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Atmospheric and ambient, but also audacious, Montréal percussionist/keyboardist and electronic manipulator Michel F Côté uses a variety of sonic strategies to construct an exuberantly original nine-part sound world on à l’inattendu les dieux livrent passage. Accomplished in transforming directors’ and choreographers’ ideas into sound, as well as leading ad hoc bands such as this one, which generate a new meaning from his initials, the composer/arranger pushes and pulls the textures in a multi-stylistic fashion so that seemingly bland surfaces turn out to contain tough, multi-faceted cores.
Case in points is a track like ferveur fossile, where chunks and clicks from signal-processed timbres splutter and shrill while commenting upon Gordon Allen’s irregularly vibrated trumpet lines and the twangs from Bernard Falaise’s guitar. Arco string runs maintain the theme, although variants become looser, more strident and discordant as they come in contact with the buzzing electronics. Other pieces offer interludes of pseudo classicism via Pierre-Yves Martel’s viole de gambe or Jean Derome’s harmonized bass flute, only to have them sabotaged by Lori Freedman’s harsh bass clarinet slurs or abrasive wood scrapes from the percussionist. Overall it seems that sonic disruption is as much a part of Côté’s compositions as legato continuum.
This post-modern strategy is sardonically confirmed on au-delà de l’espace des petits oiseasux and more obviously on the concluding entre idéal et mental. On that track, string-laden samples, likely sourced by turntablist Martin Tétreault from Gone with the Wind composer Max Steiner LPs, are interrupted by plinking from live string players, motor-driven whines and clanks plus the percussionist’s cross pulses and opposite-sticking beats.
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For over a decade now, Montréal’s Ensemble SuperMusique has served as a vehicle for the larger-scale ideas of that city’s Ambiances Magnetiques collective. An orchestra adept at improvisation and varying in personnel according to the dictates of the job, it’s a logical outgrowth of the collective which still, somehow, always seems to come as a happy surprise.
Saxophonist Joane Hétu may be one of the greatest beneficiaries of the ensemble. Her compositional ideas are rich and complex, requiring an assemblage of sympathetic colleagues. Her work can be tiny and personal (as in her duet with her husband, saxophonist Jean Derome) or can take the form of sweeping explorations, as in her multi-media collaboration Filature, which took the craft of weaving as a model for both composition and video projection.
For Récits de neige SuperMusique is stripped down to a sextet, including longtime collaborators Derome, Diane Labrosse (accordion and electronics) and percussionist Pierre Tanguay alongside bassist Alexandre St-Onge and Toronto trombonist Scott Thomson for a remarkably diverse cycle of pieces.
The first of the four suites, La neige (The Snow) is comprised of four vocal pieces, both sung and recorded speech with sometimes bombastic accompaniment. The second four-part suite, Jamais froid (Never Cold) is more upbeat, with lyrical play around the word “blanc” (“white”) and a piece that likens snowfall to icing on a cake and a comforter to keep one warm. The texts are all in French, but English translations are provided, and the spirit of the music felt strongly nevertheless, even including some play with vocal sounds. The three parts of Rafales (which translates as “gusts” or “flurries”) are perhaps the most cohesive and most endearing on the disc, with brief verses seeming to love and curse the snow along with more mouth sounds, grunts and utterances, harmonica and jaw harp and stories about winter from Derome, Thomson and Tanguay blended into jazzy and atmospheric tracks.
The last of the four suites is the longest (each runs between 15 and 20 minutes) brings us just to the breaking of spring, alternating between some of the most abstract and unabashedly beautiful music on the disc. Hétu, to her credit, is such an evocative assembler of music and words that the melting snow and budding leaves aren’t cliché but simply the turning of a page.
Récits de neige is not, in fact, her first album of cold-weather music. It might be seen as a sequel to 2001’s Musique d’hiver (Winter Music), a cycle of pieces about the Québecois winter. Or it might just be a product of what a Quebecois artist must deal with for a considerable part of the year. Either way, this time out her interests in storytelling, both musical and quite literal, are wonderfully evocative.
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Reporting on records by artists whose standing equals that of Phillips, Jauniaux and Goldstein is getting harder and harder. The typical stratagem of employing the review’s first half to recount an artist’s career in pills, thus smartly reducing the analytical space, is not acceptable to this writer. On the other hand, the propensity for enthusiasm in front of an unimpeachable release is malignantly stigmatized by incompetent members of the official intelligentsia.
Make no mistake, though: Birds Abide is a great record, the remarkable fusion of three profound souls constantly striving for shared excellence. The set — recorded at the Victoriaville Festival in May 2010 — consists of six tracks that communicate urgency, theatrical qualities, extraordinary technical prowess and the sort of enlightened quest for unlikelihood that pushes an improvising artist to choose the less expected move. In this particular case the attitude is totally winning, the resulting music appearing as a crying-and-kicking newborn creature.
Jauniaux is definitively back to her highest highs, a voice able to scintillate, peep, squirrel-talk and cut like a sword. Occasionally she’s also a fine imitator of her partners’ string-based expressiveness, the fruit of decades of manual practice but — above all — of a complete development of the ability of listening interactively. Goldstein’s violin generates fragile fireflies, hard crumbles and melodic splinters, the emotional control remaining consistent throughout. Phillips sustains the influence of the lower frequencies adding a stouter percussiveness without flinching when necessary; his participation in the performance’s more elegiac circumstances — the moments in which the trio really becomes a single, multi-faceted entity — is certainly essential. Exactly as is this album, which one feels glad to hold after a mere couple of listens.
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Und plötzlich war da diese Stimmgabel. Nicolas konnte nicht aufhören den ganzen Tag daran zu denken. "Dieser Ton!", dachte er immer wieder. Er besorgte sich noch eine. Und noch eine. Und wieder eine. Irgendwann war er völlig besessen. Er fand zwei Musiker, den Violonisten Chris Bartos, und Pierre-Yves Martel für die Viola da Gamba, und sagte den beiden, sie sollen einfach mal über den Ton dieser und jener Stimmgabel improvisieren. Er würde den Rest schon mit seinem Laptop machen. So fing es an. Zwei Jahre später war Nicolas endlich zufrieden. Er hatte eine CD erschaffen, auf der die Strings singen. Fragil und brüchig, dahingehaucht, whispering, wie der Wind an den Telegrafendrähten, zugleich blubbernd in einem dezenten sea of electronics sounds. Man darf sich von dieser leicht ironisch erzählten Geschichte nicht täuschen lassen. Das Resultat ist in seiner Reduktion und Stringenz von berückender, fast schon andächtigen Schönheit. Als würde am Ende der Geschichte eine Fee erscheinen und mit ihrem Zauberstab auf Nicolas Berniers Schulter klopfen und sagen: "Siehst du, so ist das tatsächlich mit sound & vision. Du musst den Weg stets bis ans Ende gehen." Und Nicolas ist tatsächlich bis ans Ende des Geigenbogens gegangen. Für den vielleicht stimmigsten und schönsten Brückenschlag zwischen elektronischer und klassischer Moderne des Jahres 2011
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