Montréal-based trio Pink Saliva produce music that’s at once intensely deep and readily accessible. Accessible because drummer Michel F Côté lays down earthy rhythmic patterns that sound beamed to the planet through a reverb-y, distant mix. Intensely deep because trumpeter Elwood Epps (aka Gordon Allen) puts so much passion and focus into each and every sound, from kissing lip smacks to achingly beautiful single notes, suspended over the insistent thrumming of Alexandre St-Onge on either bass or laptop. All the musicians are technically ultra-adept, but you won’t find displays of ego or pyrotechnic showing-off. Mood and atmosphere are carefully created and sustained with attention to sonic salience. Amour, Amour, Amour begins with a lo-fi, rubbery vamp opening into a vulnerable trumpet cry that just stops dramatically. Eros Turannos features loose lips and cracking Harmon mute split tones and a reaching bass solo over multivalent drum motifs. This is a highly individualistic take on ambient music that’s rewardingly listenable.

Canada’s Et Records are now in full active force: existing since 2003, but only last year they doubled their amount of releases. That’s great, also since they operate on an interesting crossroad of music styles, and these four new releases show that well. The crossroad is where pop music, improvisation, musique concrète and free-jazz meet up. We have to go the website for additional information (which sometimes linked from the Actuelle label — Canada seems well organized in that respect).

Let’s start with the most ‘traditional’ one — or so it sounds like. I have never heard of Alexis O’Hara, who uses a lot of human voice — her own — as well as electronic improvisation and video. She has performed on spoken word festivals all over the world, from “new music symposiums to “women & technology events”, and besides various mini CDRs, Ellipsis is her second full length CD. Now it may sound like that this is all serious sound poetry, but this release is perhaps the most ‘pop’ music based I heard from Et Records. O’Hara samples her voice, adds a bit of electronic backing, rhythm machines, maybe a synth (but then perhaps these are sampled from her own voice, who am I to tell), and she signs a song, not use her voice in some dramatic or abstract poetry-like manner. That adds a distinct pop music like element to her music, along with a cabaret/nightclub like feel in some songs — perhaps due to the fact that she uses besides English also French and Spanish. The CD closes with Twenty-three, which sounds like a pastiche of Twenty Jazz funk Greats and Hot On The Heels from Throbbing Gristle. An excellent release! Very relaxed music, very well made.

From this extreme we bounce to an opposite extreme, the free jazz improvisation of Pink Saliva, a trio from Ellwood Epps (trumpet), Michel F Cote (drums, microphones, lapsteel) and Alexandre St-Onge (electric bass and laptop). A live recording, which is edited down to twelve short ‘songs’ (again?), somewhere between one and four minutes. This music is more traditionally improvised than what I usually like, with a strong sense for jazz. That is not necessarily, of course, a bad thing, but just not so much my cup of tea, although I could envisage myself in a dark cellar smoke filled and pipe in my hand. Perhaps I should say ‘that traditional’, but I have to be careful: maybe this is all done tongue in cheek, but I am not qualified to judge on that.

More improvisation can be found on the trio disc of Diane Labrosse (sampler), Philippe Lauzier (bass clarinet, saxophones) and Pierre Tanguay (drums). With the addition of the sampler, things become straight away more ‘modern’, ‘abstract’ and perhaps also less strictly defined as something like free-jazz. Throughout these four lengthy pieces there is a great sense of controlled playing here, with some quite intense music. This trio keeps things well under control here, with a lot of rumble beneath the surface. Meaning it can be found more in the low end than in the top end of the music, and that is what delivers a certain, great kind of tension to the music. Maybe one could wonder if four such pieces is a bit too much to be taken in at once, but nevertheless its some wonderful music, not be swallowed at once.

From a more musique concrete perspective we have a CD by one Tiare Kese, who was born in 1948 in Bulgaria, son of a resistance hero and soprano mother, who went in 1965 to Paris to study piano and horn. Later on befriended Karl-Heinz Stockhausen and Guy Debord, left the first, and then started to play music by Cage and Satie. Then he met Michel F Cote and ended up playing music on this CD, for which he plays piano, organ, mellotron, strings, French horn, electronics, samples and voices, plundering works by Satie, Cage, Tétreault, Falaise, Siewert, Brandlmayr, B Günter, Fennesz, Neina and Oval. I have no idea if this is all true, but why spoil a good story by looking up the ‘truth’? The music is good, and that is what counts. If the other three are working towards the crossroad of styles, then its perhaps Kese who is in the middle. Bits of pop/rock tunings are used, mainly when it comes to using distortion, samples of an electro-acoustic nature, treated instruments, and occasionally improvised playing on them, all mingled together into some well crafted soundtrack-like music. A bit of drone here and there, field recordings interwoven, desolate French horn, modern classical glissandi, sparse percussive sounds. Altogether this makes an excellent release. Quite intense, sparse and at times dramatic music. The best out of these four.

Montréal’s Pink Saliva are Ellwood Epps (trumpet), Alexandre St-Onge (bass, laptop) and Michel F Côté (drums), here providing 12 miniatures spanning one to four minutes. Recognizable trumpet-trio textures alternate with ricketier soundscapes, bubbling bass and clattering percussion never far below the surface. Slippery trumpet squeezes out drones over soft-mallet-driven marching beats and rumbling bass on Amour, Amour, Amour as Eros Turannos, Really Deadly Romantic and Debout les Morts hint at dark, enigmatic love.

Pink Saliva won’t ever ask for your ears — they’ll simply begin and demand your full attention, all other matters be damned. Found on upstart Montréal label &records, this Montréal-based trio’s self-titled debut is a series of short and incredibly focused improvisations that calls for repeated listening. Indeed, throughout this — their fourth release — Ellwood Epps (trumpet), Michel F Côté (drums, microphones, lapsteel) and Alexandre St-Onge (electric bass, laptop) thoroughly reward the attentive listener with the latest findings from an ongoing exploration of this group’s seemingly limitless sonic potential.

It is a record consisting largely of improvisations full of ambient drones and feedback from St-Onge’s laptop and Côté’s ingenious use of Pignose-amplified-contact-microphones-turned-drumsticks, which serve as a leaping-off point for Epps’ meditative trumpet playing (Really Deadly Romantic). However in other places, there are improvisations such as Yes, As A Look Springs To Its Face, which, at times, sounds thoughtful to a point where one starts to wonder whether the record contains through-composed works (note: it does not). It is, in a phrase, captivatingly dark and profoundly serious.

However for the dark and serious mood established and maintained by these fine musicians, there is an unmistakable joie de vivre that also permeates the record’s forty-one minutes; one would be hard-pressed to find a statement without intention anywhere on this record — and you know Pink Saliva knows it — which makes for a palpable sense of excitement and confidence. I would like to name a standout track, but that almost seems to miss the record’s point. This is very much an album in the truest sense of the word — with each piece developing, exploring, trashing, and rebuilding ideas that come before and after — simultaneously showing the way forward and destroying the path behind — inviting listeners to make their own way through an exquisite sonic environment.

Toute une attaque, pourtant, la renonce. Les chiens s’amusent, pourtant, la renonce. Au-dessus du balcon pend le lapin, pourtant, la renonce. Et de ce que nous voulons, rien n’en découle. Cette démission n’est point voulue. Sa présence, pourtant, inéluctable. Pink Saliva n’est pas le trio qui nous donnera le premier véritable porte-voix pour le trompettiste Ellwood Epps. L’électronisme des Alexandre St-Onge et Michel F Côté brouille les pistes. Un Klaxon Gueule (version Infininiment) plus sale, plus brusque. Un Mecha Fixes Clocks plus improvisé, moins orchestré. Un Pink Saliva plus authentique. Plus précis que le Hardcore: La Brique (Bug Incision, 2009) plus concis que l’auto-produit de 2008 (ou 2009?). Une première version définitive d’un ensemble aux vastes possibilités. Et de ce constat. Et de cette renonce. Une prime.

I Pink Saliva sono due terzi dei Klaxon Gueule — Michel F Côté (batteria, lapsteel, microfoni) e Alexandre St-Onge (basso e laptop) — con Ellwood Epps (tromba), ma è soprattutto quest’ultimo l’elemento che caratterizza maggiormente il disco coi suoi suoni per lo più allungati e sospesi (Amour amour amour, Debout les morts, Nautilius Pompilius) e solo accidentalmente rifratti e frastagliati (Eros turannos); Côté e St-Onge forniscono un substrato d’improvvisazioni ‘ragionate’, molto calde, notturne, fortemente percussive. Un disco ‘really deadly romantic’, come titola uno dei pezzi migliori, disperatamente romantico, fatto d’impressionismi fisici che rimandano nostalgicamente a certo ‘caloroso cool’ anni ’50 (Yes, As A Look Springs To Its Face, Daedalus), a Chet Baker (Nachtmützen e When You’re Real Gone Boy, Sweet Boy…), di schizzi austeri e rapidi arabeschi, mai sopra le righe, elegantissimo.