with narrative nonfiction in hopefully novel and creative ways.

None of these things made me rich or famous. But they fulfilled me nonetheless and continue to do so in large part because I never strayed from the core of Lynch’s guidance, which was simply to learn by doing — and to be the best me that I can be.

My opinion of David Lynch’s movies has shifted in 25 years, since good drama is always about change. But my gratitude to Lynch as an artist has only grown.

Because in addition to being the kind of artist who more than anything inspired ideas to flourish, Lynch’s greatest artform may have been to encourage other artists to keep making their art.

That, I believe, is Lynch’s eternal legacy.◼︎

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: Nubian Néné performs at MAI, 15 January 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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