Labels // Ambiances Magnétiques

15 June 2002
By François Couture in All-Music Guide (USA), June 15, 2002

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“… Justine pushed further the ideals of challenging, thought-provoking feminist rock…”

Born out of the Montréal-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 Montréal 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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6 June 2002
By François Couture in All-Music Guide (USA), June 6, 2002

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“… 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 Montréal’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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1 June 2002
By François Couture in All-Music Guide (USA), June 1, 2002

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“Keyboardist and sampler artist Diane Labrosse is a core member of the Montréal avant-garde music collective Ambiances Magnétiques.”

Keyboardist and sampler artist Diane Labrosse is a core member of the Montréal 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 Montréal-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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1 June 2002
By François Couture in All-Music Guide (USA), June 1, 2002

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Alexandre St-Onge is an ambiguous artist from Montréal. 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 Montréal 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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1 July 1998
By Jean-François Denis in SOCAN, Paroles & Musique #5:7 (Canada), July 1, 1998

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Au cours des derniers mois le collectif de musique actuelle Ambiances Magnétiques a produit une série de disques portant son catalogue à plus de 60 titres. Le premier de cinq nouveautés brièvement présenté ici s’intitule Inédits et est la troisième compilation des membres d’Ambiances Magnétiques: Michel F Côté, Jean Derome, André Duchesne, Joane Hétu, Diane Labrosse, Robert Marcel Lepage, René Lussier, Danielle Palardy Roger et Martin Tétreault. Contrairement aux deux premières compilations constituées de repiquages, Inédits présente justement 24 œuvres qui se trouvent sur disque pour la première fois.

Pierre Tanguay, batteur vedette des musiques actuelles, et Tom Walsh, tromboniste éclaté, ont enregistré Midi tapant. Des musiques qui sont à la fois planantes—par accumulation de couches sonores—et très dynamiques: Tanguay et Walsh jouent à plein poumon, à bras raccourcis.

Un trio ad hoc de bruististes improvisateurs électroacousticiens, Diane Labrosse, (échantillonneur}, Ikue Mori (percussions électroniques} et Martin Tétreault (tourne-disques) offrent Île bizarre où l’oreille est attirée, menée dans tous les recoins de ce monde inventé, purement sonore, dont les sources sont méconnues. C’est un travail sur la surface des haut-parleurs et pour l’imaginaire qu’il déclenche dans mon écoute.

Chansons de Douve est un album double présentant la grande œuvre poétique de Pierre Cartier (sur des textes de Yves Bonnefoy). Hybride de musique ancienne et jazz improvisée, Chansons de Douve est constitué de 14 pièces strictement composées, mais laissant place aussi à l’instantanéité des interprètes, pour un ensemble de dix musiciens: Angèle Trudeau (soprano), Noëlla Huet (mezzo-soprano), Pierre Cartier (basse électrique et voix), Jean-Denis Levasseur (saxophone alto), Jean Derome (saxophone alto, flûte et flûte en sol), Ivanhoe Jolicæur (trompette), Sylvain Jacob (trombones alto et ténor), Tom Walsh (trombone), Pierre Tanguay (batterie), Julien Grégoire (percussions).

Finalement, le cinquième disque est le dernier à ce jour de l’Orkestre des Pas Perdus, sous la gouverne de Claude Saint-Jean, Maison douce maison avec des musiques de jazz… dansantes… qui toujours suscitent l’écoute. Avec les excellents et solides musiciens Rémi Leclerc (batterie), Jean-Denis Levasseur (sax alto, piccolo), Roberto Murray (sax ténor, flûtes), Jean Sabourin (sousaphone), Claude Saint-Jean (trombone) et Maxime Saint-Pierre (trompette, flugelhorn).

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Ambiances Magnétiques
Québec

Ambiances Magnétiques is an independant label created in 1983 by Montréal musicians: Michel F Côté, Jean Derome, André Duchesne, Joane Hétu, Diane Labrosse, Robert Marcel Lepage, René Lussier, Danielle Palardy Roger, and Martin Tétreault. The idea of a collective was brought about by the need to create quality recordings of their musical material. Recordings that reflect the creative process and aesthetic values of the artists themselves. Ambiances Magnétiques seeks to give greater access to a music that is innovative, audacious, and authentic.