Improvisateurs québécois astucieux, Lussier et Tétreault — respectivement guitariste et platiniste — n’en sont pas à leur première collaboration et officient depuis de longues années au sein du collectif Ambiances magnétiques. Issues de sessions prises live en 97, ces pièces dures évoquent une rencontre totalement libre et saccadée des cordes et de (souvent courtes) séquences sonores issues des platines et radios de Tétreault. Lussier utilise tous les détails de ses instruments, du grattage ludique au récurage nerveux tandis que Tétreault pique son interlocuteur d’assauts fourbes (la fausse politesse dans Enrayure) et racleurs qui provoquent des demangeaisons dans le conduit auditif. Les accalmies arrivent à point nomme pour souffer un peu (le gris et bien nomme Sépulture) avant les nouveaux craquements, les nouvelles nodosités et un final dissonant. Si l’on n’avait conscience du tout joue sans fioritures de ces 21 morsures, on jurerait parfois (surtout sur la partie Prise de terre) d’un travail électroacoustique d’exception. Tous les mots choisis dans le livret définissent parfaitement ce disque en Ure. Lire l’excellente interview de Tétreault dans Revue & Corrigée n40
blogue@press-1511
press@1511
Lussier (guitars) and Tétreault (turntables) battle it out on 21 tracks with titles all ending in "ur" or "ure". There are some great textures and sounds here. It is extremely intense and noisy a lot of the time, but in turn can also be admirably restrained. Spontaneous ideas are picked-up and tossed around, or only fleetingly glimpsed at. At times it sounds like people just messing around with a bunch of stuff. Which, by the way, is a good thing!
blogue@press-1277_012
press@1277_012
This work represents a virtual melange of found sounds (recorded in real time without benefit of samplers). Abrupt guitar strummings come and go, couped with the sound of somebody stumbling through a room in the dark. The sound manipulations of avant-garde guru Martin Tétreault (turntables, pick-ups, radios) are combined with the ultra minimal, spastic guitar workings of René Lussier. This work will either fascinate or frustrate you, depending on your level of open-mindedness. If you prescribe to the "sound as art" school, you will enjoy it wholeheartedly.
Tétreault has been gaining much exposure lately for his very nonconventional approach to turntables. He is more concerned with the noises that turntables can produce by manipulating and altering the internal mechanisms, rather than what the machine can produce by gliding a needle through some grooves. This tinkering seems to produce both interesting and forgettable results. Dur noyau dur sounds less like an album of non-music than it does an art school project by two sound chemists. There isn’t one hint of conformity on this entire disc.
blogue@press-1094
press@1094
Michel Ratté may not be very well known outside of Canada, but Lussier and Tétreault sure are. Lussier played with Duck & Cover, Les Quatre Guitaristes de L’Apocalypso Bar, Fred Frith Guitar Quartet, Heiner Goebbels, etc. It strikes me that Lussier plays also in many duo combinations: Fred Frith, Jean Derome, Robert Lepage and some others from the French-Canadian scene. He seems to have a preference for improvisation as a duo: it takes two to improvise? Here Lussier plays with Martin Tétreault. Tétreault is a French Canadian from Montréal who plays and performs with turntables and related objects. He was in fine arts in the past. One day he started working with records instead of cutting up paper, and so it all began. Later — around 1989 — he participated in the Broken Music Exhibition with Christian Marclay and played with many musicians inside and outside of Canada. On the present CD, it is not only quoting from records what we hear, using them as sound source and giving the listener experiences of recognition. The record and the turntable are also used as such, as objects with their own possibilities, apart from the music that is on the record. Here the sound is very abstract (abstracted from what are traditional sound sources to our ears). Lussier can be heard on acoustic and electric guitars. The music is very exciting, radical sound improvisation.
blogue@press-1049
press@1049
New Music is where you find it, but for heavy electroacoustics and crosscultural blends of free improvisation and song. Montréal is presently the place to be. Turntablist Martin Tétreault works at the centre of the city’s beehive of musical activity, alongslide a bevy of inquisitive, explorative artists, such as guitarist René Lussier, saxophonist Jean Derome, vocalist/multi-intrumentalist Joane Hétu, keyboardist Diane Labrosse and percussionist Michel F Côté. A mix of studied intuition and wild experimentation, Tétreault’s hands-on approach to turntables is doubtless unlike any other you’ve heard. He collaborated tow of last year’s most engaging CDs Dur noyau dur with René Lussier (my vote for the best free Improv disc of the year) and Callas:La diva et le vinyle, a tongue-in-cheek deconstructivist homage to opera legend Maria Callas, recorded with clarinettist Robert Marcel Lepage. Tétreault didn’t come up throught the usual musical channels, wich might account for why he’s so different. As he relates in his fluent French-accented English, "I began in 1984, switching from fine art to music. To make it short, I was doing things in visual art, very minimalist stuff, cutting paper and things like that, and one day I decided to cut a record. At first it was not for music, it was only to cut something other than paper. But I put it on a turntable and thought, ’Wow, it works’ It was not something I planned, to become a musician, but just this very simple action completely changed my artistic direction. "Though he hadn’t heard any of HipHop’s pathbreaking turntablists, he immediatly jumped into the fray. A predilection for skewered stylistic juxtapositions and intensely textural, rather than rhythmical, effects asserted itself. "I was completely into New Music when I began," he says. "More recently I’ve listened to new DJ stuff like DJ Spooky, DJ Shadow— a little more commercial, but I think it’s interesting, very important for pop music. People want to introduce me to DJs that are more HipHop here in Montréal, but I know more about the work of Otomo Yoshihide, Christian Marclay, David Shea, that generation Christian Marclay and I played together in Montréal in 89, for a Broken Music exhibition. I met Otomo in that same period, I think it was 1991. He sent me tapes and asked me if I wanted to work with him. But he’s a very busy person. So last year I was in Japan to play with him and then he came to Canada and we did a tour. "
Working with so many different musicians and in so many varied settings, at home and on the road, challenges Tétreault to invent new sounds for each context. Yet he rarely includes random radio play among his sound effects, and eschews samplers or other electronic devices. He still concentrates on vinyl LPs and the turntable machinery itself as sound sources. " I consider the turntable to be a music instrument," he asserts. "Take the electric guitar, for instance. There’s no two guitars that sound the same, and it’s the same with turntables. I have some customised turntables with modified motors and speeds and so on, and more than 3000 records in my collection. Each record is classified by musical instrument—percussion, strings, electronics. spoken words, things like that When I work with panticular records, I go and make a kind of composition—let’s try this percussion sound with these strings if it’s for an improvising concert, I will work in that way, but other times it must be more precise. For example, Jean Derome’s Hommage à Georges Perec /Je me souviens) is a composition for big band, 13 musicians playing a kind of intentionally cliched 1950s music, and every part was written out except for mine. I was the only person who was free. So I created my part at home, and put stickers on the records for visual cueing, so that it’s very controlled, and I can repeat it at exactly the same way, the same speed, every time. On another project with René Lussier and Diane Labrosse, I played with prepared records and prepared needles—no musical quotations, only surface noise from the LP and things stuck on the record to make rhythmic effects. But that’s different from what I normally do, it’s more "musique d’objet". And I just completed a new solo CD done with only parasite noise from turntables—no scratching, only the sound of motors and things like that. Every project is different, because there are a lot of possibilities, and every time I say to myself I will try to do something different than before.blogue@press-1042
press@1042
Turntables mix with guitars for rock steady experimentalism and noise.
blogue@press-1273
press@1273