Tag Archives: SAT

999 Words

One Weird Trick

“A cool tool is …
Anything useful that increases learning, empowers individuals, does work that matters, is either the best, or the cheapest, or the only thing that works.”
—Cool Tools: A Catalogue of Possibilities, Kevin Kelly

The 2013 directory entitled Cool Tools is a compendium of technological objects that promises to help its readers, for example, put on a house concert, design a logo, rear an optimistic child, replace bulbs with LEDs, bypass real estate agents, and scores more apparently useful activities.

The tools clearly do not accomplish the tasks themselves. But they facilitate the work with machinery designed to economize jobs that have become commonplace time occupiers in modern life. According to Kelly, machines like the pineapple slicer/corer, the pocket chainsaw, the TUSA hyperdry snorkel, and the Matterform 3D scanner are the coolest tools.

Intelligent machines don’t just surround us. We seamlessly integrate them, most often unconsciously, into our daily lives. From the mobile phones to which we are eternally tethered, to the terminals that dispense and take our money, to the vehicles that transport us, to the boxes in our homes that we use to keep our food frozen, wash our clothes, warm our soup, condition our air, watch movies, and listen to music, technology is everywhere, ubiquitous, invisible. We really only notice technology when it doesn’t work as intended.

An illuminated projection on a curved surface displaying text about vibrant user experiences and sound elements, with a light point in the background.
Rough realtime translation of Lucas Paris’s Q&A following Vibrant User.Online at the Satosphère, 16 June 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

A spate of recent musico-technological events including the ELEKTRA biennale and the Society for Arts and Technology’s 30th anniversary has again placed technology at the focal center of local cultural production. Montreal is known for its techno-predilection. The MUTEK festival in particular has since 2003 positioned Montreal as a vital international destination for digital arts. The LUMINO festival, Cité Mémoire, Oasis Immersion, and current and past public artworks like Utopie by Jonathan Villeneuve and 21 Balançoires by Daily tous les jours signal Montreal’s municipal commitment to technological innovation in the service of art.

This begs the question: does technology make better art? Does it make our artists better? The tools artists use no doubt shape the works they create. But do modern technological advancements actually stimulate creativity?

Currently, the hottest debate revolves around creative Artificial Intelligence. Should artists use A.I.? And if so, does this toolbox simplify art-making processes like, say, a pineapple slicer/corer might simplify making fruit salad? Should art be innovative, as if it were a technology?

It is helpful to recall Joseph Weizenbaum’s influential 1976 book Computer Power and Human Reason in which the computer scientist and ELIZA programmer proclaimed that computers lack the capacity for moral judgement. Computer Power’s most famous anecdote recounts how Weizenbaum’s secretary became so engaged with ELIZA, his benign computer programme designed to mimic a psychoanalyst’s routine, that his secretary asked him to vacate the room.

It might be tempting to maintain that machines don’t require moral judgement when human users can steer and, when necessary, override A.I.’s deficiencies. Yet, ELIZA’s inability to judge seemingly interfered with Weizenbaum’s secretary’s judgement, as if the evolution of the machine precipitated the devolution of our own. The fact that his secretary knew full-well how ELIZA worked is what prompted Weizenbaum to issue dire warnings about A.I.’s dangerously seductive allure.

A performer in a stylish outfit singing into a microphone on stage, with blue lighting and a DJ behind a covered table.
Xela Edna performs at Espace SAT 11 June 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

The intelligent tool that still fascinates me most is MIDI, or the Musical Instrument Digital Interface — so much so that I wrote a book, Mad Skills, about its cultural history. Ostensibly, MIDI is the protocol that enables digital musical instruments to “talk” to one another, as if exercising judgement. But what it really is, is a mechanism for technological control, not only of one technology over another, but also of music technology over analogue music making, of corporate control over maker culture — ultimately, the tyranny of the binary.

Circuitry is not the technology most essential to MIDI. Curiously, MIDI’s intelligence has nothing to do with computers. It goes much further back than that. Indeed, the clock may be the first artificial intelligence.

“The clock,” wrote Lewis Mumford in Technics and Civilization, “is not merely a means of keeping track of the hours, but of synchronizing the actions of men.” There would be no techno music were it not for clocks. The clock measures and regulates and quantifies and values time, the medium within which all of existence unfolds.

Like ELIZA, the clock itself is incapable of moral judgement. Rather, the clock reshaped the erratic immorality of chaos into a strict moral code of stability: “under the rule of the order,” Mumford contended, “surprise and doubt and caprice and irregularity were put at bay.” Clocks did not just produce synchronization. They also created the concept of asynchrony.

A performer interacts with electronic equipment on a table while a visual projection of circular patterns is displayed behind them in a dimly lit space.
Myriam Bleau performs with the ELEKTRA festival at Centre PHI, 18 June 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

The MIDI clock was always off by a hair’s breadth. And this reintroduced a degree of chaos into the digital musical order, kicking events, in a manner of speaking, off the grid. Montreal artists — like Myriam Bleau, who performed a skittering set on 19 June at Centre PHI with a collection of illuminated spinning tops, or Xela Edna’s unexpected technical glitches on the night of her album launch at the SAT for My Data Cannot Rot — consciously or subconsciously intervene in the clock’s domination and trouble the notion that technological tools are unquestionably cool.

Fluorescent lights flicker rhythmically. Data indeed rots. Anyone who has ever relied on Montreal’s Métro system understands that time is just a suggestion here. If the train is running late, more time is simply added to the clock. The Métro’s turnstiles are locked from forward motion. But everyone knows that if you spin them backwards half a turn, you can slide right through.

Technological innovation doesn’t de facto produce better art. It is arguably in the ethics and aesthetics of technological failure that creative revolutions are incubated. If intelligent machines encourage our moral stagnation, then winding the clock back might be the most promising strategy to push us forward. Sometimes, what works best is that which evidently doesn’t.

As tech-savvy as Montreal presents itself, our cutting-edge technologies seldom function as advertised. And so, we exploit weird tricks, cool tools to navigate our social spaces, our culture.◼︎

Cover image: Public Appeal performs at Espace SAT 11 June 2026. Rory Creelman for NicheMTL.

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The Mass Ornament

David Altmejd, Elle, Bradley Ertaskiran, Until 4 July 2026

A metal duct mounted on a concrete block wall, casting a shadow on the surface below.
David Altmejd’s L’etoile casts a shadow on the wall in the bunker at Bradley Ertaskiran. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“An object of art is an honest way of making a living, and this is much a different idea from the fancier notion that art is a scam and a ripoff. The bourgeoisie have, after all, made it a scam. But you could never explain to someone who uses God’s gift to enslave that you have used God’s gift to be free.”
—Rene Ricard, “The Radiant Child”

The dance between artist and observer is as transient as any dance craze that has come and gone before. It used to be fashionable for the critic to try and gain access to the artist and understand their motivations; at one time, critics fancied themselves psychoanalysts who interpreted the inner workings of artists through their art as if they were forensic crime scene investigators or handwriting experts. Artists, too, have perennially shaped their art for their critical audiences, attempting to anticipate their tastes and desires, to comment upon some underlying condition or natural disposition intrinsic in the contemporary public.

Today, when all art is accessible with a click or a tap or a swipe of the screen, and everyone can observe anything and become an instant expert upon it, what is the objective of the critic that the casual viewer cannot achieve?

It is no longer enough to comment upon structure and form and tradition and perceived inspiration, or to speculate on the artist’s inner impetus for making art. The transactional circumstances of this brand-new dance, too, are laid bare. Artists are no less workers than those who toil on assembly lines or suffer through service industry jobs. And critics have infiltrated the ranks of artists, compelled to draw upon some creative zeitgeist and produce novelty.

Artists and critics are each doing The Watusi on opposing sides of a two-way mirror in 1982, displaced in space and dislocated in time, alienated in virtual communities and disconnected by digital technologies that function to enrich their shareholders by exploiting and enslaving us both. Art, as any other productive pursuit in the hyper-capitalist age, pays in attention rather than capital, where wealth is measured in engagement and ignorance is bankruptcy.

All art and its observation, regardless of medium or language or form, teaches these dance moves today. The critic’s business is to reveal the artist’s obscure secrets while enshrouding the obvious ones in labyrinthine layers of mystery.

Wagner and Debussy: From Love to the Sea, Lawrence Power, viola and Elim Chan, conductor, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, Maison Symphonique, 14 May 2026

Conductor leading an orchestra, deeply focused, wearing a black outfit, with sheet music in the foreground.
Elim Chan conducts the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal. Eduardus Lee for the OSM.

“Nothing is more compromising than a thought! But the state of mind which precedes thought, the labour of the thought still unborn, the promise of future thought, the world as it was before God created it — a recrudescence of chaos.… Chaos makes people wonder.…”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Case of Wagner”

To watch the mass behaviour of a crowd — at a Habs game or an F1 event or the vernissage for an art star’s latest exhibition — is one of the few activities left in which we are presented with the whole rather than its fragments, or wherein the fragments reveal the whole. It is like reading a book in one sitting or devouring a meal in a single mouthful. It is like looking at an ocean from space and recognizing that all the individual ripples and waves conceal one leviathan. Chaos is merely order uncharted.

LODE, La naissance de l’art, Galerie Eli Kerr, Until 27 June

A partially covered large object leaning against a wall, surrounded by wrapped items and a row of small red cups on a dark mat, with wooden crates nearby in an industrial space.
Installation view of LODE, La naissance de l’art, Galerie Eli Kerr. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Fate is expressionless, it is as cold and alien as the stars into whose galactic configurations men project the entanglements which they subconsciously create themselves.”
—Theodor Adorno, “Fantasia Sopra Carmen”

Adorno, writing on Georges Bizet’s Carmen, suggests that freedom is the antithesis of virtue. We can extrapolate from this suggestion that artistic freedom is the antithesis of artistic virtue, and that freedom for artists to paint what they will betrays a profound decline in character, a lack of faith in the trajectory of art history, or a breach in the hull of the vessel that has buoyed art since the first cave paintings appeared at Lascaux.

It is the artist’s job to be truthful in disclosing this decline. It is necessary for the artist to surrender their free will and their agency, itself such a trendy buzzword, and submit to the vibrancy of things. An honest artist will organize matter in some virtuous manner and factor out freedom from the equation. Casting images back into the world is a reiteration of the chaotic impulse that obliges the reactivation of imagination.

Moin with Sediment Club, Espace SAT, 21 May 2026

A live music performance under blue lighting with musicians playing instruments on stage.
Moin performs at Espace SAT. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“I see the girls walk by
dressed in their summer clothes,
I have to turn my head
until my darkness goes.”
—The Rolling Stones, “Paint it Black”

The record label Blackest Ever Black, which released Moin’s first recordings, as well as those produced under their alter ego, Raime, was the sort of label that inspired obsession. Blackest Ever Black’s output varied widely in genre — from the sludgy punk of Raspberry Bulbs to the oddball lo-fi indie of Officer! to four-to-the-floor stompers by Regis and Tropic of Cancer’s angular new wave. And yet there was a unified aesthetic to everything they released into the world: dark, cool, metropolitan, modern.

Blackest Ever Black label boss Kiran Sande was concurrently a commissioning editor at Fact Magazine, one of the first publications to offer me an audience. Sande was my favourite editor to write for and an enigmatic and ephemeral presence thereafter. Music criticism at that time consisted of snarky love-hate relationships with of-the-moment artists rising and falling on the Boomkat splash page and generating passive-aggressive reviews on corporate websites. Sande was the last of a certain type of visionary, a genuine charlatan, aiming with 100% accuracy.

Insoon Ha, Artist-in-Residence lecture, Fonderie Darling, 21 May 2026

A woman standing in front of a group of people in a bright, industrial-style room, giving a presentation or lesson. Windows with natural light and a variety of plants and materials visible in the background.
Studio view of Insoon Ha in residence at Fonderie Darling. Ana Lucia Londono Flores for Fonderie Darling.

“You know Marx and Lenin were pretty lazy dudes when it came to working for somebody. They looked at toil, working for your necessities, as something of a curse.”
—Huey Newton, Speech Delivered at Boston College, 18 November 1970

The criteria for cultural importance are not popularity, marketability, or influence. Import is weighed in granular increments, accumulative intuition. Mass movement is science. Stirring a single soul is magic.

Art is not the Polio vaccine. It is a compulsion, the need to see, and to be seen, and to see what others see, and to grasp the invisible. Writing about art is even less consequential. Criticism doesn’t save lives. In many instances, it wastes them.

The invention of the wheel was art. Understanding the nature of wheels is essential. The dance steps may have changed, but dance is eternal.◼︎

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 David Altmejd, Elle, Bradley Ertaskiran. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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The Pretty Things Are Going to Hell

Meet the artist Maskull Lasserre, Arsenal Contemporary, 13 May 2026

A person wearing a gray sweater and dark pants is seen from behind, standing in an art gallery with modern artwork displayed on the walls.
Gallery view of the artist Maskull Lasserre at Arsenal Contemporary, Montreal, 13 May 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“The forest reveals its truth for those who are travelling through it on foot.”
—Werner Herzog, “I Rant Against the Jungle”

Trees comprise forests. Though seldom do we see both at once.

Our human perception is such that it focusses upon orders of magnitude, from minute detail to grand scale. Take a walk through a forest and observe this spectrum of awareness in action. Thus, knowing God is impossible because we either apprehend His individual works or an abstract accumulation thereof.

A forest is comprised of trees just as the Kingdom of Heaven is made up of minor miracles.

Andy Stott with Corporation and William Hayes-Dulude, Espace SAT, 9 May 2026

A crowd of people in a dimly lit venue surrounded by purple haze, with soft light beams coming from above.
Andy Stott performs at Espace SAT. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Those who remain at the surface do so at their own peril
Those who dive beneath the surface glorify the grotesque.”
—Genesis P-Orridge & cEvin Key, “Beauty Is the Enemy”

American Transcendentalists considered truth, righness, and beauty to be self-evident. The philosopher Charles Saunders Peirce in the early 20th century conceived of these virtues as the “Ends” of phenomena, under the purview of normative science, the laws of which to Peirce were both universal and necessary.

The universality of truth, rightness, and beauty is indicative of Peirce’s pragmatic understanding of nature and the specificity of the American interpretation of Idealism. But the notion of their necessity addresses something more profound.

Logically speaking, order could not emerge from chaos without truth, rightness, or beauty. Nor could nature function in absence of these three Ends in divine equilibrium, a sort of contemporary, new-world holy trinity.

“I am going to make a series of assertions which will sound wild,” Peirce proclaimed in his fifth lecture on the subject at Harvard University in 1903, “although I cannot omit them if I am to set the supports of pragmatism in their true light.” For Peirce, truth, rightness, and beauty transcended human taste and were philosophically unquestionable. This left no room for argument from his audience, whom he proceeded to call “undeveloped” nominalists, a bold and patent dig at New England’s intellectual elite.

“Reality consists in regularity,” Peirce proclaimed. “Real regularity is active law.”

Céline in Dior: A Dazzling Moment, Musée McCord Stewart, Until 13 September 2026

Gallery view of Céline Dion’s Dior dress exhibited at Musée McCord Stewart. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Your beauty won’t be anything
When I take off my glasses.”
Leonard Cohen, Death of a Lady’s Man

Beauty activates action. It is impossible to remain passive in the presence of prettiness. And given that beauty is universal and necessary, it is one of the most important motivating forces of nature.

However, aesthetic beauty is not synonymous with truth — often, quite the opposite. We attain beauty through augmentation and perversion and concealment and outright denial of our true nature, polishing, as it were, the brass on the Titanic.

Therefore, deception pragmatically galvanizes nature just as effectively as veracity.

Turandot, Orchestre Philharmonique et Chœur des Mélomanes, Maison Symphonique, 10 May 2026

A dramatic scene featuring a man assisting a woman in a black gown who is holding a sword, conveying intense emotion during a performance on stage.
Andrew Haji (left) and Sydney Baedke perform Turandot at Maison Symphonique. Tam Lan Truong for the Orchestre Philharmonique et Chœur des Mélomanes.

“Beauty, women’s business in this society, is the theatre of their enslavement.”
Susan Sontag, On Women

More than in any other social station, American First Ladies may be the world’s most heavily objectified and endlessly scrutinized women.

Women’s Wear Daily, the tabloid journal that chronicled “microtrends” before they were called microtrends, obsessed over Jacqueline Kennedy’s every purchase: suede skirts, knee socks, Gucci shoes. John Fairchild, WWD’s publisher in the 1960s, called Kennedy “Her Elegance.” In contrast, he dubbed Kennedy’s successor, Mrs. Lyndon B. Johnson, “Her Efficiency.”

Women’s Wear Daily treads much more carefully today when writing about Mrs. Trump, restricting its coverage to strict facts without editorializing or judgement. Among the harshest criticism it has published since Trump’s first presidency is of Melania “not being ultrathin,” as well as revealing that Wildes & Weinberg, the immigration firm that represented John Lennon during his deportation hearings, helped secure her citizenship, which she received in 2006.

Eventually, WWD turned on the Kennedy clan, too, writing of the late President’s daughter in their signature all-caps headlines (a style that a certain similarly snarky head of state has adopted), “THERE IS NO QUESTION THAT CAROLINE DRESSES MUCH YOUNGER THAN HER AGE.”

Défilé 2026 de l’École supérieure de mode, Centre de design de l’UQAM, 12 May 2026

A model wearing a unique dress featuring a mix of black, white, and patterned fabrics, designed with a strapless bodice and a voluminous skirt. The model is seated on a stool, showcasing the intricate layers and details of the garment.
Lace of a Jester, Claire Miranda-Goldstein. Photographed for NicheMTL (with thanks to Rory Creelman.)

“The pretty things are going to hell
They wore it out, but they wore it well.”
—David Bowie, “The Pretty Things Are Going to Hell”

If beauty is equivalent with rightness and truth, then there is no cause to damn the righteous and truly beautiful. Deceitful beauty, however, is narcissism — “vexation of spirit,” as it is written in Ecclesiastes 2.

The question of what to do with one’s days is at the root of the Western conception of damnation and salvation. Labour in wisdom, and not for pleasure, is considered goodness before God. Labour in sin condemns the sinner to gather up all she labours for and give it to her that is good.

Labour for true beauty, however, must be righteous. Beauty gladdens the heart and unencumbers the spirit. Labour for true beauty also obscures the nature of God and makes Him unknowable. To conceal God’s work is God’s work.

Ecclesiastes 3 is among the Bible’s most well-known chapters, made famous by Pete Seeger in his song, “Turn! Turn! Turn!” which The Byrds in 1965 turned into an international hit. Fashion is instructive here as it is literally seasonal. There is a time proper to scarves and boots, and another time for shirtsleeves and sandals. To make peace in a time of war, or to acquire in a time of loss, is to disobey the Ecclesiastical calendar, like wearing white after labour day.

“He hath made every thing beautiful in his time,” it is written in verse 11, and so ugliness is also a form of seasonal beauty. There is nothing which does not eventually have its moment and purpose. This philosophy is fundamentally pragmatic because it positions the use value of beauty above its aesthetic appeal.

Beautiful utility is good work. Alternately, futility is vanity.◼︎

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: Suffering Machines, Aude B. Verville. Photographed for NicheMTL (with thanks to Rory Creelman.)

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How Do You Spell Holiday?

Practically Magic: in conversation with Myriam Bleau

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cover image: Myriam Bleau photographed by Bruno Destombes.

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Bookish

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Blue Metropolis Festival runs 23-26 April 2026.

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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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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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