This year’s issue of Four Minutes to Midnight is dedicated to our favourite festival here in the city; Expozine, Montreal’s annual small press, comics, and zine fair. Celebrating it’s tenth anniversary this year, Expozine has always provided John and I with an amazing venue for us to showcase our work, and welcomed us into a lovely community of support and inspiration. Our seventh issue won the first ever Expozine award for Best English Zine (the first year I was back in Montreal), and since then we’ve been honoured to be a part of the festival, with me hopping on board the organising committee a couple of years back. The DIY ethic of the festival has always appealed to both the aesthetic and politics of 2356, and it has acted as the catalyst for many dear friendships and allies. Given all this, it only made sense that for their tenth birthday, we bake them a Four Minutes to Midnight zine-cake, complete with a gold-foil stamped cover.

The bilingual issue features interviews with Expozine co-founders Louis Rastelli and Billy Mavreas, long-time co-organiser Pascal Fioramore, two essays exploring the independent cultural scene in Montreal by Sebastian Hell and Stefan Christoff, and a 70+ page collage of selected works extracted from the thousands of zines collected in the Expozine archives. Given the immensity of the festival, our selection is obviously biased (ahem, curated…), reflecting themes of personal interest (eg. social anxiety, cats, sex/love, and revolution!). Still, one of my favorite parts of the issue is the near complete list that we compiled of the 1100+ exhibitors that have tabled at the event over the years (set in 5-point type).

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Hey Montréal, HUGE week coming up in the indy culture scene here, and I’m really happy to be a part of several events. First up, Howl IV is on Thursday night featuring the beautiful sounds of cellist Julia Kent. The Howl Arts Collective has been working hard over the last year to bring cutting-edge, politically-rooted music to your ears, and this night will close off our concert series for 2011 with an all-woman cast of performers, and a short presentation from the 2110 Centre for Gender Advocacy.

Expozine madness 2009! Photo by Camille McCouat

The main event this weekend is Expozine, of course. Celebrating 10 years running, this year’s event will lead us into the next exciting decade of indy publishing here in Montreal. It kicks off with a launch event at Drawn & Quarterly on Friday, featuring a discussion with the co-founders of Expozine, moderated by yours truly. In parallel, we’ll be launching the 12th issue of Four Minutes to Midnight, a special issue focusing on 10 years of Expozine and independent culture in Montreal.

Expozine itself is shaping up to be really great this year, with almost 300 exhibitors signed up, a reading series by the Greasy Goose Salon, a presentation on women silkscreeners organised by Galerie La Centrale, and an anniversary party at Casa del Popolo on Saturday night. Finally, an official event so we can all get drunk together with fellow zinesters!

And an important reminder to past Expozine participants, the latest issue of FMTM might very well feature some of your work! We’ve tried to contact you all, but you know how it goes sometimes… We’ll have more info about the issue on this website soon, but please swing by our table this weekend and browse through a copy of the issue, if you see your work, the copy is yours to keep! Looking forward to seeing you all there!

I’ve been working with the Artivistic crew for some time now on an exciting exhibition project that will be taking place in March at le Centre des arts actuels Skol. The second phase of our Promiscuous Infrastructures publishing project, it’s too early to unveil the full scope of the exhibition, but I wanted to share a couple of images that I’m currently working on.

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Painting by Lindsay Foran

The next concert in the Howl series features Vancouver-born, NYC-based cellist Julia Kent, and local artists les momies de palmeres and Jen Reimer.

Having worked with such artists as Antony and the Johnsons, Angels of Light, Devendra Banhart, and William Parker, amongst many others, Julia Kent has recently released her second full-length solo album Green and Grey, “a new solo record of looped cello, field recordings, and electronics inspired by the intersections between the natural world and the human-created world.” Her music has been described as “cinematographic, melancholy and luminous”, “emotive, up-close and personal”, and we are very honoured to bring her to Montreal, a city which could share these same descriptives.

The concert takes place two Thursdays from now, Nov. 24th at the Sala Rossa, and is co-presented by the amazing 2110 Centre for Gender Advocacy.

More information and RSVP on facebook here.

This is such an amazing initiative, I wish I was in Toronto to take part. For our readers in Toronto, please check it out and report back, as I’m now thinking of (slowly) working on something like this for Montreal. For readers in Montreal, get in touch and let’s make this happen!