This release totals nearly an hour and forty minutes worth of strange, dark and sombre R10-ish French fusion. With fabulously controlled and complex drumming on the first track, it reminds me of a more restrained Magma. All of the semi-operatic vocals that appear throughout are the poems of Yves Bonnefoy, a French poet, writer and philosopher, and are extracts from a book of his poems.

Sometimes the music touches onto the likes of Henry Cow, Opus Avantra, and Bertold Brecht, though it has an identity of its own, fusing jazz, classical, folk and traditional French musics. Maybe it’s a bit over-long, but I did enjoy the majority of it.

Torticolis documents Jean and various cohorts live in concert. It veers towards some New York acts like Curlew or Material, as a very rhythmical and percussive brassy rock, transmuting to more subdued jazzy parts with some “swinging” bass-lines.

3 Musiques pour Ubu comprise almost all of Jean Derome’s compositions written for Denis Marleau’s Théâtre Ubu. The first disc was inspired by reading the complete works of Beckett. Typical to other music on the label, it is very brassy, Iyrical and sombre. My interest waned, though there are some brilliant Art Zoyd/Univers Zero type moments with dramatic chopping strings and winds, interspersed with dead-stops for added tension. Disc 2, containing the works Les Ubs and Luna-Park, I found more enjoyable, more typically French, with Eric Satie like playful melodies, and some fine vocals, going on to wonderfully strange realms, almost sounding like The Residents at the end.

Carnival music? Joyous rodeo music? I am constantly reminded of cabaret and circus shows with La Bête, The Beast Within.

Strange, and quite avant-garde in parts, yet oddly “easy to listen to” music. The arrangements are great with plenty of parallels to Eric Satie type moments juxtaposed with wonderful atmosphere and lots of variety.

Similarly, St-Jean uses sampling techniques in his music on, but his approach is oriented more toward spirited forward movement and tess with special effects. His quintet displays a bold attitude and exhibits a lot of brawn in navigating through nine of his compositions and two by band members. St-Jean builds his repertoire around his robust trombone playing and the interplay with the reeds of Labbé. Adding wattage to all selections is a boisterous rhythm section featuring guitarist Falaise. The music has intensity and volume, kicking into high gear at the start and rarely showing signs of downshifting. The group creates a carnival atmosphere through its highly amplified antics. It sports a rock-infused Jazz attitude with playful similarities to the raucous music of Gianluigi Trovesi.

St-Jean’s band is a true collective. All players share in shaping the muscular identity of the band. Power drive is fueled by the power drummer Leclerc who plays with a heavy backbeat and throbbing put sation. He propets at a nonstop pace while the band builds in ever-increasing dynamic increments. Bassist Babin takes on a simitar rote. Onty infrequent y are individual soloists featured. The songs are written as collective expressions of mass commotion, and att five players adhere to the formula. The final selection was recorded over a 1924 surrealistic film by French cubist painter Fernand Léger, who incorporated mechanical images into his work. It has moments of dampened intensity but never forgets where high gear is located.

The band of St-Jean creates sheer energy through its volatite playing. It starts at a gallop and finishes at the same pace. it is’hold on to your hat’ music for those in the fast lane.

Here’s the deal: take a world-famous opera diva. Give her recordings to an iconoclastic turntable artiste. Introduce him to a brown-toned clarinettist and leave the two alone together for a while. The result? An unexpectedly lyrical, flowing album of improvisations packed with melodic invention, and nary a camp postmodernist joke to be found. It most assuredly is a funny old world.

There are one or two gags, of course — there could hardly not have been. The first thing you hear is Callas warming up. Shortly afterwards, Tétreault puts on a teach-yourself-Italian disk full of opera house cliches and leaves Lepage to play an uncharacteristically lumpy solo over the top. Nothing lasts for very long (shortest track: 28 seconds), and Tétreault shows precious little respect for the compositions Callas was originally performing. At one point, he even mimics the soprano perfoming a descending scale by slowing the turntable down with his finger. It all sounds like a recipe for knockabout cultural reference humour but, astonishingly, such impulses seem merely to be registered in order to keep them in check.

Instead, Tétreault and Lepage seem intent on making a record of beautiful music. Of course, Callas’ voice is a fantastic sound-source, and rendered atonal, quavering and unpredictable as it is here it is a musical instrument up to the task of interacting with Lepage. The latter plays with a scrupulously clean classical tone throughout, enunciating his ostinati and curlicues of scales with careful precision. At this disk’s finest moments, Lepage seems to curl his clarinet around Callas’ voice, the two locked in an impossible, or at least implausible, counterpoint.

This also brings Tétreault’s acheivement to the fore. He seems to have given over considerable time to the preparation of this disk — perhaps he did not, but if not then his work here is all the more remarkable. What he manages to do is to take apart Callas’ voice, to use the different elements of it in different pieces, yet to do so without it becoming a gimmick. Most of the pieces here have real musical interest, not just novelty value. Part of the credit for that goes to Lepage, because without an attentive and sensitive duo partner this would have been unlistenable. Part, however, must go to Tétreault for having the imagination and musicality to carry it off. Or then again, perhaps this conventional musicality is all part of another kind of joke, a sort of meta-joke about making a record of opera diva cutups with a straight face. This is a geniune ambiguity for a lot of this disk, the confusion between irony and sincerity, and that too is something of a strength in comparison with all those earnestly wry referential works which tend to dissolve into kitsch.