Canadian, Québec-based Martin Tétreault is a sound artist, turntablist, DJ and improviser who came to music from the visual arts milieu. His work shifted from highly imaginative puzzles of musical citations to exploration of the intrinsic qualities of the turntable, its motor sound, its interferences, needles, or prepared surfaces, with preparations and analog glitches He has collaborated with local improvisers like René Lussier, Jean Derome and Michel F Côté and others from the international, free-improvisation scene like Otomo Yoshihide, Ikue Mori and Xavier Charles.

Vraiment plus de Snipettes!!! (Really more Snipettes!!!) is Tétreault’s third installment in a series that he began in 1992 with a limited edition of 250 cassettes of Snipettes! (remastered to an album by Ambiances Magnétiques, 2007), and continued with Plus De Snipettes!! (More Snippets!!, Ambiances Magnétiques, 2018). Now, at 65 and without the enthusiasm of a 25-year-old, Tétreaul promises this is the final installment.

These installations are made of raw chunks of material excavated from Tétreault’s early archives — magnetic tapes and audio cassettes that were transferred to the computer and then being destroyed. In some cases, the original recordings were made without a mixing console, directly onto a reel-to-reel tape recorder. “I wanted to preserve as much as possible the original qualities of these materials and their supports”, Tétreault explains. “This involves the good moves and the mistakes conducive to learning and the naivety of time. The disc brings together gone gestures, analog tools and magnetic sounds. Most of the tools used for these recordings have disappeared from my entourage. As for music, it fixes in time plays and explorations that are elsewhere… ” The sound materials for Vraiment plus de Snipettes!!! were collected between 1984 and 2023.

Vraiment plus de Snipettes!!! demonstrates the brilliant, thought-provoking work of Tétreault as a sound artist and turntablist who finds delight in abrupt and brief, subversive juxtapositions between concentrated, obscure fragments of sound, that, surprisingly, gain enigmatic clarity and momentum as the album progresses. Obviously, all these sonic collisions. highlight Tétreault’s wily sense of humor. The last, 25th piece, the 27-minute From Raymond a Micheline begins after three minutes of silence and documents a virtuosic, cathartic live recording from 1994, showing Tétreault juggling with conventional DJ techniques alongside his wildly imaginative story-telling gift and personal abstraction tactics. It ends with the analog scratches of vinyl. Vraiment plus de Snipettes!!! is a reflective but bumpy rollercoaster journey to an innocent musical universe but also a remarkable, experimental sound art with a punkish, even John Cage-like sense of discovery.

The album comes with Tétreault’s text — thoughts about the irreverent nature of his art and each piece and its original materials. “Improvisation means work, pain, occasionally prolonged spells away from home, sacrifices, and God knows if we improvise”, he wonders in Improviser. “Listen carefully, because it will sound to you crazy. And, if it does not sound to you crazy, that is a sure sign that you have not started to understand what we are talking about. That not to understand is something like not to understand music. And you’ll begin to understand when you begin to find out that you can love music. That you can begin to get really interested in ideas, in puzzles, in surprises. And then you’ll realize that science is much more interesting than music”, he quotes a lecture by Hungarian-American theoretical physicist Edward Teller, “the father of hydrogen bomb”, in Bongos en furie (Furious Bongos). Tétreault immediately matches this statement with Conscience/Awareness, and his own thoughts about Teller’s statement: “Now, here are some other exercises that will help you become aware. Correction, correction, I repeat, correction. Okay, that makes you happy. Take a moment to think about your answer, to develop it mentally. Hmmm… Are you thinking? Let’s start: one, two, four, three, five. Phew!”. Tétreault concludes this text with an optimistic promise: “If you listen to this record, you will always feel ready to face the next day”. You are guaranteed to feel better after taking this wild ride with Tétreault.