This is a very different endeavour for Montréal violinist/multi-instrumentalist Guido Del Fabbro (Rouge Ciel, Fanfare Pourpour, etc.). This solo album is a whole different story than Carré de sable or Agrégats. Short at 35 minutes, it features five compositions superimposing tracks of electronics, analog synthesizers, and violin/recorder loops. Each track weaves a strange, alienating, yet fully functional soundworld. An odd but artistically successful proposition.

Having earned her avant pop stripes working with Bjork and Mike Patton, Inuit throat singer Tanya Tagaq plunged deeper into the fringes at the 2009 Guelph Jazz Festival where she was paired with drummer Jean Martin and violinist Jesse Zubot, two movers in the Toronto out jazz scene. To say her music got stranger or more abstract would be hasty — the tradition she mines is pretty deep — but she now had a standing band and was plugged into the Canadian festival circuit.

Tagaq is an animated performer. Enormously so, and the tradition of Inuit throat singing lends well to that. Similar in technique to the more familiar Tuvan throat singing (made known in the free improv world by Mongolian vocalist Sainkho Namtchylak), the Inuit style is more centered on storytelling and humor. The singer may portray hunting scenes, emulate animal sounds, or reach deep into fear, sadness, joy or sexuality. Tagaq draws from all of these in her evocative performances. She is raw and unbridled and often channels an eroticism unusual in the staid and intellectual free improv scene. (No sex please, we’re post-jazz.)

Anuraaqtuq is Tagaq’s third record and her first with Martin and Zubot. The 2005 Sinaa received scant distribution outside Canada, despite winning several Canadian Aboriginal Music awards, so 2008’s Auk/Blood, released on Patton’s Ipecac label, was many listeners’ first introduction to her. It was a daring but uneven record, pulled in different directions by a varied cast of contributors. Anuraaqtuq on the other hand is an hour of out-of-her-gourd spontaneity. The freedom of the extended improvised session suits Tagaq well; She has nothing but room here to stretch and freak out. And drenched in reverb, the disc is far from a stark and pristine session. Martin and Zubot play their parts perfectly, always supporting her but never letting the ground beneath her feet get too firm.

Ten years into her performing career, it still seems early to tell where Tagaq might go with her avant garde Inuit art. But there’s a world of long-form experimentation already inhabited by such vocalists as Namtchylak, Makagami Koichi and Phil Minton, which is there for the taking if she wants it.

The other release is by at least two musicians by whom we hear more music on the same label: Alexandre St-Onge on bass and electronics and Michel F Cote on amplified drums, along with Sam Shalabi on electric guitar. All three known from their experiment in improvised music, and here they do the same, but with a slight twist. It seems to me they are using the ’no wave/no new york’ format of a slightly more pop-like character, sans any vocals of course. Nervous hectic playing on all three instruments, but occasionally leaping into a bit of a rock mode, all in a very free reign of play. Jazzy also times, but not as much as one could all too easily think. Quite a vibrant and energetic release. Exactly the right Ultra spirit, but then from Montréal.

The picture of Guido Del Fabbro shows a young man with a violin, which in the opening seconds/minutes of his Ctenophora release shows. But it quickly moves into something else, and that something else is not easy to define. At first it seems that it’s all electronic manipulation of those first few violin sounds, but the cover also lists ‘flutes a bec’ and ‘electroniques’ as well as ‘synthetiseurs’, but these instruments are also presented as they are. That makes an odd result of improvisation, composition, analogue and electronic music. Quite interesting music I must say, perhaps because its so difficult to define. At times very modern classical, but then with all those microscopic pulses, gliding electronic scales, crackles, also very much the work of improvised electro-acoustic music. Fascinating collision of styles and ideas in some gorgeous sounding set of five pieces. Could have been seven as far as I’m concerned, as every time I play it, I regret it’s over.

Owen Underhill is a major presence in Canada’s new music community; the launch of a new CD, Still Image, devoted to his chamber music, proved both a welcome sample of his recent work and a demonstration of his personal journey as a composer.

Somewhat unusually for a launch, at least where classical repertoire is concerned, Sunday evening at SFU Woodwards saw the live performance of all four works on the disk: two string quartets written about a decade apart, performed by Montréal’s Quatuor Bozzini, plus two quintets. Accepting the slightly artificial construct of an entire evening of work by the same composer (which invariably blurs the already wide line between superficial mannerisms and the genuine original voice) the selection of works proved a good one. Underhill’s strategies for the string quartet have a consistency, but there is also a sense of growth and discovery, revealed by the conjunction of his String Quartet No. 3 — The Alynne, written in the late 90s, and the new String Quartet No. 4 — The Night composed last year.

I’ll admit that my own firm predjudice against the combination of clarinet and strings made me less enthusiasic about Still Image, a clarinet quintet that takes the special skill set of François Houle very much in mind and ear. Yet it’s by any standard an effective piece.

My favourite work of the evening saw the rare combination of trombone and strings. There has been little written for this particular combination; Underhill’s lovely work makes one wonder why. I’ve long believed that a number of Vancouver’s finest trombone players are some of the most sensitive musicians in town. That Jeremy Berkman could reveal an enormous range of sonorous possibilities was a given, as was the inevitability of a sterling performance.

Underhill has created a showcase for the trombone, with both plenty of novelty and a rock-solid foundation of expressive and very beautivul writing for the instrument with string support and commentary. The four-movement Trombone Quintet is a composition that would grace virtually any chamber music program, and a real treasure for those trombone players who wish to participate in the rarefied world of chamber music-making.