Enchanting improv that seems to tell a series of stories that never veer too far into the joy of self-indulgent improvisational playing at the expense of our need to hear new sounds presented in a manner that we can at least relate to other than as examples of audio onanism. Atmospheric and with cultural refs galore, sounding in part like shattered shards of Morricone…

Pour le deuxième disque de sa Collection QB, le Quatuor Bozzini foule les territoires minimalistes de Steve Reich avec une de ses œuvres majeures: Different Trains. Cette fresque sonore en trois mouvements pour quatuor à cordes, et trois quatuors à cordes enregistrés, ponctuée de fragments sonores (bruits de trains, sirènes, et voix de survivants de l’Holocauste), se déploie aux rythmes de séquences répétitives dans une partition rigoureuse. Reich s’inspire de son enfance, de ses allers et retours en train, New York/Los Angeles, et des allers simples qu’ont vécus les juifs vers les camps de la mort. Des versions existantes sur disque, celle du Kronos Quartet, dédicataire de l’œuvre en 1988, est la plus incisive. Le Bozini s’en démarque par son jeu plus chaleureux et retenu, privilégiant ici et là le «dramatisme» des artefacts sonores historiques. Délaissant celles du Kronos, le Bozzini a enregistré ses propres bandes aux cordes, sous les conseils du compositeur. D’une réalisation soignée, cette version inédite crée les effets obsédants escomptés, mais n’évacuent pas la nostalgie poétique du sombre propos. Un bémol: le minutage (27 minutes) qui autorisait largement un complément de programme.

Montréal is just a five-hour flight away, but the cultural capital of Francophone Canada can sometimes seem as remote as Antarctica. West Coast residents know the city as the home of relaxed liquor laws, good restaurants, and great delis, but we’re rarely exposed to the music that’s made there—and that’s almost entirely because most of it, whether pop, rock, or contemporary classical, is not sung in English.

North America’s largest French-speaking city is home to a thriving music industry and a club scene that we can only envy, but connecting with them seems difficult, thanks to the barrier of language. It’s ironic, then, that one of Montréal’s lesser-known contributions to the world of sound might end up being Vancouver’s entrée to Quebec’s musical life. Musique actuelle—a hybrid style that emerged in Montréal during the mid-1980s—is a largely instrumental form, so unilingual Vancouverites need not be scared off by incomprehensible texts. And although the idiom is so all-embracing that it’s hard to define, it’s animated by the kind of exploratory spirit that’s drives Vancouver groups like Talking Pictures and the Hard Rubber Orchestra. So it shouldn’t be that difficult for B.C. ears to appreciate Montréal’s sonic explorers, and we’ll get a chance to do just that this week, thanks to the Vancouver New Music Society’s Interférence: Statique X Statique festival.

Although the event, which runs at the Scotiabank Dance Centre until Saturday (October 22), features non-Francophone artists such as the U.K.’s Fred Frith and Janek Schaeffer, most of the performers hail from Quebec, and many of them, like Diane Labrosse, are 20-year veterans of the musique actuelle scene. Nonetheless, the otherwise charmingly articulate keyboardist still finds it difficult to explain what it is, exactly, that her chosen style includes—and that, it seems, is not only a linguistic issue.

“It’s a hard thing to do, describing a music that’s so broad,” Labrosse says, on the line from her Montréal home. “Of course at first there was progressive rock, and then improv came along, and then came the idea of putting together different styles of music. Some musicians began to draw on the roots of jazz, and also using more traditional or folkloric stuff, and then putting all of this together to make a new hybrid of music, which we called musique actuelle. We even find these different direct references within the same piece.”

The style’s name, like the music itself, contains a wealth of inferences and possibilities. Its sounds are “actuelle” because they’re real music made by real musicians, as opposed to machine-made, bottom-line-driven pop, but also because they reflect the kaleidoscopic reality of today’s media environment. The argument Labrosse makes is that few people confine their listening to just one genre, so why should musicians suffer self- imposed limitations on what they play?

Her own career reflects this wide-open attitude. She’s written scores for dance, penned twisted avant-pop tunes, worked extensively with sample-based music, and performed with a global array of free improvisers. And in her Thursday-night concert at the Dance Centre, she’ll move a step or two toward abstract sound, in the company of multimedia artist Jean-Pierre Gauthier.

“Jean-Pierre is more known in the visual arts,” Labrosse notes. “He started out as a sculptor, a visual artist, and then he started to make some sound sculptures. This is where we got involved together quite a few years ago, maybe in 1998 or 2000 or whatever. We did a project where he was working with rubber tubes and compressors and bird whistles, things of that nature, so it was a noisy kind of culture. That started him doing shows, or doing performances; before that he was more of a sound installer, working in galleries and things like that. But he’s always done very fine work, juxtaposing visual and audio stuff.”

Labrosse reveals that she doesn’t yet know what Gauthier will be bringing to their Interférence show. “He told me that it’s very small, and that it’s something that he’s made, and that it varies from one performance to another.”

With that in mind, she’s readying herself for a performance that will be improvised from start to finish, as will several of the other bookings that Vancouver New Music artistic director Giorgio Magnanensi has arranged for his festival. Following Labrosse on Thursday will be the cross-country quartet of Pierre Tanguay, Bernard Falaise, Dylan van der Schyff, and Ron Samworth, a group she describes as well worth hearing.

“It’s a double-duo sort of thing: two drummers that work in a similar fashion, and two guitarists that also work in a similar fashion,” she explains. “But everybody’s very different and has a real personality. I saw this band in Montréal, and it was quite a nice concert.”

Friday night (October 21) features performances by sound artist Magali Babin and saxophonist Joane Hétu, followed by Klaxon Gueule, a trio that includes guitarist Falaise, percussionist Michel F Côté, and pianist Alexandre St-Onge. Like Labrosse’s collaboration with Gauthier, both of these ensembles patrol the grey area between sound sculpture and more conventional forms of improvisation, a zone that increasingly draws practitioners of musique actuelle.

“You start with finding new sounds on your guitar or your bass or your drums,” Labrosse notes. “And you move from there to adding effects, and then to [computer-based] processing, or even to building your own instruments.”

Fittingly, then, Interférence’s musique actuelle survey will conclude on Saturday with Morceaux_de_Machines, an abrasive and intense collaboration between sound designers Aimé Dontigny and Érick d’Orion that has earned comparisons to noise innovators Einstürzende Neubauten and Otomo Yoshihide.

It seems that the Montréal-born idiom known as musique actuelle really is capable of embracing almost everything from the minimalist gestures of Babin and Hétu to the ear-scorching aural firestorms of Dontigny and d’Orion. Close observers of the Vancouver scene will note that our own creative musicians are capable of a very similar range of styles; perhaps the gulf between East and West, between Francophone and Anglophone, is narrowing at last.

As a radio man from way back, drummer/composer/alchemist Michel F Côté knows how scraps and fragments of sound-overheard conversations, old blues and country songs-can rattle around inside the brain. Thing is, though, that the memories never come out the same as they originally went in. Flat Fourgonnette gives musical form to this notion, as Côté and his musicians-a potpourri of the folks around the Ambiances Magnétiques tribe-playfully blend bits and pieces of old songs (Hank Williams, Billie Holliday, Mississippi John Hurt) with their own musical ideas and memories into a kind of spaghetti western soundtrack. It’s warm and romantic and a little bit subversive all at once.

Different Trains est le 2^e enregistrement de cette œuvre depuis 1988, initialement interprétée par le Kronos Quartet. Cette suite de Reich relate ses voyages en train en Amérique en parallèle avec les allers simples des juifs vers les camps de la mort. Cette pièce pour quatuor à cordes jouée simultanément avec trois autres quatuors enregistrés et bande suit le rythme de la mélancolie du voyage et des textes récités. Très belle interprétation d’une œuvre profonde et saisissante. …La musique suit en parallèle les textes récités. 9

Outstanding new music ensemble featuring six guitarists from Quebec performing the compositions of Mauricio Kagel, John Cage, Claude Vivier, Martin Levasseur and (ensemble member) Francis Marcoux. Montréal-based experimental guitarist Antoine Berthiaume left me with one of these fascinating discs and I am most grateful. I have had a fondness for guitar ensembles since hearing the Four Guitarists of the Apocalypso Bar (also from Quebec) and their sort of offspring, Fred Frith’s Guitar Quartet. As far as modern classical music goes, pioneers like Glen Branca and Rhys Chatham have also paved the way.

L’Hexacorde utilize mostly acoustic and one electric guitar(s), bass guitar and charango. They open and close this disc with pieces by influential composers who are rarely associated with guitars, Kagel and Cage. Mauricio Kagel’s Rrrrrr… is for a cycle of 41 pieces all with titles beginning with “r”. It features acoustic guitars played delicately, with slightly twisted folk melodies. Canadian composer Claude Vivier was a rather mysterious figure who studied with Stockhausen and died very young (at 35). Vivier’s piece, Pulau Dewata (“Isle of the Gods” in Balinese), is a fascinating one. Influenced by Balinese music, it is a collection of haunting fragments, intricate and with unexpected twists and turns. Martin Levasseur’s Empreintes magnolia is short, yet a unique in its structure. Layers of sparse acoustic and electric guitars play a series of enchanting melodies that evolve and remain connected as well. Francis Marcoux, who plays electric guitar in this ensemble, contributed “Obstinaton”, which deals with tight ostinato patterns played slowly in intricate layers. Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes was written for prepared piano and here is played by prepared guitars, with objects placed between the strings. It is contains the same mysterious, alien, exotic sound that Cage coaxed from his prepared piano. The fractured rhythms sound just right. Closing with Cage’s In a Landscape, a delicate and lovely work, where certain notes are sustained and ring melodic elegance.