actuellecd

Review

BLG, Downtown Music Gallery, March 2, 2007

Guitarist & composer André Duchesne is a major talent who we don’t hear from frequently enough. He was the co-founder of Conventum and the leader of the great Les 4 Guitaristes de l’Apocalypso Bar. This album is scored for guitar/bass/drums “power trio”, plus string quartet, and it has his usual blend of rhythmically interesting and melodically inventive work. Cordes à danser is an impressionistic rock suite of 12 instrumental pictures inspired by the landscapes among which he spent his childhood, in the industrial atmosphere of the Saguenay. One could see the relationship between quartet and trio as the reunion of a triangle and a square. One moves forward like an arrow or a ship, while the other develops and builds. Composition and improvisation. Dragged by three horses, the buggy rolls on through landscapes of bauxite lakes, factory chimneys and energy powers. You look at the sky and think it’s gonna rain cats and dogs.