Two new releases on one of Montréal’s finer homes of anything improvised (be it rock, modern classical, computer), one by someone we heard before and a new name. That one is Bernard Falaise, who plays electric guitar and is part of improvising ensembles such as Miriodor, Klaxon Gueule, Les Projectionnistes, Diesel and others. As a composer he wrote pieces for Ensemble contemporain de Montréal (ECM+) , Quartango and the Isis Quartet, as well as for film, theatre and choreography. I assume he plays the guitar here as well but also the piano, and uses some kind of way to process that playing. I assume, but am not sure, that this is the computer. It’s maybe more a gist than a certainty on y part. Twenty pieces, somewhere between under one minute and just under three minutes, with a total length of thirty-three minutes. An album of action, I should think, packed with ideas. On the website Falaise is quoted: “A suite of five pieces repeated four times. At each repetition, I scratched, twisted, dislocated, polluted, deboned, objected. A record about exhaustion, saturation and sinking. That’s how it is.” I don’t agree, necessarily. It’s not really exhausting to hear all of this music, but things do indeed appear and disappear rather quickly from time to time. As outlined five pieces, repeated four times (which you can see, more or less, by the equal lengths of respective songs), which have a fine sensible character to it. Part experimental, part improvised, a bit of musique concrete like, but perhaps due to its brief character also a bit ‘pop’ like in approach. Short, sketch like ideas, but nevertheless quite worked out into well formed compositions. An excellent CD, I thought, full of sparkling pieces, strange moves and with an exciting brief character per track. Certainly moving around various musical circles.
Less tracks — six — and a bit longer — thirty-five minutes — is the new release by Alexandre St-Onge, who is a well-known musician from Montréal, who has played with such bands as Et Sans, K.A.N.T.N.A.G.A.N.O., Klaxon Gueule, Pink Saliva, Mineminemine, Shalabi Effect and Undo and has already released seven solo CDs for labels as Oral, Alien8, Squint Fucker Press and Namskeio. His main instrument is the bass, sometimes acoustic, but on his new solo CD the electric one and also the computer. Here we deal with an interesting combination of improvisation and musique concrete. I assume — again and again — that he feeds the recordings of his bass playing through the computer, perhaps in real time, perhaps not, where it’s being transposed and pitched up and down the scale. That’s is nice, but I must admit that I though the CD was also a bit too much based on a single idea, which happened to take six almost identical forms. The improvised plucking of the bass, and the transposition of those sounds is something we know after a while, and one wonders if there is anything more that could be done. Probably there is, but it’s not happening here. That is a pity. No matter how brief the whole album is (well, a real LP length by old standards of course), the similarity in approaches works a bit against the album as a whole, whereas each track individually is actually quite nice.
