Les Poules (Diane Labrosse, sampler; Joane Hétu, saxophone and voice; Danielle Palardy Roger, percussions) will play live at Zeke’s Gallery in Montréal (Québec) on February 21, 2006.

Les Poules travel to Russia! The trio of Joane Hétu, Diane Labrosse and Danielle Palardy Roger will be in concert in Moscow on April 20, 2005 and in Saint Petersburg on April 22 and 24, 2005.

For the third installement of the Volapük concert series, Les Poules (the trio of Danielle Palardy Roger, Diane Labrosse and Joane Hétu) pairs up with three young innovative musicians, i8u, Magali Babin and Myléna Bergeron. The concert will be held at the O Patro Vys hall (Montréal) on April 28, 2005.

Ambiances Magnétiques is making many year-end top lists. First, Mike Hansen of WhynotJazz on CKLN picks Prairie orange by Les Poules. François Couture of Délire actuel on CFLX picks Playing Guitar: Symphony #1 by Tim Brady. Mike Chamberlain chose 10 compositions by the Trio Derome Guilbeault Tanguay for his selection in Coda magazine, same as Bart Plantenga for radio Patapoe in Amsterdam. Finally, Montréal’s cultural weekly Ici (Montréal) also picked Playing Guitar: Symphony #1 in addition to Joëlle Léandre and Gianni Lenoci’s Sur une balançoire.

Les Poules will end their season with two concerts in North-America, ,June 17, at Buffalo’s Big Orbit Gallery (NY) and ,June 18, 2004, at ArrayMusic’s space in Toronto (ON) for the Leftover Daylight concert series.

The 19th annual Seattle Improvised Music Festival took place this winter over two week-ends in Febuary. This year brought a turning point for the festival, as the long-term orginizers turned over the reins to musicians newly very active in the scene, all of whom are directly or indirectly affialited with Open Music Workshop. Open Music Workshop (or OMW) is a relatively young entity, less than two years old, but has constitued something like a second wave in the improvised music scene in Seattle. This shift in leadership was reflected in the shape of the festival this year, which cast a wider net and included a broader range of approaches to music making.

The next weekend I also managed to catch Les Poules (Montréal) at Consolodated Works, a large warehouse-like art gallery and performance space. Les Poules have beon playing together for over a decade, and every passing minute of their long history and musical intimacy. Joane Hétu (vocals, alto sax) staked out a minimalist territory of voiceless fricatives and static noises, which she mined over the course of the performance. Diane Labrosse (electronics) explored a similarly focused territory, while Danielle Palardy Roger’s percussion poured out speechlike with orchestraly various gestures accumulating over time into a complex field. A drama of highly attuned listening slowly emerged full of simultaneous starts, frequent finishing of each others’ sentences, and sudden collective laughter. Occasionally, certain silences were allowed to move with grace to the center of the circle.