Tag Archives: Suoni per il popolo

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Down With Love

LUMI, 9-course Tasting Menu, SonoLux, 9 July 2026

Chef Graham Hood’s first of two desserts with the new summer 9-course tasting menu at LUMI, Hôtel SonoLux. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Venus de Milo, who said to Colonel Sanders, ‘Mmm, this is finger lickin’ good’ … never got a dinner.”
—Red Buttons

Even folks of my parents’ generation might have trouble remembering the Borsch Belt comedian Red Buttons, who achieved modest fame following World War II as an early television pioneer and recording artist with, among other niche successes, a minor hit in the double A-side, “Strange Things are Happening.”

Born Aaron Chwatt to Russo-Polish Jewish immigrant parents in Manhattan, New York, in 1919, Buttons struggled harder than his contemporaneous comedians, like Jack Benny or Bob Hope, to gain a foothold in emerging media.

To put it generously, Buttons wasn’t handsome. He didn’t possess natural charisma. He resembled a garden gnome, with his stout physique and shock of ginger hair. And he garnered a reputation for being impossible to work with, having fired more than 80 writers from his eponymous General Foods-sponsored variety programme, until the company and his network, CBS, publicly cancelled him in 1952.

Buttons enjoyed a second life in the 1970s as a regular panelist on The Dean Martin Celebrity Roast, a series of T.V. specials in which famous actors, singers, and politicians would take a kicking in the form of insult comedy from their peers. Don Rickles might have been the master of this genre. But Red Buttons developed a routine, a rhythm, a pattern that he would apply in 19 episodes to such celebrities as Frank Sinatra, Muhammed Ali, and Betty White, leaving his fellow panelists, like Orson Welles and Milton Berle, in stitches.

Buttons would question why host Dean Martin should honour so-and-so when so many other notable historical figures “never got a dinner.” He would then list off a litany of famous personalities followed by one-liners like, “Lot, who said to his wife, ‘salt I’ve got, it’s popcorn I need!”

The one-liner is an underrated device that contemporary comics have largely abandoned in favour of more topical humour. But jokes dependent upon current affairs don’t enjoy the shelf life of a timeless and politically incorrect Buttons witticism like, “Adam, who said to God in the Garden of Eden, ‘I’ve got more ribs, have you got more broads?’”

St. Vincent Symphonique with Ruby Plume, Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier, 28 June 2026

St. Vincent performs at Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier with the Montreal International Jazz Festival. Victor Diaz Lamich for FIJM.

“Well, some people try to pick up girls, they get called assholes
This never happened to Pablo Picasso
The girls would turn the color of a juicy avocado
When he would drive down their street in his El Dorado
He could walk down your street, girls could not resist his stare
So Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole
Not like you.”
—David Bowie, “Pablo Picasso”

A recent New York Times op-ed titled “Go On, Date Your Co-Workers” pricked up my attention, for obvious reasons.

The increasing estrangement between women and men, what has newly been termed “heteropessimism,” was the subject of Ross Douthat’s Interesting Times podcast only a few weeks prior. And Magdalene J. Taylor, senior editor at Playboy, astutely noted in her own guest essay in May: “Gender relations are tense to the point of hostility these days.”

In this post-#metoo moment, something that was once considered as innocuous as inviting a colleague or even a stranger to dinner can carry the risk of wild accusations and potentially devastating consequences.

It is no surprise that a woman wrote the Times article encouraging inter-office romance. Because along with the carpet-bombing condemnation of even an inkling of male desire, female sexual prowess has been concurrently rebranded in our era as overdue feminist empowerment. A woman can behave like Don Draper from Mad Men nowadays and rather than being called “Jian” or getting dragged on social media, she is simply asserting her long-sublimated femininity. You go, girl.

There is no shame in sluttiness — nor should there be. But sexual intercourse is not necessarily the be-all and end-all of associating with people, regardless of sexual identity or gender normativity. Maybe, and this may be a radical suggestion, hanging out with someone of the opposite sex without the expectation of sex can go some way to bridging the perilous gender divide.

“The best relationships — the ones that last — are frequently the ones that are rooted in friendship,” writes Gillian Anderson, best known as X-Files it-girl and author of We: A Manifesto for Women Everywhere.

“The person who was just a friend is … suddenly the only person you can ever imagine yourself with.”

Radwan Ghazi Moumneh & Frédérique D. Oberland with Jessica Moss, La Sala Rossa, 27 June 2026

Radwan Ghazi Moumneh and Frédérique D. Oberland perform at La Sala Rossa with Suoni Per il Popolo Festival. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“In every modern country that is Christian or post-Christian, women are the beautiful sex — to the detriment of the notion of beauty as well as of women.”
—Susan Sontag, On Women

We don’t tend to describe men as “beautiful.”

Men, especially in Montreal, known for its packs of man-bunned buttoned-down jeans-and-sheux-wearing walking Adam’s Apples, are “handsome” or “dapper” or “dashing,” qualifiers that are more often associated with sartorial style than with physical charm. Heaven forbid a fellow be beautiful, lest he is effeminate, or an adolescent — Björk’s archetypal “Venus as a Boy.” Especially a man of a certain age can never be described as beautiful.

At the same time, masculinity has become the purview of the manosphere, of incel subcultures, dangerous radicalism, repressed testosterone, Louis C.K. apologism, and right-wing hysteria. These are ugly qualities, not beautiful ones. The modern man might instead do well to aspire to a beauty in spirit in order to overcome any lack or loss of aesthetic splendour.

Beauty is regrettably constrained when it is beholden to the eyes, or age, or the fairer sex, only.

Diana Krall with Anaïs Cardot, Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier, 26 June 2026

Diana Krall performs at the Montreal Jazz Festival. Victor Diaz Lamich for FIJM.

“I was sentimental about many things: a woman’s shoes under the bed; one hairpin left behind on the dresser; the way they said, ‘I’m going to pee…’”
—Charles Bukowski, Women

Man, I love a beautiful woman. I think of Nicolas Cage’s soliloquy in Adaptation — “one has eyes that dance; one has eyes that contain the sadness of the world” — or sometimes of Cheech Marin’s infinitely more vulgar inventory in From Dusk till Dawn that has no place in polite company.

Summer is the season to “try with pleasured hands,” as The Zombies’ Rod Argent wrote; “Un beau jour c’est l’amour et le cœur bat plus vite,” according to Françoise Hardy. Tell me more, tell me more! All I can say is, if loving a beautiful woman is wrong, then I don’t want to be right.

Quinton Barnes with Preoptic Ridge, Le Système, 2 July 2026

Christian Richer and Frédérique Duval perform as Preoptic Ridge at Le Système, 2 July 2026. Rory Creelman for NicheMTL.

I hope I’m not telling tales out of school by recounting that the hip-hop artist Quinton Barnes and I had an insightful and in-depth conversation the other day about the complicated relationships between gender and race and economics and culture.

A beautiful man if ever there was one, Barnes lamented that modern Black music, in North America at least, has historically been the oyster from which white pearls have been plucked since the age of negro spirituals, when the likes of Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis mined Juke Joints for what came to be known as Rock n’ Roll.

Of course, “rock n’ roll” originated as a Black euphemism for sex that over the years became deracinated and sanitized to the point that any Catholic nun can say she loves rock n’ roll without getting her habit ruffled.

Another example of a phenomenon co-opted from the Black community is the term “cancelled,” which according to my deep dive, has its earliest origins in the sense that we use it today in the 1968 Brunswick recording by Erma Franklin, Aretha’s sister.

“Like a credit card that ain’t been paid,” Franklin sings, “you’ve been cancelled.”◼︎

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: Quinton Barnes performs at Le Système, 2 July 2026. Rory Creelman for NicheMTL.

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The Part You Throw Away

Alicia Clara, Blame it on the Moon, Nothing Dazzled (Self-released)

“Men seek for seclusion in the wilderness, by the seashore, or in the mountains — a dream you have cherished only too fondly yourself. But such fancies are wholly unworthy of a philosopher, since at any moment you choose you can retire within yourself.”
—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

It seems at times that there is no refuge from life’s trials and tribulations, no vacation from the constant barrage of work and domestic labour that doesn’t get done unless you do it, and no respite from the onslaught of information and incessant media — most of it utterly inconsequential — that assaults us on a daily basis.

Summer is supposed to be the season to relax and recharge, and many of us remember holidays taken at this time of year, a break from school or a pause from work, endless idle and expendable expanses of indefinite duration unspooling like rolls of toilet paper launched mischievously into a neighbour’s tree.

There is no time to do nothing these days, every waking moment filled with a sense of urgency and purpose, each day regardless of its calendrical station beckoning us to make something of it, as if everything unproductive was necessarily a waste, a casualty of capitalist ideology. Throwaway days are a thing of the past.

Time waits for no one. There is no escape within time or without it.

T. Gowdy with Nennen, Ky Brooks & Mat Ball, and Elizabeth Anka Vajagic & Steve Bates, Casa del Popolo, 28 June 2025

Tim Gowdy performs with the Suoni per il Popolo festival at Casa del Popolo, 28 June 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“A force like capital does not exist in any substantial sense, yet it is capable of producing practically any kind of effect.”
—Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie

In troubled moments, I return over and over again to the thinkers who influenced me most. And re-reading them — certain Biblical passages and scholars thereof, William S. Burroughs, Mark Fisher — never fails to reveal something new, something that clarifies and distills their ideas.

This process provides some comfort, some sense of stability in an increasingly destabilized world, a world in which natural cycles have been broken, natural progressions interrupted, natural continuity ruptured, and progress apparently set in reverse.

I am amazed, for instance at Fisher’s crystalline thought processes in defining the subtle distinction between the weird and the eerie. Everyone has an understanding and an experience of these two designations, and on the surface of it, they don’t seem particularly dissimilar or necessary to distinguish. But still, Fisher forges on churning the cream into butter by describing weirdness as the presence of something that shouldn’t be present, and eeriness as the absence of something that should.

And in an instant, those definitions seem foregone and essential. A disembodied voice is eerie. Whereas, say, a renaissance instrument in electronic music invokes the weird.

As most of the forces that exert agency in the world remain mysterious to us, we live in predominantly eerie times.

Nonetheless, it is weird that there is a clown holding the office of the United States presidency, or that there exists widespread plague, war, famine, and death in an age in which technology, diplomacy, and prosperity should have diminished all of these things.

Tautologically, weirdness is a condition upon which the eerie persists. The survival of that which should be absent produces a failure of absence.

Renée Condo, One Who Shatters Particles, One Who Smells Flowers, Blouin|Division, 26 June – 23 August 2025

Gallery view of Renée Condo’s exhibition at Galerie Blouin|Division. Photographed for NicheMTL.

We tend to believe that humans bring order into the world. We attribute organization to the Anthropocene. But ours is an era of manufactured chaos.

Nature is the law. Humanity is lawless.

Kara-Lis Coverdale with Noam Bierstone & Daniel Áñez, and Beast, Sacré-Coeur-de-Jésus, 30 June 2025

Kara-Lis Coverdale performs with the Suoni per il popolo festival at Sacré-Coeur-de-Jésus, 30 June 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

A friend loveth at all times, and a brother is born for adversity.
—Proverbs 18:17

We live in a spiritless society. Idols of worship have been replaced not by other gods or even people, but by lifestyles that ultimately rely upon accumulation and waste, exploitation and submission, complicity and silence, labour and leisure in appropriate measure, status and celebrity, a hierarchy of comments and likes that makes the Angelic order look as simple as a game of snakes and ladders.

The question of morality — the matter of a universal right and wrong — is so repressed as to be inverted: the absence of a moral code is itself the new morality; nothing is true, everything is permitted.

But the basic truths of bygone moralities hold true: karma is real, and she’s a bitch. What we do to others we also do to ourselves. And what we do not do for others, we also cannot expect in kind.

In an ironic twist, not stopping ourselves from amoral acts is what constitutes damnation under late capitalism. We desperately need to start speaking again in terms of what is universally right and what is unequivocally wrong.

For instance, violence is wrong. Genocide is wrong. Upsetting our planet’s delicate balance and making it uninhabitable for future generations is absolutely, undeniably, definitely wrong.

God doesn’t require us to believe in a god. Or even to worship a god. Whether or not “god” exists is independent of human faith or lack thereof. But a religious education and a sense of doctrine are invaluable to reconstructing the kinds of morality that will be necessary to solve the earth’s mounting existential crises.

We must become shepherds, our brothers’ keepers, leading by example, bringing light to the darkest corners of consciousness, gently walking on.

no cosmos, Pub Molson, 2 July 2025

no cosmos perform at the Montreal International Jazz Festival, 2 July 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL

“The thing you long for summons you away from the self.”
—C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

I’d rather have a line than a point.

A point only takes one second to make. Or conversely, you could be stuck making the same point for years. Points are easy to miss. Points mean stasis and death, whereas lines mean movement and change and life.

Don’t have a point. Draw a line and defend it.◼︎

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: Gallery view of Renée Condo’s exhibition at Galerie Blouin|Division. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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Time & Free Will

Harik, SANAM, Sametou Sawtan (Constellation Records)

“Right now you’re reading about free will. You’re free to go on reading, or stop now. You’ve started on this sentence, but you don’t have to………finish it.”
—Galen Strawson, “Luck Swallows Everything” in Things That Bother Me

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about deliberation.

There are subtle pronunciation differences and yet no change in spelling in the two most common uses of the term ‘deliberate.’

First is the verb: to deliberate. This word is pronounced ‘deliber-8’ and means to arrive at some form of conclusion about a problem or question. For instance, to deliberate is what a jury does after hearing legal arguments and examining evidence before establishing a judgment.

Second is the adjective: deliberate. This word is pronounced ‘deliber-@’ and simply denotes an act performed with intention. For instance, a premeditated murder is deliberate homicide. Its connotation is often negative, differentiating the action from something unconscious or accidental.

The verb ‘deliberate’ implies the passage of time. Juries are usually sequestered and allowed a determined period to reach a verdict. However, the adjective ‘deliberate’ does not imply any time at all. A murderer can deliberately kill someone in a split second, no deliberation required.

The word ‘deliberate’ is derived from the Latin language. At its heart is Liber, meaning the god of male fertility, wine, and freedom. The suffix ‘-ate’ means ‘an abundance.’ Passion-ate denotes an abundance of passion; consider-ate implies an excess of consideration. Thus, liberate suggests a wealth of freedom.

But the prefix ‘de-’ in Latin means ‘apart from’ or ‘away.’ So, deliberate literally means far from an abundance of freedom. Consequently, deliberation seems to suggest the paradoxical absence of free will in the nonetheless conscious performance of an act.

When the Orange Cheeto, with reference to America’s involvement in military action in support of Israel against Iran, says, “I like to make the final decision one second before it’s due,” this implies the rarest and most dangerous case of deliberation — a deliberate act that is de facto void of temporal contemplation, intentional carnage in absence of any meaningful forethought.

No Bystanders, Frantz Patrick Henry, Fonderie Darling, 19 June – 17 August 2025

Gallery view of No Bystanders by Frantz Patrick Henry at Fonderie Darling. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“There are no innocent bystanders … what are they doing there in the first place?”
—William S. Burroughs, Exterminator!

Some people believe that we see what we’re looking for. This suggests that the world always meets our expectations. If you trust that people are generally inherently good, you will generally see the inherent goodness in people. If you think that people are generally inherently bad, generally, you won’t be disappointed.

Black Ox Orkestar, Matana Roberts, Erika Angell, and Sam Shalabi Septet, Théâtre de Verdure, 14 June 2025

Erika Angell performs at Théâtre de Verdure, 14 June 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Detonating the bomb is like pushing the button that takes the selfie. At that moment, the imaginary world is in charge, for the real world, with all its discrimination and hopelessness, is no longer worth living in.”
—Byung-Chul Han, “Torturous Emptiness,” in Capitalism and the Death Drive

War is the most perverse form of self-harm — the injury of the Other in order to encourage the Other to injure us in retaliation. Narcissism is the flipside of the self-harm coin and provides the impetus for national conflict. We love our identity to such a degree that we fear annihilation and therefor attack the Other to inspire vengeance, thus self-harming. By this logic, the aggressor is able to claim victimhood as a justification to attack.

In the 21st century, the U.S. rebooted this franchise with its pre-emptive strike on Iraq because of a supposed cache of weapons of mass-destruction that turned out not to exist. Israel’s insistence that Iran’s uranium enrichment capabilities will inevitably lead to a nuclear weapon is a subtler rationale and requires circuitous reasoning.

It is not logical to say that if Iran enriches uranium, it will use it to manufacture nuclear weapons. It is, however, logical to say that destroying Iran’s uranium enrichment capabilities will prevent Iran from producing nuclear weapons.

Rick Leong, The Night Blooms, Bradley Ertaskiran, 15 May – 5 July 2025

Gallery view of The Night Blooms by Rick Leong at Bradley Ertaskiran. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“This democracy thing is easy—you just vote for the guy who promises you the most stuff. An idiot could do it. Actually it likes idiots, treats them with apparent kindness, and does everything it can to manufacture more of them.”
—Nick Land, “Cross-Coded History,” in The Dark Enlightenment

The technical invention of cinematography in the late 19th century enabled the mass dissemination of images. It also revolutionized acting.

Prior to cinema, theatre set the standard for drama. And the conventions of theatre were to play to the back of the room, i.e. to overemphasize and enunciate and dramatize every movement, every line.

The motion picture camera, though, was able to capture and magnify the minutia of behaviour, recording every detail, every gesture. It took some time to figure this out, and consequently, the majority of early cinema by today’s criteria looks stagey.

I claim that the trajectory started to reverse with the introduction of television. The shrinking of the screenic image meant that actors once again had to overact to convey cinematic sentiment on a diminutive scale. There was a momentary détente during the so-called golden age of TV with productions like The Sopranos and other prestige fare. But the process redoubled in speed as screens shrunk to laptop and then to smartphone size.

The sitting U.S. president arose as an outsize television personality, achieving celebrity status on late-night talk shows and his own reality series. Today, he has honed his overblown persona for TikTok, going bigly-er than ever before.

Quinton Barnes, Black Noise album launch, Casa del Popolo, 19 June 2025

Quinton Barnes and friends perform at Casa del Popolo, 19 June 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“The idea of the future, pregnant with an infinity of possibilities, is thus more fruitful than the future itself, and this is why we find more charm in hope than in possession, in dreams than in reality.”
― Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will

‘Knowledge is power’ is a common adage. This axiom presupposes that the acquisition of knowledge — through higher education and life experience — will bestow upon the learner increasing measures of agency in the world.

But what if power is antecedent, not knowledge? That would suggest, rather, that information is produced by systems and networks that exert power in culture and society.

And what exerts power?

In today’s world? Money and violence are likely the most powerful observable culprits. But still, we have not quite located the precise root source of power. There is only one force capable of manufacturing ex nihilo money and violence and therefore knowledge, and that power is time.◼︎

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: Rick Leong, Spell of the Sensuous, 2025, Oil on canvas 182.9 x 182.9 cm. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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On Alternate Planes: catching up with Kiva Stimac

Kiva Stimac is rearranging boxes.

“I’m trying to organize all the merch so we can start printing more,” she says, heaving a cardboard cube onto the chesterfield.

I have arrived at the Suoni per il Popolo headquarters located up one flight of stairs from the legendary Casa del Popolo venue on St. Laurent Boulevard, just south of St. Joseph. The office is plastered on one wall with a spate of colourful hand-printed posters cataloguing two-and-a-half decades’ worth of events. A blackboard featuring the calendar for the forthcoming 25th edition of the storied Montreal music and arts festival covers the other wall, formidable lineups scrawled out in white chalk, uncompromising programmes of innovative music across 12 days.

The Watch that Ends the Night label showcase featuring Polaris Prize-longlisted Quinton Barnes on 19 June; Radwan Ghazi Moumneh with Lebanese post-rock powerhouse SANAM on the 21st; Lesbians on Ecstasy coming out of retirement that same evening, featuring HRT as the local opener; experimental electronic traveller Hiro Kone on the 27th; T. Gowdy supported by a handful of hometown heavyweights on the 28th; Wolf Eyes making their intrepid comeback; Kara-Lis Coverdale performing a solo organ set; the Jellicle Kiki Ball — the list of unmissable shows goes on.

And on.

“Because it’s the 25th anniversary, every single night is going to be sick,” boasts Stimac, Suoni’s artistic director, in-house screen printer, master chef, and resident caretaker. Stimac lives by the DIY ethic, micromanagement be damned.

“None of this was built with money, or investments, or business plans,” she says, gesturing to the living history wallpapering the space. “It’s punk rock.”

“I’m definitely looking for stuff that challenges people’s perception of what music can be, and how to use sound to connect.” Photographed for NicheMTL.

After a quarter century, this festival and its founder have seen ups and downs. But this year is no doubt cause for celebration, the silver anniversary of Montreal’s most risk-taking gathering, both during the festival and in the off-season. Nowhere else will patrons be regaled with a lineup of artists ranging from six to 80 years old, novices and unsung heroes alike, all playing the same stages. “I’m definitely looking for stuff that challenges people’s perception of what music can be, and how to use sound to connect,” Stimac explains.

When Suoni began, she didn’t imagine that the festival would last 25 years and grow to mean so much to Montreal’s arts community. “At 27 years old, I don’t think we thought in our heads that we had this goal of making anything or doing anything,” Stimac recalls. “We were just trying to live our lives as artists and put food on the table and be with our friends.”

But doing that year after year, decade after decade, Suoni has become entrenched into Montreal’s cultural fabric, supporting the Plateau and Mile-End-based music scenes and introducing renowned international artists to new audiences.

“People influence each other in scenes,” says Stimac. “Everybody hears differently and sees differently and thinks differently. But if there’s some collective understanding that we can come together by sharing our visions of the world through our creativity, I think that’s how we can communicate on alternate planes. The other way humans have to communicate outside of speech is our art. But art can be anything. I think cooking a dinner for your friends can be artistic.” (As a professional chef, Stimac ensures that none of Suoni’s performers play on an empty stomach.)

“I believe in my heart that the personal is also political.” Kiva Stimac photographed for NicheMTL.

Stimac offers me a tour of Popolo Press, the studio where all of Suoni’s posters and t-shirts are screen-printed. Linoleum cuts and letter sets, stacks of paper and bottles of ink, paint brushes and glue, a printing press, photocopies, photographs, fridge magnets and books and record covers and hand-written notes — the assemblage of artistic tools and ephemera induces an almost vertiginous sense.

To be surrounded every day with art supplies and creative paraphernalia means that Stimac is literally immersed in a life of making something out of nothing. The office is a factory of near constant production, an organic assembly line. And all of it originates from an impetus for social justice.

“I believe in my heart that the personal is also political,” Stimac asserts. “If you’re singing about love as a queer person, that’s a political act. When I make art, I don’t necessarily think that I’m putting my politics into it. But everything I do is because of humanity’s shared struggle.”

The inherent value of music and art is that it allows for a field for experimentation in which new ideas and ways of doing things can germinate and grow. Art can mirror life, or it can suggest life to come.

“Often, people leave saying, ‘that music changed my life.'” Photographed for NicheMTL.

“I think experimental arts that are trying to test boundaries or coming out of struggle — trying to use creativity as a means for connection in some ways that’s maybe different than the music industry side of it and the selling of things — is very important to nurture and give a platform for. That’s why I’m continuing to do it,” says Stimac. “I do feel the feedback from the community. People come to the shows, and they talk to me. I feel the response at the shows. Often, people leave saying, ‘that music changed my life.’ It can be a really transformative and connecting thing to get through the kind of times that we’re living in.”

Our times undeniably demand action. And Suoni per il Popolo offers no illusions about the struggle’s reality. Still, Stimac and her comrades have programmed a festival this year that aims to entertain as well as enlighten. “A big part of the groove that I look for is fun,” Stimac concedes. “I want to have fun. I don’t want it to be just in the brain. I want people to dance.”

The connection between mind, body, and soul is at the heart of Suoni’s ethos. I ask how someone who is her age when she started out might get to where she is now.

“All I did it with was a pencil, some ink, and the back of a wooden spoon,” Stimac says. “There are so many things you can do. Do them.”◼︎

The 25th anniversary of Suoni per il Popolo runs at various locations from 19 – 30 June 2025.

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999 Words

Split Pulse: in conversation with Nassir Liselle

“When you’re coming up with a new band name, it’s kind of a hellish thing to have to take on,” says Nassir Liselle, the lead guitarist and founder member of Montreal Art Rock band DahL. “To find something that’s relevant, catchy, that hasn’t been borrowed.”

As literal as it may sound, the band name DahL is derived from the South Asian stew, typically made with lentils and a mishmash of optional ingredients, each with its own particular flavour.

“When I was younger we often ate it,” Liselle recalls. “We chose the name DahL because one of our sound techs had once described our sound as a bunch of people going in different directions. I like that idea. It’s like a different series of grooves all working together.”

For the uninitiated, DahL’s sonic aesthetic is as diverse as any soup recipe, more than the sum of its parts, incorporating elements of Trip Hop, electronic, and spoken word and fusing those into something uniquely contemporary.

The band — which consists of Liselle, Bryan Greenfield, Edward Scrimger, and William Winston — garner comparisons most frequently to a Montreal-specific blend of Dean Blunt, TV On The Radio, and Massive Attack. “I love Daddy G,” Liselle admits.

“When you’re out west you always hear about Montreal as this mythological spot.“ DahL band image provided by Nassir Liselle.

Hailing originally from Calgary, Liselle relocated with Greenfield to this city in 2013 and has since become something of a fixture within Montreal’s independent music scene.

“We’ve gone to school here,” Liselle tells me. “We’ve had more than one iteration of a musical project. We’ve built lives here, and roots, and built community.”

Montreal’s legendary sense of community is what drew Liselle and Greenfield eastward, with few outlets in Alberta’s more conservative environs for their outré creative sensibilities.

“It was hard to find venues in Calgary,” laments Liselle. “At the time it was still limited to community centres. We just wanted to be more immersed in a music scene. When you’re out west you always hear about Montreal as this mythological spot. But it’s not even a mythology, it’s very much real.”

Indeed, the achievements of bands like Suuns, agencies such as Mothland, labels like Constellation Records, and the storied Suoni per il Popolo festival called out like a siren song to Liselle.

“What Suoni has done here is so important to art and sustaining art and giving it some vitality,” he says. “The spaces and the venues they operate are so intrinsic to Montreal. They’re accessible to so many people. A lot of their efforts have been done to facilitate that. In terms of community, Suoni is deeply involved in different events and community-based organizing. They’ve done so much.”

Liselle’s musical education and influences span a wide generic spectrum — from country and folk to calypso and punk. “My mother was really, really into kind of crooner-esque stuff like Kenny Rogers, and Neil Diamond, and Graceland by Paul Simon,” he remembers. “But the first albums I ever owned were Tragic Kingdom by No Doubt, Smash by Offspring, and Dookie by Green Day.”

Liselle’s parents enrolled him in classical piano lessons at age five, and he developed an immediate aptitude for singing and songwriting. His paternal uncle in Edmonton was that city’s sole steel drum band leader, and his cousin, Janayah Ellis, in the early 2000s performed Dancehall-inflected Reggae under the moniker Souljah Fyah.

“We didn’t have a lot of money when I was growing up,” he confesses, “so I would make makeshift drum cases by putting plastic bags on cups of different sizes, trying to figure out what Tré Cool was doing. I’ve been obsessed with composing and writing songs since I can recall, but I started playing music and being more ambitious about it in my early 20s. What matters to me these days is the song. And I love a good story.”

DahL perform “Una Minutes” at CHMA Live Session in Sackville, New Brunswick, 8 November 2024.

DahL’s singular compositions come together through an inimitable dialogue between Liselle and Greenfield, its principal songwriters.

“We often will work on our own thing and bring it to each other,” Liselle explains. “I’ll be in my room working on something, or at the studio space, and Bryan will ask what’s going on and I’ll be like, ‘not yet. I can’t show you yet.’ When I’m still in my own little world is when I’m closest to the art, dumping the Lego box out and trying to make pieces of something, even before they really become songs that I think I’m ready to show, when I’m still in discussion with myself.”

With a 1990s Hollywood surf movie as an unexpected touchstone for inspiration, Liselle has just started writing what he believes, in two years’ time, will become DahL’s next album.

“In terms of songwriting, it’s going to be a lot less linear. The band might hate me for this,” he laughs, “but right now, I’m obsessed with the score to Point Break. Gary Busey sounds. I recently bought this lovely synthesizer that the American composer Mark Isham used to make that soundtrack. I’m like, that’s the sound.”

Liselle feels an affinity with Montreal’s established and emerging indie rock scene in bands such as Museums, Chasm, and Bluebird. “They’re more country-folk,” he tells me. “It’s really organic and from the heart, off the floor. And I’m a huge fan of Kristian North, formerly of the punk band Babysitter. Crooner singer-songwriter vibes. There are a lot of strong, tight-knit communities in Montreal, and it’s both a blessing and a curse. Those communities and the wealth of community that can be generated when people are together is great. But if you’re outside of it, it’s hard to access.”

Nonetheless, the Montreal music community has nurtured DahL across ten recordings, including, most recently, an EP entitled That’s It, a remix split with Scottish electronic duo Post Coal Prom Queen, and a live album called The Earl’s Hall Sessions, which the band recorded in Wakefield with saxophonist and prolific local collaborator James Goddard.

“There is constantly so much going on in Montreal. If you want to take the time and make yourself open, you can take in a lot.”◼︎

Dahl perform with LAL and Bianca Supercell at La Sotterenea 24 November 2024.

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Play Recent

Memories Trapped in Time

Sarah McLachlan with Feist, Place Bell, 20 June 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is nothing cheaper than infinite wealth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anything can replace “apples” in the lyrics.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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All Dressed

Wait For It: in conversation with Sarah Davachi

Unlike an old-fashioned phone call, where there are potentially several rings for anticipation, Zoom meetings just start.

In a very binary, off-on fashion, suddenly, someone simply appears on your screen, which moments before was merely a blank space. Right on time this particular morning, that someone is Sarah Davachi, the celebrated artist whose durational musical works have captivated lovers of modern classical, ambient, and drone composition for a long while.

Reclining on a chesterfield in her living room, Davachi speaks to me in Montreal from her home in Los Angeles, where she is currently pursuing a Ph.D., on the occasion of the total solar eclipse, an auspicious if fleeting sliver of history. Behind her, a Black Sabbath poster is tacked to the wall, a trivial clue that speaks volumes to the depth and breadth of generic influences that have filtered over time into her work.

“My brother was born in the ’70s, so he listened to a lot of classic rock,” Davachi divulges.

“I got really into Metallica when I was in 7th grade. I remember listening to …And Justice for All on my discman and being so blown away by all the detail.”

If there is one thread that runs through all of Davachi’s compositions, it’s an acute attention to detail. Timbral detail; temporal detail.

“In order to hear overtones and things like that, you need to let a sound continue without moving to the next thing.” Sarah Davachi performs with the Podlasie Philharmonic, Białystok, Poland, September 2018. Photograph provided to NicheMTL by the artist.

“The music that I make is very minimalist in style,” Davachi explains. “It removes a lot of melody and rhythm. Part of that is to bring the focus to the texture of the sound and the harmonics that are happening in any given moment. The time aspect was a necessity to make that happen. In order to hear overtones and things like that, you need to let a sound continue without moving to the next thing. It needs that time to actually unfold.”

On the surface, it may sound to the casual listener in pieces like 2022’s single “En Bas Tu Vois,” or “Magdalena,” from her critically lauded 2021 recording entitled Antiphonals, that there is not that much happening.

But beneath their austere veneer, oceans of complexity begin to emerge in these works in the form of microtonal variations, resonant harmonics, and apparent temporal distortions. In the tradition of venerated composers like Gavin Bryars and Max Richter, Davachi has the rare and uncanny ability with her music to stretch out a listener’s perception of time.

“In my lifetime,” Davachi says, “it feels like there’s a lot of push for things to happen quickly — not even for things to be experienced but just glimpsed at. If you go to a museum or something, it’s very unusual for people to spend even a minute looking at a specific painting. You’re just walking through and not actually looking at anything. With durational music, it’s almost like showing a painting in bits as opposed to showing the entire thing all at once. You have this control over the listener, being able to slow them down deliberately and force them to go slow. It changes the way you hear things. It changes your brain. I think that’s important, psychologically, for people.”

It’s clear that Davachi meditates, perhaps obsessively, on her work, and specifically, about how her audience receives it. She began studying piano in the Royal Conservatory system as a child, and majored, appropriately, in philosophy and music as an undergrad at the University of Calgary. “The philosophical side was informing a lot of how I thought about music,” she says.

Davachi enrolled in an electroacoustic music class and soon became enamoured with the process of layering performances and mixing recordings. “For me, it made a lot of sense,” she says. “That got me really interested in composing.”

In 2007, Davachi began working at the National Music Centre where she was introduced to a museum-full of organs, synthesizers, and various other claviocentric instruments, which were capable of prolonging sound beyond the piano’s limitations.

“Discovering that way of making music opened the door to being able to do music in a way that I wanted to,” she recalls. “It was ironic,” she laughs, “because for me, music was the sensible alternative to doing a philosophy degree.”

“I learned how to make music in this electroacoustic way, and that still informs the way that I think about where my music exists.” Sarah Davachi performs at the Museum of Jurassic Technology, 2019. Photograph provided to NicheMTL by the artist.

After graduation, Davachi was accepted to the prestigious electronic music program at Mills College in Oakland, California, where noted musicians like Pauline Oliveros and Maggi Payne had served as faculty members. She divulges, “That’s where it started with the music that I make now.”

Early in her professional career, Davachi took the conscious decision to forgo a life of performing live. “I just hated the pressure,” she confesses. “In classical music, the performance is everything. You have to get it right, and you only get one shot. If you screw up, that’s that. To me, that’s not how I think about music.”

Instead, Davachi began devoting herself to the granular levels of control that the studio-as-instrument can afford. She feels closest to the creative process when she is “taking things and sculpting them,” she says. “I learned how to make music in this electroacoustic way, and that still informs the way that I think about where my music exists. A lot of it happens in the compositional phase.”

Davachi will be in Montreal for the Suoni per il Popolo festival in June to attend the world premiere of a new work entitled “Three Unisons for Four Voices,” which the experimental ensemble No Hay Banda commissioned. The piece is a 65-minute composition for violin, cello, trombone, bass clarinet, ondes Martenot, and percussion.

“It’s split into three sections,” she tells me. “One of the things that I’m interested in is this way of having a certain piece of melody that repeats itself similarly to how sound-on-sound tape delay works. It repeats and it keeps repeating until it slowly starts breaking itself apart. I’m trying to do that in an acoustic way.”

Just as Davachi graciously and all too briefly occupies my screen on our Zoom call, her sumptuous and profound compositional works expand to inhabit whatever sonic spaces they’re in. And though her pieces extend beyond what might be considered acceptable running times for popular or even avant-garde music, they seem to end too soon. Elongating beautiful moments in musical time has always been a central tenet of Davachi’s modus operandi, starting with her earliest days as a pianist.

“When I played something, like a chord, I remember thinking that I would like to hear that more,” she recollects. “You’re playing and you get to a chord, and you have to keep going, because that’s the nature of the piano. I remember being annoyed thinking, ‘that’s such a pretty cadence, or a pretty harmony.’ I just wanted to hear that more.”◼︎

No Hay Banda performs Sarah Davachi’s “Three Unisons for Four Voices” for the Suoni per il Popolo festival 13 June at La Sala Rossa, 4848 St. Laurent Blvd.

Cover image: Sarah Davachi photographed in Los Angeles in 2020. Provided to NicheMTL by the artist.

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