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Portrait: Justineby François Couture in All-Music Guide (USA), June 15, 2002 |2131|
“… Justine pushed further the ideals of challenging, thought-provoking
feminist rock…”
Born out of the Montreal-based avant-rock group Wondeur Brass, Justine pushed further the ideals of challenging, thought-provoking feminist rock established in its previous incarnation for another ten years. The group released three albums during the 1990s and toured Canada, the United States,and visited Europe twice. Three of its musicians are members of the collective Ambiances Magnétiques, so the label released all their albums. Wondeur Brass started as a sextet in the early ’80s. By 1987 the group had been scaled down to a quartet. Bassist Marie Trudeau had joined the three original members saxophonist Joane Hétu, keyboardist Diane Labrosse and drummer Danielle Palardy Roger. That line-up released Simoneda, reine des esclaves in 1987. Upon starting work on a new opus in 1989, the girls decided it was time for a change. The new music taking shape was turning out to be more complex, intricate, and driven by a stronger will to improvise and make things interestingly dangerous. Thus Justine was born. The first album under the new name, (Suite), came out in 1990. It included guest appearances by Japanese singer Tenko and American harpist Zeena Parkins. In 1992, Hétu, Labrosse and Roger brought them back for a quintet project, La légende de la pluie. Although it doesn’t include Trudeau and sounds softer, more introspective, it can be considered as the second album by Justine. Around the same time the “real” quartet appeared on stage in an Ambiances Magnétiques showcase which yielded the live CD Une théorie des ensembles. In early 1994 Justine toured Europe, visiting many former communist countries. Back in Montreal in June they recorded Langages Fantastiques “live in the studio” -- the recording of (Suite) had stretched over ten months. After its release later that year things slowed down as group members focused on individual projects: Roger on the children tale L’oreille enflée, Labrosse on a solo album (La face cachée des choses) and a duo with Michel F Côté, Hétu on a new group called Castor et Compagnie. Justine stayed together for another three years and performed at the 1997 Ring Ring festival in Belgrade (Yugoslavia) alongside Ground-Zero, Palinckx, and Kampec Dolores (a previously unreleased song was included on the commemorative compilation Ring Ring 1997). After that tour the group disbanded. Hétu, Labrosse and Roger have continued to contribute to one another’s projects.
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Portrait: Martin Tétreaultby François Couture in All-Music Guide (USA), June 15, 2002 |2129|
“… what he lost in sense of humor, he gained in harsh intensity.”
In the late ’80s and early ’90s, Martin Tétreault was the quietest member of Ambiances Magnétiques, Montreal’s influential new music collective. He was providing strange turntable collages to the projects of his colleagues and released a couple of mind-boggling solo albums. When minimal techno and experimental electronica hit the museums at the turn of the millennium, he became the label’s biggest international name, multiplying collaborations with the likes of Otomo Yoshihide, Kevin Drumm, Xavier Charles, and Janek Schaefer. This career boom was accompanied by a stylistic shift from vinyl quotation to an approach of the turntable as a “pure” sonic device. In the process, what he lost in sense of humor, he gained in harsh intensity. Tétreault has a background in fine arts. Much like the Czech radical artist Milan Knizak, he began to work with vinyl because paper led him to a dead-end. In 1984, for the first time he took an LP, cut it in half, flipped one piece over, pasted it back together, and played the result on a turntable. Tétreault continued to experiment at home, developing cutting and skipping techniques and collecting hundreds of cheap records he found at fleamarkets. Three or four years later, his next-door neighbor overheard his shenanigans. It was Ambiances Magnétiques guitarist André Duchesne, who quickly introduced Tétreault to his group of musician friends. Michel F Côté enrolled him in his ensemble Bruire. The turntablist’s first appearance on record can be found on the 1989 LP Le Bbarman a tort de sourire. He remained with the group throughout the 1990s and beyond. He also played with René Lussier, Jean Derome, and Diane Labrosse. His first large-scale album, Des pas et des mois, came out in 1990. Then, besides the occasional Bruire album, Tétreault kept a rather low profile. Things changed in 1997-1998 when he began to let go of quotation and cut-ups to develop a more textural style that eventually saw him throw away the record to play the turntable itself, sticking the tone-arm in the motor, placing the needle directly on the platter, etc. These new developments were at the heart of his duo with René Lussier, introduced by the highly abstract and noisy Dur noyau dur in 1998. A participation to the Japanese project Four Focuses opened doors; so did a subsequent duo session with Yoshihide (21 Situations, 1999) and a solo CD for the Belgian label Audiophile (La nuit où j’ai dit non, 1998). By then, the turntable had become a trendy instrument of avant-garde expression and Tétreault embarked on a busy touring and recording schedule. In 2002, he curated the “Turntable Hell” tour (in England) financed by the Contemporary Music Network.
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Portrait: Rainer Wiensby François Couture in All-Music Guide (USA), June 15, 2002 |2125| Although active as a professional guitar player since the end of the 1970s, Canadian Rainer Wiens has constantly been falling through the cracks ofthe recording industry, leaving very little trace of his work and only since he moved to Montreal in the mid-’90s. Except for a couple of free improv records and participations in projects by members of the collective Ambiances Magnétiques, Wiens’ music has been related to the stage (dance, theatre, new opera) and thus remains largely undocumented. Wiens studied guitar with John Becker, Allan Torak, and Tony Bradan. He also studied improvisation and jazz harmony with New York pianist and noted educator Barry Harris. This private instruction prepared him for every possible work in the jazz business and soon Wiens was working the Toronto club circuit as a sideman for a constellation of local names. In 1978 he formed the left-field jazz group Silk Stockings. It toured throughout the 1980s, making appearances at various jazz festivals in Canada, but also in England and Hungary. During that period the guitarist forged himself a personal form of expression, abstract but with a lot of charm. He makes extensive use of the prepared guitar, often approaching the instrument more like a Gamelan ensemble than something with six strings. Since the late 1980s, his focus shifted toward a collaboration with artists from other fields. The 1990s saw him writing small-scale operas with librettist Victoria Ward (“Homeless,” “Down Here on Earth”), scoring music for films by Barbara Sternberg (“C’est la Vie,” 1997; “Like a Dream That Vanishes,” 1999), and collaborating with dancer Lucie Grégoire. He co-founded with Jan Komarek the Sound Image Theatre where he supplied music for many productions. In the mid-’90s he moved to Montreal and hooked up with the musicians of Ambiances Magnétiques. His solo album Bonunca Dream Music, self-released in 1995, was picked up for distribution by the collective’s label. A trio session with longtime partners Malcolm Goldstein and John Heward (Chants cachés, 1999) helped bring some attention to his work. Heco-founded the group NOMA with trombonist Tom Walsh and by 2002 was leading his own group Follow Follow.
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Portrait: René Lussierby François Couture in All-Music Guide (USA), June 6, 2002 |2108|
“… his impressive body of work represents a full course in “musique
actuelle”…”
Throughout the 1980s and most of the ’90s, René Lussier was the prime mover on Montreal’s new music scene. His guitar work has been compared to Fred Frith, with whom he has often toured and recorded. Spread between solo work, duos and large ensemble pieces, between studio compositions, structured improvisation, free improv and film music, his impressive body of work represents a full course in “musique actuelle,” a term he helped to peg down. His masterpiece remains the speech-music collage Le trésor de la langue which earned him the Paul Gilson Award in 1989. He also received the Freddy Stone Award in 1996 for his contribution to Canadian new music. Lussier began to play guitar in high school bands. He started to develop his own brand of jazz-meets-folk-meets-freak in the collective Conventum. This group included guitarist André Duchesne with whom he stroke a lasting friendship. He recorded two albums with Conventum and a handful of film scores, the first of what would become an endless list (over 50 by 2001). After the group’s disbanding, Lussier enrolled in the Grand Orchestre de Montréal, an experimental fanfare of sorts where he met Nébu saxophonist Jean Derome. Together they recorded music for the National Film Board of Canada and got involved in many projects, some of which included Duchesne and clarinetist Robert Marcel Lepage. The four of them founded the collective and record label Ambiances Magnétiques in 1983. That year Lussier released his first solo album, Fin du travail (Version 1), the title of which (“Finished work [1st version]”) already displayed his uncanny sense of humor. His big break came in 1986 when Michel Levasseur, artistic director of the Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville (FIMAV), proposed a duo concert with Fred Frith. Henry Cow and the whole Rock-in-Opposition movement had been a big influence on Lussier -- this was his chance. The resulting album Nous Autres introduced him to an international audience. In 1988 Frith invited him and Derome to join Keep the Dog. In 1989, with the help of Frith and a cast of Ambiances Magnétiques players, Lussier recorded Le trésor de la langue. Pushed by its political resonances, the album became the label’s biggest seller and the first classic item in the history of musique actuelle. Further albums, solo and with Les Granules, established him as a highly creative and witty composer and improviser. But as years passed Lussier felt the collective weight more and more on his shoulders. The mid-to-late ’90s saw him experimenting with more abstract forms of improvisation with mixed results and severing links with old friends, including Derome when he left his band Les Dangereux Zhoms. In 2001 he resolutely stepped away from the collective and released CDs on Ohm Editions and La Tribu. The album Tombola Rasa and a country-folk project with American maverick Eugene Chadbourne indicated a return to earlier pleasures at the start of the new decade.
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Portrait: Pierre Tanguayby François Couture in All-Music Guide (USA), June 1, 2002 |2103|
“If we could give a prize to the most valuable Ambiances Magnétiques
sideman (or woman), it would go to drummer Pierre Tanguay.”
If we could give a prize to the most valuable Ambiances Magnétiques sideman (or woman), it would go to drummer Pierre Tanguay. Even though he is not one of the nine core members of the collective, he appears on more albums put out by its label than any one of them! But his career cannot be pinned down to the Montreal avant-garde scene. He has also been a valued sideman on the jazz scene, playing with Eric Longsworth, Jean Vanasse, Karen Young and a dozen of others, and is active in world music, especially with his Mediterranean folk group Strada. In Montreal he occupies a place comparable to Hamid Drake in New York. Tanguay was born in Quebec City, 1957. He began as a jazz drummer, finding inspiration in the playing of Billy Higgins, Ed Blackwell and Paul Motian. A professional musician since 1978, he also studied African percussion for two years in the Comores Islands and went to Paris to study tablas and Indian music with Anand Kumar. When he settled in Montreal in the late ’70s, he was already an accomplished player. One of the first musicians he hooked up with was saxophonist Jean Derome who would later co-found Ambiances Magnétiques. Tanguay has been his trusty partner for decades, first in the scrapyard ensemble Les Patenteux du Québec and later in Jean Derome et les Dangereux Zhoms and Derome Tanguay Danse. Still, at first Tanguay let the Ambiances Magnétiques musicians pursue their experimentations, preferring to ride a softer avant-garde jazz wave. In the ’80s he was part of Icarus with cellist Eric Longsworth and participated in bassist Pierre Cartier’s ensembles. His relentless working schedule and rare listening quality and musicianship established him as a leading session drummer. With Cartier and Derome he formed the Thelonious Monk tribute trio Évidence and by the mid-’90s he was involved in all major projects by Derome, René Lussier, Robert Marcel Lepage, Joane Hétu and Diane Labrosse. With the Dangereux Zhoms et toured Europe and the US, appearing at every major jazz festival. Tanguay prefers the role of sideman, but he has occasionally stepped to the front of the stage, particularly in free improv duets with trombonist Tom Walsh (the album Midi Tapant came out in 1998) and Derome (Pinc! Plonc! in 2001). In 2000 he released a first solo album, La musique de mon disque, a collection of experimental ambient percussion pieces. Around the same time he also began to write and perform music for film, theatre and dance.
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Portrait: Diane Labrosseby François Couture in All-Music Guide (USA), June 1, 2002 |2102|
“Keyboardist and sampler artist Diane Labrosse is a core member
of the Montreal avant-garde music collective Ambiances Magnétiques.”
Keyboardist and sampler artist Diane Labrosse is a core member of the Montreal avant-garde music collective Ambiances Magnétiques. In the 1980s she took part to a string of avant-pop feminist groups. Later she switched from keyboards to the sampler and from rock to electronica improv. Although she has released solo albums, her best known works have been with collaborators Ikue Mori and Martin Tétreault. She also appears on numerous albums by other Ambiances Magnétiques artists, especially Jean Derome, Joane Hétu and Michel F Côté. She is co-founder and artistic co-director of the Montreal-based concert production company Productions SuperMémé. Labrosse was gravitating around L’Enfant Fort and the Pouêt Pouêt Band, collectives of left-field musicians that predate the beginnings of Ambiances Magnétiques. There she met saxophonist/singer Joane Hétu and drummer Danielle Palardy Roger. Together they formed the all-girls group Wondeur Brass. Her quirky keyboard playing which made use of unusual “post new-wave” sounds gave the band its signature on the two LPs Ravir (1985) and Simoneda, Reine des Esclaves (1988). The trio also performed under the name Les Poules, recording one album in 1986 (the unit was revived as an improv project in the early 2000s) and with bassist Marie Trudeau as Justine in the early 1990s, Labrosse’s closest brush with fame, at least in Eastern Europe where the group built a cult following. In 1985, along with her colleagues she was asked to join Ambiances Magnétiques. There she developed a special affinity with drummer Michel F Côté both in and outside music. She contributed to his first two Bruire albums (especially Les Fleurs de Léo), recorded a duo CD with him (Duo Déconstructiviste) and together they wrote the music for Robert Lepage’s play La Géométrie des Miracles (Geometry of Miracles) and toured with his technological cabaret Zulu Time. Labrosse released her first solo CD Face cachée des choses in 1995, at the end of Justine’s career and before joining Hétu’s new group Castor et Compagnie. It focused for the first time on the sampler as an instrument, a soft-noise direction she would stick to from then on. Île Bizarre (1998) with Ikue Mori and Martin Tétreault revealed her work to an international audience. With Tétreault she toured Europe and eventually released the duo CD Parasites (2001).
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Portrait: Papa Boaby François Couture in All-Music Guide (USA), June 1, 2002 |2101|
“… a repertoire of quirky angular songs…”
A Montreal avant-rock group with ties to the Ambiances Magnétiques collective, Papa Boa is one of many projects involving Bernard Falaise and Rémi Leclerc. The group writes complex songs out of studio improvisation sessions, including lots of sampling and oddities, and is driven by Falaise’s highly original guitar work. They have one album out. In 1991, Falaise, drummer Rémi Leclerc (of Miriodor and various projects by André Duchesne) and bassist Frédéric Roverselli struck a friendship. Out of it came Papa Boa, at first a loose studio collective to which reedist Pierre Labbé was later added. All members (minus Labbé, a jazzman) have a rock background and their first intention was to explore freer structures that would include electronics. Their first experiments consisted mostly of improvisations. The group debuted on stage in 1991 during the Festival du Théâtre des Amériques in Montréal. The next few years saw little activity, the unit being used mostly as a laboratory as Falaise and Leclerc’s profiles were constantly on the rise in avant-rock circles. The group provided the soundtrack to Michel Lefebvre and Eva Quintas’ multimedia work Liquidation in 1997. Engagements began to pile up, leading to an active period of three years. The quartet (occasionally augmented by guests such as Marcelle Hudon and storyteller Michel Faubert) performed concerts at various Quebec festivals (Festival des Musiques Fraîches in Quebec, Festival des musiques de création in Jonquières). They built a repertoire of quirky angular songs and recorded Tête à queue, their first CD. It was released in May 1999 by Ambiances Magnétiques. Performances at the Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville in May 2000 and the Montreal Jazz Festival the following year raised the group’s profile, but the members’ other projects finally claimed them back and Papa Boa went dormant.
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Portrait: Jean Derome et les Dangereux Zhomsby François Couture in All-Music Guide (USA), June 1, 2002 |2099|
“… in the Ambiances Magnétiques roster it stands as the most
popular act abroad.”
In the mid-’90s, Jean Derome et les Dangereux Zhoms was Montreal saxophonist Jean Derome’s prime project. The group released three albums from 1994 to 1998. Although activities have slowed down, it continues to perform around the world -- in the Ambiances Magnétiques roaster it stands as the most popular act abroad. 1992 was a good year for Jean Derome. He recorded the final (and best) album by his duo Les Granules with René Lussier and the first by his trio Évidence, among many other projects including music for dance and theatre. He was touring like crazy and began to keep a travel diary in which he jotted down musical impressions. It appeared to him that this “road music” screamed for a band of its own. Drawing from all of his activities, he put together Jean Derome et les Dangereux Zhoms (“Jean Derome and the Dangerous Guyz,” to pick up the intentional misspelling in the last word). The group, conceived as a road band just like the music, consists of the avant-garde jazz trio Évidence (Derome, bassist Pierre Cartier and drummer Pierre Tanguay), plus Les Granules (guitarist Lussier), plus two of Derome’s regular sidemen, trombonist Tom Walsh and keyboardist Guillaume Dostaler. For this unit Derome penned a repertoire of pieces that blend avant-jazz, avant-rock and free improv, focusing on jazz stylings Évidence derived from Thelonious Monk, the saxophonist’s idiosyncratic contrapuntal writing and the warped stage humor that was the trademark of Les Granules. They gave one hell of a dynamite show. The Dangereux Zhoms began to perform in Montreal and the East Coast. A first CD, Carnets de Voyage (“travel diaries”) was recorded and released in 1994. Navré came out a year later. The group continued to tour extensively, in the US and soon in Europe too. By the end of 1997, tensions between Derome and Lussier had reached new heights and the two parted ways after two decades of close collaboration. The group was put on hiatus and Derome produced a live album from tapes recorded at the Théâtre La Chapelle in Montréal in February 1996. Torticolis was released in 1998 and the three Dangereux Zhoms CDs were packaged together as the box set 1994-96. The chapter was closed… or so it seemed. In 1999 Derome reactivated the unit, minus Lussier. Local performances have been sparse and limited to special events (like a two-week Derome residency/retrospective at the same Théâtre La Chapelle in 2000), but the group still performs regularly outside Montréal and has appeared at jazz festivals in Guelph and Vancouver and at the 2001 RingRing festival in the Czech Republic.
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Portrait: Alexandre St-Ongeby François Couture in All-Music Guide (USA), June 1, 2002 |2094| Alexandre St-Onge is an ambiguous artist from Montreal. He started playing free jazz on double bass and quickly developed into a sound/performance artist. He belongs to the generation of experimentalists and improvisors that came after the Ambiances Magnétiques collective and was actually instrumental in establishing some contacts between that group of artists and the younger ones revolving around Godspeed You Black Emperor! He has released a few solo albums and recorded and performed with Klaxon Gueule, Undo, Et Sans and Shalabi Effect. St-Onge studied double bass. Little is known of his formative years, but his first major musical activity was being recruited by Ambiances Magnétiques drummer Michel F Côté to form the free improv trio Klaxon Gueule (also with Bernard Falaise). A first album, Bavards, came out in 1997 on which St-Onge performs in a classic American free jazz style. By the time the group’s second CD Muets was released two years later he had abandoned conventional playing, focusing on effects, electronics and textures, dragging the formation into European-style electro-acoustic improv. In the meantime the bassist had met the other, mostly anglophone Montreal avant-garde scene, collaborating with the likes of Sam Shalabi (in his Shalabi Effect with albums out on Alien8 Recordings), David Kristian (the trio Kristian Shalabi St-Onge, also on Alien8), and conceptual artist Christof Migone, once of the Quebec sound art collective Avatar. St-Onge released a first solo album, Image/Négation in early 1999. It established his fondness for the exploration of silence and noise, relating his work to artists like Francisco López, John Duncan, Bernhard Günter and John Hudak. On his second solo effort, Une mâchoire et deux trous (1999, Namskeio) he built eery textures by putting contact microphones in his mouth. This idea was developed into a performance art concept with Migone in the duo Undo. The pair also founded the record label Squint Fucker Press in 2001. Meanwhile St-Onge reached a certain level of success with the avant-psychedelic outfit Shalabi Effect. He also recorded an album with Godspeed You Black Emperor!’s Roger Tellier-Craig as Et Sans.
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Portrait: Bernard Falaiseby François Couture in All-Music Guide (USA), June 1, 2002 |2093|
“His distinctive guitar style, at times raw and twangy, at others highly atmospheric,
set him apart…”
A Montreal native, where he is still based, guitarist Bernard Falaise exploded on the new music scene in the late ’90s, appearing in many Ambiances Magnétiques-related outfits, especially in avant-rock oriented groups that included drummer Rémi Leclerc (Miriodor, Les Projectionnistes, Papa Boa). He is also active on the free improv scene, playing with Klaxon Gueule and Robert Marcel Lepage among others. His distinctive guitar style, at times raw and twangy, at others highly atmospheric, set him apart in the same class of originals as René Lussier. He is also a much in-demand record producer and has composed contemporary classical music in his spare time for the tango ensemble Quartango and the saxophone quartet Quasar. Falaise was born in 1965. Little is known from his formative years. He picked up the guitar in his teens and came to music from the progressive side of rock -- King Crimson’s Robert Fripp is an obvious influence. He studied music and started to work professionally in the early 1990s, joining the avant-prog group Miriodor. The group’s fourth album, Jongleries Élastiques, came out in 1995 and introduced his playing to fans of the genre. The enthusiastic response to the album ensured he was dutifully acknowledged for his important contribution to the group’s refreshed sound. Miriodor drummer Rémi Leclerc was already well acquainted with the avant-garde music collective Ambiances Magnétiques and he introduced his friend. Falaise quickly became a favorite sideman and enrolled in Claude St-Jean’s Les Projectionnistes, Michel F Côté’s Klaxon Gueule, Duchesne’s Diesel (sadly undocumented), and started the group Papa Boa with Leclerc, saxophonist Pierre Labbé and bassist Frédéric Roverselli. In 1999-2000 Falaise diversified his activities, reaching a wider audience. He co-wrote with Côté the music for Robert Lepage’s film “Nô” and began to work with alternative pop artists. He co-produced the first album by Jorane in 1999 and the next year produced and played on Marie-Jo Thério’s acclaimed CD “La Maline.” The number of awards and praise this album gathered assured him a first-class status as cutting-edge producer. In the meantime he released his first solo CD, Do, a collection of multi-tracked guitar pieces. other texts in
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