For the uninitiated, Bernard Falaise and Martin Tétreault are two of the finest improvisers around — not just in this city, but anywhere. If you’ve seen either one of these two musicians, you know that this is not hyperbole. Tétreault does amazing stuff with turntables, turntable motors and diverse objects, while Falaise, normally a brilliant guitar slinger, plays the computer here as he remixes tracks taken from recordings Tétreault made in the living rooms of friends in France in 2000. This is a short album, comprising 11 tracks of three minutes each. Tétreault’s improvisations skip, grind and pop along in a most musical fashion, and Falaise’s wizardry lies in the way he combines elements of various tracks playfully yet exactingly. Beautiful packaging by Michel F Coté’s & Records label completes the whole thing in a manner most classy.

Après s’être penché sur le travail de Frank Martel, voici que le guitariste Bernard Falaise s’attaque aux compositions beaucoup plus abstraites de Martin Tétreault, artiste reconnu pour ses explorations à base de tourne-disques. Enregistrées lors de trois concerts donnés par Tétreault, les bandes que remixe Falaise sur Des gestes défaits renferment tous les bruits émanant d’une platine. Les sons de moteur et de parasites forment des rythmes souvent déconstruits agrémentés d’effets et de traitements informatiques. Les fragments sonores s’entrechoquent pour créer 11 pièces de 3 minutes destinées aux oreilles ouvertes et rompues à la musique actuelle. 3/5

Canadian bandleader and composer Tom Walsh and this far-flung group of musicians have their fingers in so many pies — funk, fusion, avant-jazz, prog, even non-idiomatic improv — that it’s a surprise that Diversion isn’t baked into an indigestible lump. Instead, Walsh and his mates avoid the stop-start schizophrenia that characterizes a lot of other genre exercises and stick with a creative but organic sense of development that takes each of these ten pieces on a strange ride, but not before giving them some legs. (It might have helped that Diversion was recorded live over the course of two performances and then seamlessly edited together after the fact instead of cobbled together in the studio.)

A piece like Ouvert Tour, with skittering guitar scrapes that segue into a no man’s land of electronic buzzes and mournful trombone lines, or Two Pair/Deux Couples, which moves carefully from minute improv to Mingus-like horn growls to a vampy swing break, showcase NOMA and Walsh at their most diversified, while straight-up, stripped down (but still adventurous) funk numbers like Capacity or the prog-tinged Bud’s Dub prove they can stay interesting, even while staying inside genre boundaries.

Walsh and his bandmates have playing talent to spare and a barrell full of stylistic guises at their fingertips, but the true measure of Diversion’s success is its tight focus.

Surely it’s some sort of serendipitous combination of Canadian grant money and Splendid’s strong north-of-the-border label ties, but a dramatic preponderance of the most interesting experimental/electronic/noise-based work I’ve heard over my three-year tenure here has come from Montréal. Perhaps francophone Canadians, reacting to their province’s uneasy relationship with the rest of Canada, have converted discomfort into art. Perhaps it’s just something in the water. In any case, from the post-rock stylings of the Constellation roster to the very strangest soundscapes that issue from the empreintes DIGITALes folks, the work that comes out of this region is so intriguing as to make other areas’ artists seem deficient in both vision and their willingness to venture forth, assuming the audience will follow.

Still, that public funding thing alluded to above can’t be overemphasized. In this case, two talented young artists/documentarians set out on a several-month-long trek across a wide swath of Canada, recording anything that piqued their interest. The result is this stunning two-disc set of field recordings and manipulated aural scenes, each of which conveys both a sense of narrative and a sense of the multifaceted nature of a geographically huge nation’s life. While each is a coherent artistic statement on its own, the two together are so complementary that it’s hard to imagine the one without the other.

The first disc, “The Little Man In The Ear” (or, more mellifluously, Le Petit homme dans l’oreille), is the more manipulated-sounding of the two; the artists’ fingerprints are deliberately left all over certain sections, while others seem untouched from their original recordings. The prime example of the former comes during a visit to a carriage race: the announcer’s voice is sampled and manipulated as heavily as in any techno track, albeit sans the driving beat. As it swirls from one speaker to the other, the race’s sense of circular motion is recaptured and reimagined in the listener’s ear. It’s quite a trick, and a virtuoso production performance. At other points, sounds that had previously been presented in close to what I assume was their natural setting are subtly reintroduced in such a way as to give the listener both a sense of ongoing travel, and of the interconnectedness of things. For example, a track that begins with crickets chirping fades into people walking across gravel and eventually incorporates a barely-discernible conversation, then picks up each of the two previously added sounds once again, making you feel as if you’ve traveled some distance to visit with the speaking men, who have then graciously walked back with you to your point of origin.

The latter disc, “Surface Documents” [Documents de surface], is approached somewhat differently. While the first disc appears to have been designed to be played on a radio program, the second seems more like a collection of compelling sounds that didn’t quite fit into the theme of the first. Therefore, this disc acts more as a roving, narrative-free travelogue that glances over the entire map, chooses a theme, and then touches down everywhere that that theme might apply. For example, one of the longer sections intermixes the sounds of water interacting with various surfaces at various volumes, blending the sounds of waterways that may have been thousands of miles apart into a single beautiful piece.

If you can’t afford to take a few months and explore the backroads of Canada, I suggest that you take a couple of hours and let two people who clearly know their way around clue you in to the way life sounds in their country.

Enregistré en concert à La Sala Rossa (grande sœur de la minuscule mais chaleureuse Casa del Popolo) ainsi qu’à Toronto au Music Gallery, cet OVNI sonore propose les meilleurs moments de ces deux mémorables prestations. Rappelant pratiquement le Uzeb des beaux jours dans ses moments groovy (Conversation), tantôt dangereusement swing (Bud’s Dub) et aussi parfois d’un hermétisme difficilement pénétrable, le deuxième opus de cet ensemble fondé par le tromboniste Tom Walsh ne manque certes pas d’audace ni d’arrangements compacts. Accompagné par une pléiade de musiciens aguerris, Walsh, sampler à portée de la main, fait ici preuve d’ume fabuleuse virtuosité. À l’instar de son principal pôle d’attraction, une œuvre riche et définitivement stimulante.

Il est plutôt rare, dans les pages d’emoRAGEi, d’entendre parler de grands disques de jazz, et c’est à moi que revient l’honneur de vous faire découvrir cet exceUent album de compositions de Jean Derome. Saxophoniste et flûtiste très actif dans le cercle de la Musique Actuelle au Québec, reconnu mondialement pour son talent et sa versatilité, Derome m’étonne cette fois avec un jazz très accessible, presque rétro, définitivement swing. Je ne suis pas un grand expert en jazz ni en Actuel, mais il me semble que les fois où j’ai eu la chance d’entendre Derome en concert, sa musique était beaucoup plus bordélique, lancée à tous vents, 100% improvisée, folle et assez difficile à suivre pour le commun des mortels. J’y découvre ici un Derome quand même énergique, mais relativement doux et mélodique, variant les ambiances, restant dans un jazz à la Eric Dolphy. Un album qu’on aurait presque plus attendu chez Verve, tellement il sonne «standard»! Dès les premiers sons émis par la contrebasse de Normand Guilbeault, ou aux premiers habiles coups de cymbales de Pierre Tanguay, deux autres «vieux de la vieille» de l’univers Ambiances Magnétiques, on a le pied qui swingue, les doigts qui claquent, le groove qui s’incruste. Jetez-vous sur ce disque au plus vite!