1 March 2004
By Vincent Lecoeur in Octopus #27 (France), March 1, 2004

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Ou comment détourner par grincements, claquements, vitesses ralenties la voix de Maria Callas. Prélèvements et emprunts colorés par une clarinette enjouée ou tout en souplesse. La voix de la diva était, selon le mot d’une auditrice de ses débuts, à mi-chemin entre clarinette et hautbois. Léger et pervers.

blogue@press-2412 press@2412
1 March 2000
By Richard Cochrane in Earscape #3 (USA), March 1, 2000

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Here’s the deal: take a world-famous opera diva. Give her recordings to an iconoclastic turntable artiste. Introduce him to a brown-toned clarinettist and leave the two alone together for a while. The result? An unexpectedly lyrical, flowing album of improvisations packed with melodic invention, and nary a camp postmodernist joke to be found. It most assuredly is a funny old world.

There are one or two gags, of course — there could hardly not have been. The first thing you hear is Callas warming up. Shortly afterwards, Tétreault puts on a teach-yourself-Italian disk full of opera house cliches and leaves Lepage to play an uncharacteristically lumpy solo over the top. Nothing lasts for very long (shortest track: 28 seconds), and Tétreault shows precious little respect for the compositions Callas was originally performing. At one point, he even mimics the soprano perfoming a descending scale by slowing the turntable down with his finger. It all sounds like a recipe for knockabout cultural reference humour but, astonishingly, such impulses seem merely to be registered in order to keep them in check.

Instead, Tétreault and Lepage seem intent on making a record of beautiful music. Of course, Callas’ voice is a fantastic sound-source, and rendered atonal, quavering and unpredictable as it is here it is a musical instrument up to the task of interacting with Lepage. The latter plays with a scrupulously clean classical tone throughout, enunciating his ostinati and curlicues of scales with careful precision. At this disk’s finest moments, Lepage seems to curl his clarinet around Callas’ voice, the two locked in an impossible, or at least implausible, counterpoint.

This also brings Tétreault’s acheivement to the fore. He seems to have given over considerable time to the preparation of this disk — perhaps he did not, but if not then his work here is all the more remarkable. What he manages to do is to take apart Callas’ voice, to use the different elements of it in different pieces, yet to do so without it becoming a gimmick. Most of the pieces here have real musical interest, not just novelty value. Part of the credit for that goes to Lepage, because without an attentive and sensitive duo partner this would have been unlistenable. Part, however, must go to Tétreault for having the imagination and musicality to carry it off. Or then again, perhaps this conventional musicality is all part of another kind of joke, a sort of meta-joke about making a record of opera diva cutups with a straight face. This is a geniune ambiguity for a lot of this disk, the confusion between irony and sincerity, and that too is something of a strength in comparison with all those earnestly wry referential works which tend to dissolve into kitsch.

blogue@press-1045 press@1045
1 March 2000
By Nick Mott in Audion #42 (UK), March 1, 2000

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Basically the concept of this is: a duo playing turntables, lots of scratches, pops, clicks and squeaks, and varispeed opera vocals in improvisation against clarinet. Okay, it sounds nice and interesting for a while, becoming tedious as the idea wears thin. A shame, as it’s a good Dada idea when it works, and the parts that do work sound really disturbing and "out there".

blogue@press-1277_011 press@1277_011
1 December 1999
By Richard Cochrane in Avant #10 (UK), December 1, 1999

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“An unexpectedly lyrical, flowing album of improvisations packed with melodic invention…”

Here’s the deal: take a world-famous opera diva. Give her recordings to an iconoclastic turntable artiste. Introduce him to a brown-toned clarinettist and leave the two alone together for a while. The result? An unexpectedly lyrical, flowing album of improvisations packed with melodic invention, and nary a camp postmodernist joke to be found. It most assuredly is a funny old world. There are one or two gags, of course - there could hardly not have been. The first thing you hear is Callas warming up. Shortly afterwards, Tétreault puts on a teach-yourself-ltalian disk full of opera house cliches and leaves Lepage to play an uncharacteristically lumpy solo over the top. Nothing lasts for very long (shortest track: 28 seconds), and Tétreault shows perecious little respect for the compositions which Callas was originally performing. At one point, he even mimics the soprano perfoming a descending scale by slowing the turntable down with his finger. It all sounds like a recipe for knockabout cultural reference humour but, astonishingly. such impulses seem merely to be registered in order to keep them in check. Instead, Tétreault and Lepage seem intent on making a record of beautiful music. Of course. Callas’ voice is a fantastic sound-source, and rendered atonal, quavering and unpredictable as it is here it becomes a musical instrument up to the task of interacting with Lepage. The latter plays with a scrupulously clean classical tone throughout, enunciating his ostinati and curlicues of scales with careful precision. At this disk’s finest moments, Lepage seems to curl his clarinet around Callas’ voice, the two locked in an impossible, or at least implausible, counterpoint. This also brings Tétreaults acheivement to the fore. He seems to have given over considerable time to the preparation of this disk — perhaps he did not but if not then his work here is all the more remarkable. What he manages to do is to take apart Callas’ voice, to use the different elements of it in different pieces, yet to do so without it becoming a gimmick. Most of the pieces here have real musical interest not just novelty value. Part of the credit for that goes to Lepage because without an attentive and sensitive duo panner this would have been unlistenable. Part, however, must go to Tétreault for having the imagination and musicality to carry it off. Or then again, perhaps this conventional musicality is all part of another kind of joke, a sort of meta-joke about making a record of opera diva cutups with a straight face. This is a genuine ambiguity for a lot of this disk, the confusion between irony and sincerity, and that too is something of a strength in comparison with all those earnestly wry referential works which tend to dissolve into kitsch.

blogue@press-1760 press@1760
1 May 1999
By Richard Moule in Exclaim! (Canada), May 1, 1999

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“…a hilarious, irreverent playful tribute…”

Another set of dispatches from this Montréal collective of musique actuel-ites who continue to dazzle with their transgressive music. It is music that balances improvisation and composition in a singular fusion of jazz, rock, modern classical, musique concrète and turntablism. Callas: La diva et le vinyle is part musical and phonographic history lesson and part plunderphonics. 1997 was the 20th anniversary of opera diva Maria Callas’s death, and the 100th anniversary of Emil Berliner, who started EMI Records in Montréal. On Callas: La diva et le vinyle, clarinettist Lepage and DJ turntablist assassin, Tétreault have created a hilarious, irreverent playful tribute to these historical recorded events. Taking old recordings of Callas, Tétreault scratches, cuts and pitch shifts fragments of her voice, at one point making it sound like a fire alarm, while Lepage compliments Callas’s voice with alternating lyrically melancholic and joyous improvised phrasings. Callas: La diva et le vinyle is an exciting meeting of multiple juxtapositions: between old and new voices, between the stylised rituals of opera and the freedom of contemporary sound art and between live and recorded music.

blogue@press-1071_101 press@1071_101
1 February 1999
By Art Lange in The Wire #180 (UK), February 1, 1999

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“My vote for best improv disc of the year.”

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

Other texts in

  • Hollow Ear (USA), March 1, 2000
  • Muska, December 1, 1998

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