Review

That’s right, the title translates as Electric Guitar Solos — but if you’re expecting Satriani-style wanking, you probably haven’t been reading Splendid very long. This is a set of fourteen electric guitar improvisations recorded live, without overdubs or tinkering. Some of them, like Sous-sol, fall into the realm of music, but the majority lean toward the broader category of “Let’s see how many odd, frequently non-musical noises I can get out of this electric guitar”. There’s a lot of very harsh sonic texture here, and a lot of feedback; you’ll hear scraping, and downright frenetic two-string strumming, and numerous guitar abuses that probably would’ve given Jimi Hendrix pause. A studio diagram inside the CD booklet suggests that multiple live monitors were placed around the room during recording, the better to create feedback. They surely did their job well. Lussier never fails to challenge, and Solos… is interesting, if not necessarily listenable in the long term.