For the uninitiated, Bernard Falaise and Martin Tétreault are two of the finest improvisers around — not just in this city, but anywhere. If you’ve seen either one of these two musicians, you know that this is not hyperbole. Tétreault does amazing stuff with turntables, turntable motors and diverse objects, while Falaise, normally a brilliant guitar slinger, plays the computer here as he remixes tracks taken from recordings Tétreault made in the living rooms of friends in France in 2000. This is a short album, comprising 11 tracks of three minutes each. Tétreault’s improvisations skip, grind and pop along in a most musical fashion, and Falaise’s wizardry lies in the way he combines elements of various tracks playfully yet exactingly. Beautiful packaging by Michel F Coté’s & Records label completes the whole thing in a manner most classy.

Après s’être penché sur le travail de Frank Martel, voici que le guitariste Bernard Falaise s’attaque aux compositions beaucoup plus abstraites de Martin Tétreault, artiste reconnu pour ses explorations à base de tourne-disques. Enregistrées lors de trois concerts donnés par Tétreault, les bandes que remixe Falaise sur Des gestes défaits renferment tous les bruits émanant d’une platine. Les sons de moteur et de parasites forment des rythmes souvent déconstruits agrémentés d’effets et de traitements informatiques. Les fragments sonores s’entrechoquent pour créer 11 pièces de 3 minutes destinées aux oreilles ouvertes et rompues à la musique actuelle. 3/5

Drummer Dylan Van der Schyff, who can be heard on the latest release The Unexpected One, will be in Lisboa (Portugal) from ,August 1 to 5, 2004, for the Jazz em Agosto festival, where he will play with The Peggy Lee Band, George Lewis and François Houle’s electroacoustic quintet. He will then give concerts in Vancouver (BC) on ,August 6,, Seattle (WA) on ,August 7, and Portland (OR) on ,August 9, alongside Wayne Horvitz and Briggan Krauss.

Canadian bandleader and composer Tom Walsh and this far-flung group of musicians have their fingers in so many pies — funk, fusion, avant-jazz, prog, even non-idiomatic improv — that it’s a surprise that Diversion isn’t baked into an indigestible lump. Instead, Walsh and his mates avoid the stop-start schizophrenia that characterizes a lot of other genre exercises and stick with a creative but organic sense of development that takes each of these ten pieces on a strange ride, but not before giving them some legs. (It might have helped that Diversion was recorded live over the course of two performances and then seamlessly edited together after the fact instead of cobbled together in the studio.)

A piece like Ouvert Tour, with skittering guitar scrapes that segue into a no man’s land of electronic buzzes and mournful trombone lines, or Two Pair/Deux Couples, which moves carefully from minute improv to Mingus-like horn growls to a vampy swing break, showcase NOMA and Walsh at their most diversified, while straight-up, stripped down (but still adventurous) funk numbers like Capacity or the prog-tinged Bud’s Dub prove they can stay interesting, even while staying inside genre boundaries.

Walsh and his bandmates have playing talent to spare and a barrell full of stylistic guises at their fingertips, but the true measure of Diversion’s success is its tight focus.

Martin Tétreault will give two concerts in Europe. First, ,August 7, 2004, he will present a turntable duo with Otomo Yoshihide in Lisboa (Portugal) for the Jazz em Agosto event. The next day, ,August 8,, he will move to the Fruits de Mhere festival in Brassy (France) to play with Nikos Veliotis (cello) and Burkhard Beinz (percussions).

Surely it’s some sort of serendipitous combination of Canadian grant money and Splendid’s strong north-of-the-border label ties, but a dramatic preponderance of the most interesting experimental/electronic/noise-based work I’ve heard over my three-year tenure here has come from Montréal. Perhaps francophone Canadians, reacting to their province’s uneasy relationship with the rest of Canada, have converted discomfort into art. Perhaps it’s just something in the water. In any case, from the post-rock stylings of the Constellation roster to the very strangest soundscapes that issue from the empreintes DIGITALes folks, the work that comes out of this region is so intriguing as to make other areas’ artists seem deficient in both vision and their willingness to venture forth, assuming the audience will follow.

Still, that public funding thing alluded to above can’t be overemphasized. In this case, two talented young artists/documentarians set out on a several-month-long trek across a wide swath of Canada, recording anything that piqued their interest. The result is this stunning two-disc set of field recordings and manipulated aural scenes, each of which conveys both a sense of narrative and a sense of the multifaceted nature of a geographically huge nation’s life. While each is a coherent artistic statement on its own, the two together are so complementary that it’s hard to imagine the one without the other.

The first disc, “The Little Man In The Ear” (or, more mellifluously, Le Petit homme dans l’oreille), is the more manipulated-sounding of the two; the artists’ fingerprints are deliberately left all over certain sections, while others seem untouched from their original recordings. The prime example of the former comes during a visit to a carriage race: the announcer’s voice is sampled and manipulated as heavily as in any techno track, albeit sans the driving beat. As it swirls from one speaker to the other, the race’s sense of circular motion is recaptured and reimagined in the listener’s ear. It’s quite a trick, and a virtuoso production performance. At other points, sounds that had previously been presented in close to what I assume was their natural setting are subtly reintroduced in such a way as to give the listener both a sense of ongoing travel, and of the interconnectedness of things. For example, a track that begins with crickets chirping fades into people walking across gravel and eventually incorporates a barely-discernible conversation, then picks up each of the two previously added sounds once again, making you feel as if you’ve traveled some distance to visit with the speaking men, who have then graciously walked back with you to your point of origin.

The latter disc, “Surface Documents” [Documents de surface], is approached somewhat differently. While the first disc appears to have been designed to be played on a radio program, the second seems more like a collection of compelling sounds that didn’t quite fit into the theme of the first. Therefore, this disc acts more as a roving, narrative-free travelogue that glances over the entire map, chooses a theme, and then touches down everywhere that that theme might apply. For example, one of the longer sections intermixes the sounds of water interacting with various surfaces at various volumes, blending the sounds of waterways that may have been thousands of miles apart into a single beautiful piece.

If you can’t afford to take a few months and explore the backroads of Canada, I suggest that you take a couple of hours and let two people who clearly know their way around clue you in to the way life sounds in their country.