This isn’t some guy sitting down with his guitar and playing a few tunes. Lussier’s approach to the guitar is visceral — he hammers and plucks at the strings, sending shards of notes careening off in all directions. A cluster of notes is punctuated by seconds of silence; the music pulses and fades away, existing in a state between realization and decay. It seems that there are no beginnings and no endings, or perhaps all beginning and ending at the same time. Though there are no overdubs on either of these recordings, depth is achieved by recording with eight stratogically placed microphones, so that the sounds ricochet from hack to front and side to side. Not exactly toetapping stuff, but Lussier throws in a few foot stomps for good measure.

Avant lui, le guitariste René Lussier, le clarinettiste François Houle, le pianiste belge Benoit Delbecque et le bruiteur Martin Tétreault ont… Ce qu’il y a de bien avec Lussier, c’est qu’il y a toujours une exigence. Écouter ses musiques exige une oreille curieuse. Une curiosité affûtée de manière à capter, et pas obligatoirement décrypter, ce qui se passe sur la scène.

Ce que Lussier et ses amis ont fait est une musique éclatée propre à favoriser les interventions que l’un ou l’autre souhaite effectuer à l’instant même. Écouter Lussier et ses amis revient à faire un sain ménage: celui des neurones. Bref, la musique de Lussier est salutaire.

The duo with Martin Tétreault is, unsurprisingly, a whole other saucepan of reptiles, and follows their widely acclaimed duo Dur noyau dur (1998). The latter consisted of turntable and guitar improvisations, whereas Qu’ouis-je? is a studio constructed piece of musique concrete informed by Surrealism, Dada and art brut. Here Tétreault exchanges turntables for “synthétiseur, pick-up et boite 3 rhythme” and Lussier trades in his electric guitar for a daxophone — the bowed wooden instrument invented by German guitarist Hans Reichel (Lussier played in Reichel’s dexophone quartet).

The uncanny ability of the daxophone to produce voice-like timbres and intonations is used here to create fantastical landscapes populated by strange, exotic creatures whose wild screechings, calls, conversations, arguments and acts of aggression happen in a rather bleak landscape somewhere in deep space (or is it just post-industrial Earth?). Tétreault creates the crackling, distorted ambiences around the action in a compelling and accomplished work that has been executed with a serious sense of humour.

Improvisateurs québécois astucieux, Lussier et Tétreault — respectivement guitariste et platiniste — n’en sont pas à leur première collaboration et officient depuis de longues années au sein du collectif Ambiances magnétiques. Issues de sessions prises live en 97, ces pièces dures évoquent une rencontre totalement libre et saccadée des cordes et de (souvent courtes) séquences sonores issues des platines et radios de Tétreault. Lussier utilise tous les détails de ses instruments, du grattage ludique au récurage nerveux tandis que Tétreault pique son interlocuteur d’assauts fourbes (la fausse politesse dans Enrayure) et racleurs qui provoquent des demangeaisons dans le conduit auditif. Les accalmies arrivent à point nomme pour souffer un peu (le gris et bien nomme Sépulture) avant les nouveaux craquements, les nouvelles nodosités et un final dissonant. Si l’on n’avait conscience du tout joue sans fioritures de ces 21 morsures, on jurerait parfois (surtout sur la partie Prise de terre) d’un travail électroacoustique d’exception. Tous les mots choisis dans le livret définissent parfaitement ce disque en Ure. Lire l’excellente interview de Tétreault dans Revue & Corrigée n40

There was also a sense of the austere between guitarist René lussier and drummer Dylan Van Der Schyff, but it was borne more from unfamiliarity than anything else. Their meeting didn’t produce as many sparks as one might have hoped, but they are incapable of being anything but open and experimental, so there was plenty of reaching if not quite enough connection. Lussier continues to inspire with his ability to make music that is at once highly intimate yet oftentimes harsh and dense. Whether shaking blues licks out with his left hand or massaging noise from his strings with emery cloth, Lussier is always on the frontier, unwilling to settle for what’s comfortable. Van der Schyff is also an adventurer, and though one might’ve wished that the two would hook up to take things to another sonic plateau, the drum mer maintained a steady boil under Lussier’s explorations.

That there was much else—and much that, sadly, went unheard by this reviewer —tells the story of Guelph’s continuing growth and vision. The Saturday afternoon beer tent has finally hit its niche, featuring bands like Bunnett’s Spirits Of Havana and guitarist Kevin Breit’s Sisters Euclid that move both the body and the mind, and there are quirky little one-offs like solo balloonist Judy Dunaway that you won’t find at other festivals. Will continued success go to Guelph’s head? No time soon, it seems; once again this is the most grounded, friendly and open festival. It doesn’t have to look afield to find a definition of jazz community; it defines it from within.

Words come short when trying to describe Le trésor de la langue, as “masterpiece” can hardly express all the sweat and time put in the work, the impact it had and the critical acclaim it received. René Lussier’s second solo album only, six years after Fin du Travail (Version 1) (but there had been two LPs by Jean Derome and René Lussier and one LP with Robert Marcel Lepage), Le trésor de la langue would always remain the album to which Lussier’s subsequent efforts would be compared to Le trésor de la langue (The Treasure of Language) is built on two fundamental artistic directions. Its content is focused on the importance of speech in French-Canadian history: speaking French in order for the mother tongue to prevail against English (the conqueror’s tongue) and historical speeches that shaped the political context of the late 1980s, from France’s president Charles de Gaulle’s “Vive le Québec libre” (“Long live a free Québec!”) to the broadcasted manifest of the Front de Libération du Québec (a 1970 terrorist organization) to René Lévesque’s defeat speech after the first sovereignty referendum. As musical form, René Lussier took his starting point from Hermeto Pascoal’s In Grupo and Frank Zappa’s “The Dangerous Kitchen” and envisioned speech as music. He painstakingly transcribed historical speeches and casual conversations recorded in the streets, arranged it all with the help of Derome and Fred Frith, casting guitar, trombone, clarinet or violin to “interpret” or “double” the speeches, giving them dramatic settings and contexts just like in a movie. The results are breath-taking, even for the non-francophone. Folklore and circus music intertwine with avant-rock in interlocked suites where the line between spoken word and melody is abolished. The musicality of this sound art piece and the intelligent way it deals with a sensible question (Lussier will often deny any political implications in his work) make it a must-have. This is the road movie of one’s quest to find his identity and retrace the history of his people, all set on an engaging experimental canvas. The first four parts of the piece won the 1989 Paul Gilson Award (given by the Communauté des Radios Publiques de Langue Française, an organism regrouping French-speaking public radios). Le trésor de la langue introduced the whole Montréal experimental music scene (the musicians but also the label (Ambiances magnétiques) to a wider audience, both local and international. The CD version contains over 20 minutes of extra material.