PHI Centre
Espace 1
407 Saint-Pierre St
Montreal, Quebec, H2Y 2M3
Doors: 7 PM
Music: 8 PM
All ages
Price in advance: $24.57 (fees included)
Price at the door: $26.09
Taxes not included
Before visiting, please review some essential information about the visit, including details on accessibility at the Centre.
For more details on safety measures in place at the PHI Centre, visit our COVID-19 page.
The artist presents a mixture of haunted pop and hot-blooded R&B from her new album XO SKELETON.
XO SKELETON is the supple, steady, uncanny new album by La Force: a mixture of haunted pop and hot-blooded R&B that glistens at the meeting-point between life, death and love. “In dreams, the dead and living are the same,” Ariel Engle sings on “october,” her voice shimmering. “Maybe that’s why I’m better in the dark.”
With this LP, Engle originally intended to make a dance record. She worked on cigar-box guitar, piano; she visited NYC for a few days in studio with pros. But everything felt rushed, or forced—and of course the veil of COVID descended over everything—so her music-making shifted home. “It was such an intensely interior time,” she said. Engle’s old friend, co-producer Warren Spicer (Plants and Animals), would come over around “toast o’clock” and they’d work in her basement until lunch, allowing songs to unfold at heartbeat pace, unhurried.
These nine extraordinary songs are human-scale and intimate, with chord changes like the shifting of limbs, saxophones and processed strings that travel with a vascular ripple. Listen to “how do you love a man,” with its nimble bass and swooning groove, and a title that winks at the beyond.
Throughout these 35 minutes, La Force’s music is electric + vivid, and also tactile + grimy—a sound that enfolds influences as disparate as Tirzah, Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Jazmine Sullivan, the Cocteau Twins, Mica Levi, Tricky w/ Marina Topley-Bird, and even Joni Mitchell’s “Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter.” XO SKELETON bends and turns with its every shift of pulse—mournful, searching, turned on. Like a body, you might say. Or the memory of one.
Off-Site Location
The immersive experience Space Explorers: THE INFINITE, presented in the Old Port, is back in Montreal featuring new captivating content captured in space
Centre
An immersive exhibition that explores the connections between sexuality and technology
Free
Foundation
The PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Moridja Kitenge Banza: Inhabiting the Imaginary
Free
Centre
The PHI Centre showcases a light installation with evolving content, adapting to the seasons and exhibitions
Centre
Tune out the everyday noise and lose yourself in Montréal’s new immersive listening room
Free
Off-Site Location
Presented at Place des Arts, New Media Pioneers celebrates the work of Michel Lemieux of 4D ART and Édouard Lock
Foundation
In collaboration with Film POP, the PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art presents Fictional Revolutionary Leaders, a double bill including Gloria Camiruaga’s Popsicles (1984) and Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’s Oriana (2022)
Centre
The London-based DJ and singer will get you moving with her grooves celebrating soundsystem music