Un trio canadese d’archi colto al debutto. I temi sono composti dal contrabbassista Jean Félix Mailloux con mano sapiente e orecchie attente a quanto si ascolta ai nostri giorni. In certi passaggi pare di rinvenire echi della Penguin Café Orchestra come potrebbe risuonare oggi, immersa cioè nella temperie etnica che ci circonda. Reminiscenze classiche ben mascherate, situazioni da colonna sonora per un film esistenzialista, passi di valzer, gitanismi e profumi di musica ebraica non mancano di colorare il quadro d’insieme. Le percussioni di Pierre Tanguay aggiungono spessore e rendono concreto il tutto.

Chaque nouvelle manne de disques en provenance de nos camarades de chez DAME offre sa dose de surprises. Examinons cinq nouveautés de la saison courante en provenance de cette entreprise vouée à la distribution de ces musiques inclassables. Preuve à l’appui, le second disque du violoniste-compositeur Guido Del Fabbro.

Agrégats (AM 167 CD, ★★★) est une collection éclectique de treize miniatures — une seule pièce dépasse les six minutes — puisant aux sources du folklore européen (Le Curare et la ciguë), du rock (Las stable es stable), de la musique improvisée, électronique (Interlude résiduel) et même des marches! Dix musiciens regroupés en formations à géométrie variable composent la distribution de ce cocktail réjouissant.

Si Bach et Debussy ont souvent fait l’objet de relectures par des musiciens de jazz, on ne pourrait en dire autant de Prokofiev, dont le contre-bassiste Pierre-Yves Martel a réarrangé 18 des 20 Visions fugitives, Op. 22. Projet ambitieux, Quartetski does Prokofiev (AM 171 CD, ★★★★) est cependant mené à bien par quatre des meilleurs jeunes musiciens de chez nous, lesquels sont, outre le bassiste, Gordon Allen à la trompette, Philippe Lauzier aux anches et Isaiah Ceccarelli à la batterie.

Le batteur Michel F Côté, avec (juste) Claudette (AM 168 CD, ★★★) présente un quartette à mi-chemin entre les délires bruitistes de Sun Ra et les grooves à la Medeski, Martin and Wood. Solide contrebasse d’Alexandre St-Onge, sons irréels d’orgue (gracieuseté de Jesse Levine) et envolées de guitare de Bernard Falaise sont les ingrédients essentiels de ce mélange détonnant.

De la musique du trio Fenaison (Rémy Bélanger de Beauport, violoncelle et électroniques, Charity Chan, piano «revisité» et Kris Covlin, saxophones), Fred Frith dit que c’est «une musique qui n’a pas de sens… elle vit!». Sur Plat (AM 169 CD, ★★★), les trois musiciens nous proposent une série de sept improvisations abstraites. À vous de trouver le sens… ou la vie!

Dernier disque, mais non le moindre, le plus récent enregistrement de Jean Derome et les Dangereux Zhoms, To Continue (AM 172 CD, ★★★★), est une suite de six compositions assez élaborées du saxophoniste qui, par sa mise en musique d’un texte du sculpteur Richard Serra et de La Grenouille et le bœuf de La Fontaine, nous rappelle la démarche de l’un de ses maîtres, Steve Lacy.

Tim Brady’s ever-expanding skills as a composer are displayed to spectacular effect on his tough new disc. His compositions are always a seatbelt-fastening experience; they are wild, precise orchestrations that, in basketball parlance, distribute the ball with efficiency. On this disc, the Australian quintet Topology bring these challenging works to life, along with Brady, who dispenses with his guitar entirely in favour of samples. The melodies un-spool amongst all five players; the narrative is always maintained, but produced by always-recombinant instrumental voices. Brady’s sample technique can lapse into clumsy, Synclavier-like rigidity, but elsewhere the effect is almost seamless as he folds compositions in on themselves in a digital style. The three long form pieces are too complex to sum up in a few sentences but all are rich landscapes of activity and evocative slower sections. The final track features Christa Powell’s frenzied viola engaging with sample orchestration in a fiery Plunderphonic showdown. This is yet another superb, ambitious Brady work.

Phon-O-Victo documents Kid Koala and Martin Tétreault’s 2005 Victoriaville festival performance. It’s a rare collaboration that’s a dead on improv hit. It works because Koala and Tétreault wisely built on their musical commonalities — instructional recordings, jazz, etc. — to construct the project’s creative apex. But Kid Koala, whose turntable virtuosity is well-known, and self-proclaimed “sonic conceptualist” Martin Tétreault, spinner of experimental noise compositions, structured their improv moves — mainly transitional cuts and cues — making this a wickedly inspired set. The duo’s vinyl-only rule, featuring the music of some of their fellow festival performers, adds an edge. The ensuing concert is seven dense tracks of free-jazz, hilarious sound art, spoken word, noise freak-outs and many “happy” sound accidents. Tétreault frequently sets the mix-down tone here, with Koala interjecting hype scratch patterns. Check out Godzilla a les bleus, where Tétreault gleefully mangles a blues groove that’s further disrupted by Koala’s abstract scratch fuckery. Tétreault’s love for avant-noise figures prominently here — listen for his mixing of Boredoms singer Yamatsuka Eye’s mental shrieks into Michel au pays des merveilles. Phon-O-Victo’s biggest surprise is how the duo’s symbiotic turntablism draws out their influences. At several points, Koala sounds eerily like himself and Coldcut combined, circa the Beats & Pieces era. And Tétreault’s noisy mix snippets occasionally channel a Naked City sonic barrage. Phon-O-Victo is a brilliant experiment in abstract and pop-culture turntablism.

This folkloric bent, but with Asiatic and Arabic influences, is taken one step further by guitarist Jean-Marc Hébert’s L’autre. Hébert, who studied classical guitar at the University of Toronto in the 1980s, orients his Montréal playing towards World Music-fusion in groups such as Ragleela and Africa Musique. The CD’s seven tracks temper European folksiness with harsher Third World textures. Hébert’s single-string frailing and picking often suggests the additional overtones available from exotic strings, while Marie-Soleil Bélanger, who also plays in Ragleela, is able to display splayed and flanged bow movement, whether playing erhu or standard violin. Pierre Tanguay, one of Montréal’s most versatile rhythm players, adds his drums and “body percussion” throughout, creating tunes that reference droning ragas, serpentine Arabic melodies and formal Cantonese operas as well as western sounds.

Although some of the tunes exhibit a certain sameness in theme-variation-and-recapitulation, the standout is Asie mineure, where the percussion beats could come from tablas or talking drums, the strings’ chromatic runs from a sarod and the shrill string sluicing from the Indian classical fiddle. In addition rock music-like backbeat and note spraying improvised solos are also prominent.

Even more non-categorical are the timbres and textures exposed on cellist Mélanie Auclair’s Décor Sonore, another aural stunner. Leading a seven-piece ensemble including clarinetist Lori Freedman and guitarist Antoine Berthiaume as well as musicians manipulating a laptop, a foley for sound effects, and a piano, plus narration, the Drummondville, Que.-born, Montréaler uniquely melds music and everyday sounds. With the 20 tracks encompassing, foley-created scrapes and squeaks and non-specific buzzes and wheezes as well as trilling chalumeau split tones, hollow wood cello thumping and under the bridge finger-picking, the results touch on musics New, free, concrète and folkloric. Most notable is an unintentional four-track intermezzo (Le fil, Les volets mous, Mon cerf-volant and Dream Alarm which uses the cello’s shuffle bowing with a thick vibrato to joins floating, tongue-stopping reed lines, string plinks, tangled ring modulator clangs, natural thunder approximations into agitato but exhilarating patterns.