Tag Archives: SAT

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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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Small Parts Isolated and Destroyed

Hesaitix with Laced and Amselysen, Espace SAT, 31 May 2025

Laced performs at Espace SAT, 31 May 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Look at me and watch yourself
Everyone is someone else
When you speak the echoes chime
The voice is yours, but the words are mine.
—Nomeansno, “Machine”

Perhaps the reason that everyone is so fascinated with the spat between the Orange Cheeto and Tech Bro Numero Uno is that we recognize the lowest form of petty squabble magnified and reflected in the behaviour of the world’s most powerful people. Reality TV has migrated to Truth Social and the network formerly known as Twitter and returned full circle back to reality.

In the beginning, God created man in His image. Now that man is in charge, we are finally free to fashion the Gods we deserve.

The Womb is a Room in Another Person, dir. Catherine Machado, Mission Santa Cruz, 4 June 2025

Lynley Traill (left) and Mariana Jiménez Arango (right) star in The Womb is a Room in Another Person. Photographed for NicheMTL.

I’m living in an age that
Screams my name at night
But when I get to the doorway
There’s no one in sight.
—Arcade Fire, “My Body Is a Cage.”

Practice makes perfect. So be careful what you practice.

Since 1957, Alan Belcher, Galerie Eli Kerr, 7 June – 24 July 2025

Eli Kerr (left) and Alan Belcher (right) at the vernissage for Since 1957 at Galerie Eli Kerr, 7 June 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Why shouldn’t everything we’ve constructed be deconstructed? What’s so special anyway about some abstract concept like democracy, or liberty, or justice? What’s so special about art when a crypto billionaire spends $6.2 million on a banana duct taped to the wall?

Later, that same crypto billionaire might spend $40 million on meme coins to attend a private dinner at Trump National Golf Club, effectively buying an audience with the leader of the so-called free world. Influence peddling is the highest artform of our era, an artform that requires highly specialized skills, and abundant material resources.

Ours would not be the first toxic civilization to fall away, and likely won’t be the last. Anyone who has seen the original Planet of the Apes knows that composition is inevitably followed by decomposition. It doesn’t matter whether these are good times or bad times or in between times. They won’t last.

Shapes with Thee Soreheads, Caniche, and Shunk, Van Horne Underpass, 7 June 2025

Shunk perform at the Van Horne Underpass, 7 June 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

The other day I was searching for a CD amidst a pile of them that was taller than I am. Crouched on the floor trying to locate the spine of the album I was looking for, I raised my head just in time to see the entire stack come crashing down on me, one sharp plastic jewel case after another — Tom Waits, These New Puritans, Roger Waters — colliding with my forehead. It was slapstick. I walked around for three days with a discernible bump on my brow, wounded again by music.

I recounted this story afterwards to Gary Worsley, the proprietor of Cheap Thrills, to which he replied, “Good thing you don’t have much heavy metal in your collection.”

Superposition, Jinny Yu, Fondation Guido Molinari, 5 June – 24 August 2025

Marie-Eve Beaupré introduced Jinny Yu at the vernissage for Superposition at Fondation Guido Molinari, 5 June 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

You’ll never live like common people
You’ll never do whatever common people do
Never fail like common people
You’ll never watch your life slide out of view
And then dance and drink and screw
Because there’s nothing else to do.
—Pulp, “Common People.”

The last time you were here, walking hurriedly southward on Rue Dézéry from Métro Prefontaine, the snow was knee-high and it was Nuit Blanche and you were on your way to the same place that you are on your way to now, Fondation Guido Molinari, on the east end of Sainte-Catherine, a converted Spanish Bank in Hochelaga that housed the artist’s studio and living quarters while he was alive and now serves as a monument to his substantial legacy.

The air was painfully cold then, and the sidewalks were not cleared, except for the worn pathways of footprints that carved meandering makeshift snow trenches which deceived every second step into a potential broken ankle. The lamplight illuminated a sepia scene, and icicles hung from the most European of balconies in Canada, and you thought to yourself that you were fortunate to be living here in a city that prized arts and culture to such an extent as to celebrate Nuit Blanche with nighttime events at places like this.

Today, though, it is late spring, and the air is soft and warm and mild as baby’s breath — either the plant or the respiration — and songbirds are singing you on your way to your destination. Black girls in skin-tight spandex and white girls with naked tattooed arms sprouting from flowing sundresses walk before you down the one-way street, and beautiful girls’ backsides bounce on bicycle seats when they ride by, and you are grateful for Montreal’s crumbling and bumpy roads. An elderly woman in a purple robe and matching hair walks twin Scottish terriers on two lime-green leashes, smiling at you as she ambles past.

The scent of lilac overwhelms your olfactory sense, intermittently interrupted by the acrid stench of compost, because it is garbage day and the garbage collectors have left the tops of all the receptacles open to air out. You can smell the accumulated age of the neighbourhood, this time superimposed upon all the eras that came before it, the decomposing wood and musky tobacco fumes belching from open doors of flats with no air conditioning and out onto the sidewalks.

An ambient breeze carries puffs of pollen lazily through the park, where old men ride on reduced mobility scooters with high visibility vests wrapped around their seats. They smoke and are unshaven and sift through garbage cans gleaning empty beer bottles and cigarette butts that they can roll by hand back into smokable form.

It is 6:17pm and you are 17 minutes late. But it doesn’t matter right now because you feel alive and particularly present in a way that you haven’t in some time. You want to elongate everything about this moment, to remember the detail of every discrete sensation, to capture them as they wash away like grains of sand on some faraway beach.◼︎

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: Alan Belcher, Carbonara (2024), Carbon drawing on canvas with imported pancetta stagionata, egg yolk, pasta water, pecorino romano, agricola due leoni, olive oil, and black pepper. 18″ x 18″ x 2.25″

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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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After The Future

Jan Jelinek with Roméo Poirier and Racine, Society for Arts and Technology, 15 November 2024

Racine performs at SAT, 15 November 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“From now on there can be no unpolitical prophecies.”
—John Berger, “The Moment of Cubism.”

In 2016, when Donald Trump was for the first time elected U.S. president, the online discourse-o-sphere kicked into overdrive with comparisons to various dystopian narratives, both historical and fictional.

Political theorists like Henry A. Giroux and Robert Paxton cited similarities to the unholy trinity of World War II-era fascist dictators. The New Yorker cartoonist Paul Noth likened Trump to the archetypal wolf tending his flock of sheep.

But none was as pervasive as Trump’s apparent correlation to Biff Tannen in Back to the Future Part II, leading the 1989 film’s screenwriter, Bob Gale, to confirm that he indeed modelled Tannen’s character on a caricature of Trump.

However, the blowhard billionaire archetype is no longer an exaggeration, nor does its application implicitly affront Trump or his supporters.

On the contrary, a loudmouthed misogynistic bully who appears impervious to criticism is the epitome of heroism for the new generation of disaffected and desensitized Americans who voted for him. Scorn only empowers them further; shame, paradoxically, is their badge of honour.

These incongruities have led many of us to observe, like the Back to the Future sequel’s plot, that we are living in the worst of conceivable timelines. But I’m afraid that it’s even worse than that: we’re going through the worst timeline again, like taking that pathological second whiff of a carton of spoilt milk.

This is Back to the Future Part II, part two.

NPNP with Anna Mayberry and Hidden Attachment, Lamplight, 14 November 2024

Listeners gather for NPNP’s “Harmony in a Vacuum” launch, 14 November 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Deception counts less as a measure of realism than as evidence of magicianship, and is a highly atypical mishap.”
—Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art

If works of art reflect the cultural zeitgeist, then we are clearly in a state of general disarray. Deconstructed music is only the latest structurally homologous current indicating the lack of structure and void of solidarity evident in society.

For instance, rigidly rhythmic electronic music of the 1980s and ‘90s fairly accurately echoed late modernity, the perfect and predictable thump-and-clap of the cybernetic age.

At the turn of the new millennium, arrhythmic trends exemplified by Autechre’s off-the-grid programming, and further, by Burial’s beat-mismatched hauntological loopscapes, anticipated the increasingly fragmented post-Fordist modes of production emerging under hypercapitalism.

Of all the 20th century musical inventions, the synthesizer sonically represented futurism best. But by the early 21st century, it had quickly flipped into an instrument of nostalgia, reminding us of the squandered potential of possible futures past.

Now, in an era of heightened precarity, remote and always-on labour, forever wars and forever chemicals, we are confronted with alienating and longform musical (de)compositions that reject almost any semblance of structure, and in which moments of traditional melody and chance harmony are at best incidental.

The recto of this verso is the retromaniacal return to thinner and thinner slivers of musical historicity, reliving, repeating, and recombining ever-shrinking aesthetic precedents in a rapidly decaying orbit, reducing entire cultural currents and oeuvres to a “vibe” or a “mood.”

This is neither a good nor a bad thing — but it is undisputedly nonetheless a thing.

La grandiose Symphonie alpestre de Richard Strauss, Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, Bruce Liu Piano, Rafael Payare Conductor, Maison Symphonique, 13 November 2024

Bruce Liu performs with the OSM at Maison Symphonique, 13 November 2024. Antoine Saito for the OSM.

“The sense of inevitability that a great work of art projects is not made up of the inevitability or necessity of its parts, but of the whole.”
—Susan Sontag, “On Style.”

There are a handful of writers to whom I always return in troubled times, among them William S. Burroughs, Slavoj Žižek, Mark Fisher, Susan Sontag, and Woody Allen. All of these at alternating points in their lives experienced ecstasy and despair, the heights of fame and the trials of misfortune.

Burroughs, for example, murdered his own wife, ostensibly an accident from which his creative conscience likely never fully recovered. Woody Allen has now defiantly spent half of his career under the long shadow of popular cancellation. Fisher succumbed to his own diagnosis that there was no alternative to capitalism — other than the exceedingly unlikely possibility that we would all take psychedelics and fall madly in love with modernity again.

I make no claim for any of these thinkers, nor apologies for their misdeeds, nor explanations for their failures or successes. However, their words provide me a profound sense of comfort, a path forward, like sets of deep footprints in freshly fallen snow.

Russell Banx, Gaze and Gesture, Pangée, 14 November – 21 December 2024

Russell Banx, Across the Lake, 2024. Graphite on paper. 57 x 44 in. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“for God, to me, it seems,
is a verb
not a noun”
—R. Buckminster Fuller, “No More Secondhand God.”

My generation and every generation after it mainly fall into two problematic categories: those who were never taught how to fight, and those who were only taught how to fight.

The progeny of hippies were erroneously told that love would conquer all. This is false. Love in fact conquers very few things, not even love itself. Hatred is often stronger than love.

If conquering is the goal, the most valuable tool is violence. The trick is to fight lovingly, to commit violence with love.

Déliquescence, Fonderie Darling, 26 September – 8 December 2024

Installation view, Déliquescence, Fonderie Darling. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“God makes the world by calculating, but his calculations never work out exactly, and this inexactitude or injustice in the result, this irreducible inequality, forms the condition of the world.”
—Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition

The work of art in the age of its artificial reproduction immediately raises the question of its authenticity. Can art conceived of and made by a complex computer program genuinely be called art? Or is the art perhaps the A.I. itself?

If it is, human beings are not the artists; God is. And all of creation is His, well, creation. We are not the medium but the form.

The opposite of artificial intelligence is not human intelligence but rather divine instinct.◼︎

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 subscribing.

Cover image: Russell Banx. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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Paradise Now

L Con with Miel and Tenses, Marché des Possibles, 24 August 2024

Miel performs at Marché des Possibles, 24 August 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

In Paradise Now, the Oscar-nominated 2005 Palestinian film directed by Hany Abu-Assad, two lifelong friends, Said and Khaled, are recruited to carry out a suicide bombing mission in Tel Aviv.

At the time, the film was criticized for humanizing terrorism, potentially eliciting sympathy for radical acts of religious and political extremism, and concurrently praised for realistically characterizing the circumstances that lead to such desperate ends.

In the film, Jamal, the operation’s mastermind who represents a nameless guerrilla organization, convinces Said by telling him that a man who is unafraid of death is in true control of his life. Though the pair require little convincing, believing that martyrdom will imbue their ostensibly meaningless existence with a sense of higher purpose, this is the twisted logic that seals the deal.

19 years ago, when the film made its North American premiere at the Telluride Film Festival, the United States was still reeling from the September 11th attacks. Acts of terror were considered rare and isolated incidents. Today, we in the West are living under a climate of ambient terror in which the threat of localized destruction is low, but the mediation of war is ever-present.

The realities of combat — and the carnal horrors of violent death — are things that happen elsewhere, but never too far, dematerialized and yet ubiquitous. Their impressions upon us are both visceral and virtual. We cannot help but be traumatized and anaesthetized at once.

Luke Painter, Moving Images, Patel Brown, 29 August – 5 October 2024

Luke Painter gallery view at Patel Brown. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Following 9/11, the footage of the airplane striking the second tower played and replayed on an apparently endless loop via 24-hour news channels, producing what I call the “consensus image.” This establishing master shot became something like a brand, or better yet, a logo, immediately recognizable, transmissible, consumable.

Even eyewitnesses who were present that day in Manhattan described what they saw as like a scene from a disaster movie. The event itself was somehow less real than its replication, its proliferation, like the sting of a stubbed toe that’s only painful when the brain finally receives and decodes the message.

‘Ah yes, this is supposed to hurt,’ our nerves inform us, well after the initial shock of impact. This temporal interval is what creates the sensation of progression.

Cinema was composed of a series of still images that flickered like a flip book to life in real-time. Television is composed of a series of moving pictures, dancing electronic images that in their simultaneity and overabundance produce the impression of stasis.

Panorama: I’m Feeling Lucky, Timothy Thomasson & Tatum Wilson, SAT, 27 August 2024

In Slavoj Žižek’s extended 2002 essay on the September 11th attacks, entitled Welcome to the Desert of the Real, he predicts, alarmingly accurately in retrospect, what 21st Century warfare would come to look like.

“We are entering a new era of paranoiac warfare,” Žižek writes, “in which the greatest task will be to identify the enemy and his weapons. In this new warfare, the agents assume their acts less and less publicly … forming an ideal breeding-ground for conspiracy theories and generalized social paranoia.”

Jean-François Lauda, Eli Kerr, Vernissage, 13 September 2024

Jean-François Lauda gallery view at Eli Kerr. Photographed for NicheMTL.

The horse is prepared against the day of battle: but safety is of the Lord. —Proverbs 21:31

“Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution.” —C.P. Cavafy

The purpose of war in every century previous to our own seemed to be a paradoxical one: to prevent an even worse conflict.

The Second World War, for example, was justified to put a halt to the Holocaust and Hitler’s ruthless expansion into Eastern Europe. The Cold War was viewed as a deterrent to a larger and possibly nuclear war — surely a far harsher fate. As the old ideological axiom went, to secure peace, we must prepare for war.

However, war in the 21st Century appears to have only one goal: to perpetuate conflict, while guaranteeing its manageability at a purely bureaucratic level.

Just keep the temperature up while ensuring the water never boils out of the pot. As long as the explosions continue on the accepted field of battle — i.e. Ukraine, Gaza — war poses no problems and indeed yields dividends to the political and capital powers that reign today.

Particularly in the U.S., it won’t matter whether Donald Trump or Kamala Harris wins the presidency. Either one would benefit from a permanent state of war abroad.

The battles that rage now are designed not to end. Otherwise, they never would have begun.

Yves Charuest, out into, Interzone Editions (2024)

“In the history of art, late works are the catastrophes.” —Theodor Adorno

As he approached his final years, David Bowie’s compositions became evermore chaotic, wilder, influenced increasingly by disrupters and experimenters.

Bowie was always known as something of a vampire, feeding off and making palatable the avant-garde zeitgeist. In the late 1960s it was Syd Barrett and Marc Bolan. In the late 1990s it was Goldie and Trent Reznor.

However, in 2002, Bowie released arguably his most confounding album, Heathen. Superficially, the record sounded like an artist shifting into a more adult contemporary phase, adopting the vernacular of acolytes like Dave Grohl and The Pixies, whom he covered on the recording. But beneath the surface, it was apparent that Bowie was wrestling with something more profound, spiritual, and in doing so, discovering his own original voice, perhaps for the first time.

On his ultimate album, entitled Blackstar, Bowie consciously conjures the mythical archetype of Beethoven in late life — deaf, isolated, insane — abandoning any airs of pleasant or acceptable pop music.

The Palestinian-American philosopher Edward Said wrote in his 2006 book On Late Style: “Beethoven’s immobilized and socially resistant final works are at the core of what is new in modern music of our own time.”

Bowie’s final works are at the heart of what is postmodern in ours.◼︎

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 subscribing.

Cover image: Michael Dumontier & Neil Farber, Animal Shapes (2021) Acrylic and ink on MDF, 24 x 24 in. Patel Brown. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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Ignoring van Gogh

Heith with Orchestroll and Audréanne Fillion, Espace SAT, 12 July 2024

Orchestroll perform at SAT, 12 July 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

I know a lot of people who want to quit doing the things that they know are bad for them. Smoking, drinking, eating crap food, taking drugs, toxic relationships — these kinds of things.

For some reason, many of these people come to me as if I have answers for them. Maybe it’s because I have stopped doing all of these things myself, and they believe that I can magically ladle them out of that thick soup of addiction.

Sorry, I can’t. Nobody can.

These people think that there is some light that will switch on, or off, when someone like me shows them the secret, or some useful doctor prescribes the right antidote, or recommends replacing one compulsion with another. They try to change their friends, or their work, or move house. They think that by rearranging everything around them, something inside them will be altered, too.

People ask me if I feel better now.

No. But I feel. My sense of feeling has improved, both pleasure and pain, happiness and sorrow.

So yes, I suppose that technically speaking, I do feel better now. And yet I still don’t know how to feel.

Learning to feel again is the opposite of riding a bike. Once you learn, you immediately forget. It’s like being a goldfish, swimming forever around the castle in the feelings fishbowl.

There is no sage advice, no magic formula. The sole equation that exists, which is rather quotidian, is Life + Time = X.

The only advice I can offer for people who want to stop, for instance, smoking, is just to stop smoking. Stop putting combustible sticks in your mouth and lighting them. And keep stopping doing that. Stop lighting combustible sticks in your mouth until you don’t feel like lighting combustible sticks in your mouth anymore.

And even after that, keep stopping. Never go back. Just stop for good.

The worst thing anyone can do who wants to stop doing something is to start doing that thing again. You cannot reward yourself for an extended period of abstinence with short bursts of indulgence.

If there is one weird trick to quitting anything, it’s to learn to enjoy not wanting, say, cigarettes, or alcohol, or smack, or your crazy ex, or whatever it is that you so badly want. Learn to love unconsummated longing, and suddenly, you will find fulfillment in absolutely everything. And nothing.

The less you need to satisfy yourself, the freer you will feel.

What then? Then you die. Full-stop.

Music & Nature, Private home of Nabil Fawaz, 13 July 2024

Yuki Isami and Nabil Fawaz perform impromptu at Mr. Fawaz’s private residence, 13 July 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Among the first films ever made is a short by the Lumière brothers called “Feeding the Baby.”

It depicts in documentary form precisely that: Auguste Lumière and his wife, Marguerite, feeding their infant daughter, Andrée.

Still, the subtext of this film is noteworthy. Cinema feeds its audiences the images that form our consensus.

There is a reason why our timelines are called “feeds” — and the text at the bottom of a newscast is coined “the crawl.”

A Nearly Tangible Fiction, Patel Brown, Until 17 August 2024

Malik McKoy, when can we start using emojis as titles?, 2023, acrylic and yarn on canvas. Photographed for NicheMTL.

A fundamental difference exists between galleries and museums.

Generally, curators run art galleries with a passion for art. Galleries have to make money, too, because operating a gallery is labour, like any other kind of labour. And labourers deserve to be paid. Art labourers work hard finding art.

Art museums, on the other hand, are far more monetarily concerned. We mistakenly believe that curators run art museums, too. This is false.

Art museums are run by PR and marketing teams who work two days a week and meet over Zoom, or Zoom over Teams. Art museums are run by risk management departments and accountants who devise and revise ever-shrinking budgets on ever-expanding Excel spreadsheets. Players more than workers run museums.

If ever there was an artist as original and talented today as a van Gogh, even if he or she or they crawled into the museum bloodied and overdosing and earless, the players who run them would never take notice.

They’d be too busy counting Instagram followers like sheep and unconsciously refreshing their newsfeeds, looking everywhere except in front of their faces for the next big thing.

Museums are where great art gets lost. Art galleries are where great art is found.

Vagabond Shoes, McBride Contemporain, Until 17 August 2024

Eun-Ha Paek, Mongmong Lassies Double, 2024, Glazed stoneware with luster, 16.5 x 21.6 x 8.3 cm. McBride Contemporain.

We are taught to forgive those who trespass against us, for they know not what they do. Most people, when they do us harm, feel a sense of remorse. So, it’s easy to forgive. If someone apologizes for their trespasses, it inclines exoneration.

But what happens when people who trespass against us aren’t sorry, when they don’t feel a sense of remorse, when they know precisely what they do?

There’s less teaching for that.

Jessica Moss with Radwan Ghazi Moumneh and Frédéric D. Oberland, Hotel2Tango, 20 July 2024

Jessica Moss performs at Hotel2Tango, 20 July 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth. And it shall come to pass, when I bring cloud over the earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud: And I will remember my covenant, which is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh. —Genesis 9:13-15

There are no coincidences.

Not because everything happens for a reason. But rather, because we alone manufacture the often-arcane meanings we ascribe to concurrent or successive events.

These meanings are only meaningful insofar as they are collectively felt, or whether we are capable of communicating and convincing others of their circumstantial, synchronous significance.

Take, for example, the full-horizon double rainbow that occurred over the Van Horne underpass about an hour before Radwan Ghazi Moumneh, Frédéric D. Oberland, and Jessica Moss were set to perform at Hotel2Tango.

There is nothing inherently meaningful in a deluge of summer rain and the natural prismatic phenomenon that occurs just afterwards. There is no symbolic significance to rainbows taking place before a gig — or for that matter at any given time. There is only scientific significance to light refracting through water.

Nonetheless, it was a coincidence. Know what I mean?◼︎

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 subscribing.

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Reasonable Hand-Drawn Facsimile  

Soft Focus, Bradley Ertaskiran, Until 7 September 2024

Manual Axel Strain. Dawn transforms into siya (saskatoon berry) (2023), Bradley Ertaskiran, 11 July 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

In the early 1980s, there was nothing that I wanted more than a Cabbage Patch Kid.

Verily, I was the target market for this genius stroke of consumer product branding: I was a child in the early 1980s.

Every other 1980s child I knew had one, it seemed, and wanting to be like every other child, I hankered and desired and yearned for a Cabbage Patch Kid like no other item.

I wanted one like I wanted Christmas to come. I craved a Cabbage Patch Kid more than food. It was the first time I can recall developing something approaching an addictive impulse, needing that doll.

My dad didn’t want me to have one. He didn’t want me to play with dolls, I imagine, because he thought that in this world there were boy things and there were girl things, and decidedly, dolls were the latter. So, for a long time, I just quietly coveted other children’s Cabbage Patch Kids.

But my maternal grandmother, Margaret, knew how much I wanted this toy. And being a knitter, she took it upon herself to make me a Cabbage Patch Kid.

Out of a pair of thick old stockings, denim and yarn and buttons, she crafted for me a home-made version of this marketing phenomenon which approximated a Cabbage Patch Kid. As Cabbage Patch Kids all had names, Margaret gave my doll a name, too. His name was Flint.

I loved Flint, possibly more than I would have loved a Cabbage Patch Kid. Everyone else had a Cabbage Patch Kid, but no one else had Flint. Flint was even better than the real thing — singular, not mass-produced, in retrospect, more niche.

Looking back now, Flint is my Rosebud.

Good Sine, Cyber Love Hotel, 7 July 2024

From Left: Scott Bevins, Kevin O’Neil, Lisa Teichmann, and Luke Loseth perform at Cyber Love Hotel, 7 July 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

At a recent party, I had the good fortune to meet an actual practicing theoretical physicist. This man, whose name was James and was a spry 81 years old and in Montreal for an academic conference, appropriately gravitated towards my companion and me, lurking in the kitchen corner.

We struck up a conversation and I could immediately discern a higher level of intelligence and experience in James. His demeanour was calm and his sense of focus unsullied by the acceleratory pace of social media.

He spoke of concepts and ideas and told stories with gravitas and substance. He talked about Schrödinger and chaos and string theory and general relativity, fascinating us as a magician might with a coin trick.

I asked James if he believed that there were simultaneous, competing realities, and without hesitation, he said absolutely yes. He told us that the best answer that physics can offer to the nature of being is “probably.”

I shuddered and felt a tingle through my spine at that moment as I realized that I had probably stumbled into my own best possible competing reality.

Conflit Majeur, with Poor Girl, Shunk, and Puberty Well, Van Horne, 19 July 2024

Children dance while Shunk perform beneath the Van Horne overpass, 19 July 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Quentin Tarantino’s 1997 film Jackie Brown, based on the 1992 novel Rum Punch by Elmore Leonard, features a scene in which the film’s main character, Ordell Robbie, whom Samuel L. Jackson portrays, details his dreams for the future. Robbie plans on amassing a million dollars in Mexico from his trade in the sale of illegal firearms and, as he puts it, “spend the rest of my life spending.”

This is a common theme of heist films — to steal or otherwise stockpile enough wealth to live out the remainder of one’s days free from labour’s obligations. To escape the work world, even if that work is crime, is the ideal goal.

Dennis Hopper’s 1969 counterculture classic Easy Rider reiterates this refrain.

In a scene where the film’s protagonists, Billy, played by Hopper, and Peter Fonda’s character, Wyatt, sit smoking marijuana around a campfire after selling an enormous stash of cocaine, Billy declares, “We’re rich, man. We’re retired in Florida now, mister.”

Wyatt replies, “No Billy, we blew it.”

“What?” Billy asks incredulously. “That’s what it’s all about, man, like, you know, you go for the big money, man, and then you’re free, you dig?”

Wyatt gazes into the flames and smirks and repeats, this time more forcefully, “We blew it.”

During an interview contained in the special edition DVD release of the film, Peter Fonda elaborates on this enigmatic response. He talks with genuine anger about people who aspire to retire. “I want to get right in their face and say fuck you man, there is so much work to do.”

Terra Flecta, SAT, 12 July 2024

Excerpt from videographer Emma Forgues and musicians Philippe Vandal and Joël Lavoie’s Terra Flecta. Captured for NicheMTL.

Thou shalt make thee no molten gods. —Exodus 34:17

Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they? —Matthew 6:26

The Torah speaks of a Jealous God who commands His disciples to worship no other deities but Him. The New Testament echoes this notion throughout, attributing false idol status primarily to money and pleasures of the flesh. True fearers of God must always be in the spirit rather than in the world.

This is a paradox — and, according to most faithful orders, the origin of suffering.

Humans are born with desire. As soon as we emerge from the womb, we cry, as if in anticipation of a lifetime of unrequited yearning. To want is to never be fulfilled. And yet we seem to need wanting.

This is The Place Where We Pray, Lara Kramer, Fonderie Darling, 18 July 2024

Lara Kramer performs in front of Fonderie Darling, 18 July 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

In Ernest Hemingway’s 1952 novella, The Old Man and the Sea, Santiago, an ageing fisherman, catches a fish so big that he has to tie it to the side of his boat to bring it ashore. But on the way back, sharks and other scavenging predators feast on the fish so that all that Santiago is left with is the fish’s skeleton.

This story is typically interpreted as a metaphor for human aspiration. The more we accumulate, the more we are apt to lose.

But taken from the shark’s angle, The Old Man and the Sea could be a holy book about an otherworldly entity — a sort of deity — who arrives in an unidentified seafaring object and feeds the masses.

It’s all about perspective.◼︎

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 subscribing.

Cover image: Sonya Derviz, Reclining, dreaming, (2024.) Charcoal and oil on linen, 160 x 200 x 2.5 cm. Photographed for NicheMTL

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