The next Mercredimusics will feature Jean Derome, Michel F Côté, Martin Tétreault and Josh Zubot on November 19, 2008 at Casa Obscura in Montréal.

Nathalie Derome, with her first class collaborators Jean Derome, Frank Martel and Martin Tétreault, will perform at the Lion d’Or in Montréal on October 29, 2008. Here’s a chance to rediscover the poetry that has made her mark over the past 20 years.

Martin Tétreault and his turntable quartet take part in Le passe-muraille, a 2-day event featuring 10 new musical works from Québec and abroad at La Sala Rossa on October 28 and 29, 2008.

Gordon M Allen, Michel F Côté, Martin Tétreault and Toronto guitarist Nilan Perera will be at Le Cagibi on Tuesday October 7 2008 as part of the Mardi spaghetti weekly series for creative music.

While the 2008 edition marked the 25th anniversary of the Festival international de musique actuelle de Victoriaville, and while the festival grid looked, in some respects, like a tribute to certain mainstays of the festival that’s not quite the way that Victo’s director, Michel Levasseur, set out to put the milestone program together. The 25th anniversary nonetheless has a resonance for many people, Levasseur found. “You can’t hide the reality of this history,” he said in an interview before the festival. “Some people have 25 years of marriage. Some people think of where they were 25 years ago. Some of our audience weren’t even born then. […]”

And there was, in fact, a certain symmetry to the lineup, with Jean Derome et les Dangereux Zhoms + 7 and John Zorn’s project The Dreamers opening the festival at 8 and 10 pm respectively. Both Derome and an expanded lineup of Les Dangereux Zhoms and Zorn’s Dreamers delivered performances that demonstrated that their leaders were still making interesting, relevant music. Les Dangereux Zhoms did two pieces. The first, Traquen’Art, was first performed late last year in homage to the Montréal production company of the same name, while the second, Plateforme, was a premiere, written in tribute Levasseur’s creation and life work. With the lineup expanded to include the voice of Joane Hétu, the reeds of Lori Freedman, and the turntable of Martin Tétreault, among others, the two compositions encompassed a wide palette that drew together almost everything Derome has done over the past thirty years. Ranging from delicate interplay between voice, violin and viola to full-on collective improvisation with screeching guitar and muted trombone pyrotechnics, the music exploded generic considerations in the best Victo tradition. […]

A lot of festival-goers skip the midnight shows, but this year’s edition featured two of the best I have seen in a decade of attending the festival, the Friendly Rich Show on Thursday and Michel F Côté’s post-rock soul sextet (juste) Claudette on Sunday. […] While the collective intrigue of the three Thursday concerts were hard to match, there was much to savor over the weekend. Among these […] the premiere performance by the trio of René Lussier, Martin Tétreault and Otomo Yoshihide, whose nakedly human endeavors to improvise as a trio had to overcome their long histories of playing with one another in duos, the results demonstrating both the promise and the pitfalls of improvised music.

… The evening started off with Philippe Lauzier and Pierre-Yves Martel of Quartetski, turntablist Martin Tétreault and Norwegian guitarist Kim Myhr in three quiet and textural improvisations. The set started with Lauzier playing his alto saxophone with a plunger mute affixed on his bell, creating a muffled and distant sound. The blend of Tétreault’s turntables, Myhr’s guitar effects and Martel’s viola da gamba was impressive. It was difficult to determine where the sounds were coming from. Martel, unamplified, would bow furiously, unleashing streams of harmonics, and even thump his bow against the body of the instrument. Myhr and Lauzier used their instruments more as resonators for external objects and vocalizations. Myhr many times moved a spinning toy across the body of his classical guitar, which he alternately played lying flat on his lap or in normal playing position. Lauzier also played bass clarinet, emphasizing the overtones of the instrument, and pulled out a plastic tube through which he circular breathed. At that moment, with Lauzier playing the tube, the whole group combined to sound like a massive vacuum cleaner, or that noisy radiator from down the hall — a sound full of airy noise, feedback and harmonics…