Martin Tétreault is a renowned turntable improviser and audio creator whose latest collection thrives on juxtaposition. The album begins with twenty-four short fragments and then closes with a final holistic composition that is 27 minutes in length, titled From Raymond à Micheline.

It is a live recording from 1994 has been described as “nothing short of virtuosic, deftly juggling conventional DJ techniques alongside his wildly imaginative personal abstraction techniques… nimble, witty, but also exacting.”

This record needs to be experienced in one sitting to be fully appreciated. I confess to not understanding the spoken word segments in French, but that somehow adds to the unfamiliar nature of the work. (I do regret that I may be missing out on key information, though.)

Vraiment Plus de Snipettes!!! is like an auditory photo album, or a journey through one man’s mind. The resulting trip is both curious and intriguing. It is not casual listening, but a commitment.

Tape-Glitch und Schredder-Elektronik ganz alter Schule quasi, direkte Abkömmlinge der modernistischen Avantgarde der Sechziger, produziert seit quasi schon immer und jederzeit frisch: der Kanadier Martin Tétreault. Sein Vraiment plus de Snipettes!!! (Ambiances Magnétiques, 13. Dezember 2024) macht die uralt-ureigene C60-Kassetten-Ästhetik der hochgepitchten Stimmen und runtergemumpften Slushwave-Beats nochmal neu.

Le premier opus du joueur de tourne-disques Martin Tétreault, Des pas et des mois (1991), était dans le même esprit, qui ne craint vraiment pas d’avoir recours à l’humour, que ce que l’on trouve sur ses collections de «snippettes» dont ce volume est le troisième. Après ses premières expériences, alors qu’il utilisait beaucoup la «citation», c’est-à-dire des extraits de disques dont on peut encore reconnaître le contenu (instruments, bruits divers ou bribes de monologues absurdes), Tétreault a exploré toutes les manières de jouer du tourne-disques sans disque, comme d’autres font du «no input». À travers ses nombreuses collaborations, il est devenu un maître dans l’art de faire chanter les platines, mais on ne se lasse pas du Tétreault première manière, qui glisse les suggestions d’un hypnotiseur amateur entre un tango déjanté et un «trois dans un» épileptique (le «trois dans un» étant fait à partir de trois disques qui sont découpés en tiers, l’artiste prenant ensuite un tiers de chacun pour reconstituer un disque entier — ça swing sur un moyen temps).

Ce troisième volume de snipettes nous donne aussi l’occasion d’entendre Tétreault live, dans une performance enregistrée en 1994.

Canadian, Québec-based Martin Tétreault is a sound artist, turntablist, DJ and improviser who came to music from the visual arts milieu. His work shifted from highly imaginative puzzles of musical citations to exploration of the intrinsic qualities of the turntable, its motor sound, its interferences, needles, or prepared surfaces, with preparations and analog glitches He has collaborated with local improvisers like René Lussier, Jean Derome and Michel F Côté and others from the international, free-improvisation scene like Otomo Yoshihide, Ikue Mori and Xavier Charles.

Vraiment plus de Snipettes!!! (Really more Snipettes!!!) is Tétreault’s third installment in a series that he began in 1992 with a limited edition of 250 cassettes of Snipettes! (remastered to an album by Ambiances Magnétiques, 2007), and continued with Plus De Snipettes!! (More Snippets!!, Ambiances Magnétiques, 2018). Now, at 65 and without the enthusiasm of a 25-year-old, Tétreaul promises this is the final installment.

These installations are made of raw chunks of material excavated from Tétreault’s early archives — magnetic tapes and audio cassettes that were transferred to the computer and then being destroyed. In some cases, the original recordings were made without a mixing console, directly onto a reel-to-reel tape recorder. “I wanted to preserve as much as possible the original qualities of these materials and their supports”, Tétreault explains. “This involves the good moves and the mistakes conducive to learning and the naivety of time. The disc brings together gone gestures, analog tools and magnetic sounds. Most of the tools used for these recordings have disappeared from my entourage. As for music, it fixes in time plays and explorations that are elsewhere… ” The sound materials for Vraiment plus de Snipettes!!! were collected between 1984 and 2023.

Vraiment plus de Snipettes!!! demonstrates the brilliant, thought-provoking work of Tétreault as a sound artist and turntablist who finds delight in abrupt and brief, subversive juxtapositions between concentrated, obscure fragments of sound, that, surprisingly, gain enigmatic clarity and momentum as the album progresses. Obviously, all these sonic collisions. highlight Tétreault’s wily sense of humor. The last, 25th piece, the 27-minute From Raymond a Micheline begins after three minutes of silence and documents a virtuosic, cathartic live recording from 1994, showing Tétreault juggling with conventional DJ techniques alongside his wildly imaginative story-telling gift and personal abstraction tactics. It ends with the analog scratches of vinyl. Vraiment plus de Snipettes!!! is a reflective but bumpy rollercoaster journey to an innocent musical universe but also a remarkable, experimental sound art with a punkish, even John Cage-like sense of discovery.

The album comes with Tétreault’s text — thoughts about the irreverent nature of his art and each piece and its original materials. “Improvisation means work, pain, occasionally prolonged spells away from home, sacrifices, and God knows if we improvise”, he wonders in Improviser. “Listen carefully, because it will sound to you crazy. And, if it does not sound to you crazy, that is a sure sign that you have not started to understand what we are talking about. That not to understand is something like not to understand music. And you’ll begin to understand when you begin to find out that you can love music. That you can begin to get really interested in ideas, in puzzles, in surprises. And then you’ll realize that science is much more interesting than music”, he quotes a lecture by Hungarian-American theoretical physicist Edward Teller, “the father of hydrogen bomb”, in Bongos en furie (Furious Bongos). Tétreault immediately matches this statement with Conscience/Awareness, and his own thoughts about Teller’s statement: “Now, here are some other exercises that will help you become aware. Correction, correction, I repeat, correction. Okay, that makes you happy. Take a moment to think about your answer, to develop it mentally. Hmmm… Are you thinking? Let’s start: one, two, four, three, five. Phew!”. Tétreault concludes this text with an optimistic promise: “If you listen to this record, you will always feel ready to face the next day”. You are guaranteed to feel better after taking this wild ride with Tétreault.

Vraiment plus de Snipettes!!! (Riparian Media), le dernier opus de la série Snipettes du vétéran de la musique actuelle Martin Tétreault ressemble à une glissade de 78 minutes dans les archives sonores de Tétreault. Se précipiter à travers 25 pistes d’enregistrements de champs fragiles, de curieux sons trouvés, de turntablism glitched-out et de vignettes de speech-splicing Vraiment plus de Snipettes!!! est une aventure sauvage et bourrée d’action qui met en valeur l’imagination brute et ludique de Tétreault, culminant dans un long enregistrement live.

As the exclamation marks denote this is the third such volume of retrieved archival experiments produced via an apparatus of record player, cassettes, radio and various surface sounds from the free improvisation Québec innovator Martin Tétreault. With over sixty releases under his belt there’s a lot of material floating about: a lot of it previously unused.

Although there’s been considerable gaps in this series, which initially began back in 1992 with the limited cassette collection Snipettes!, followed by a “reprise” in 2007 after that inaugural instalment was re-released on CD, the latest volume continues to draw upon the idiosyncratic turntablist’s more “irreverent” sonic, dialogue, concrete and musical collages. For there is levity, a sense of fun, playfulness, wit in the way each avant-garde etude, passage or improvised performance is spliced (more in the sense of how it sounds than actual methodology) and put together.

At the centre of it all, or most of this play, is the turntable, which often sounds as if it is being impeded or led astray through pitch and speed manipulation and covered or wrapped by hidden materials. Less Qbert or DJ Shadow and more Basquiat or Nam June Paik qualifying for an avant-garde version of the DMC World Championships, captured extracts of serious theory, science, philosophy, lectures, the state of consciousness are morphed, twisted or shunted by a lifetime of accumulated snippets from TV, radio, cartoons, theatre, the opera, the rock concert and the art world. High meets low art, popular soundtracks meet the Afro-Cuban, and retro futuristic predictions of computer power, of domed utopias and the like come up against the mooning, the loony and ridiculous.

At times it plays out like Fluxus skits, and at others, finds a new rhythm and groove bordering on Afro-jazz or no wave or even funk from the transformed source material. A bastardised jazz-prog-noodling Zappa can suddenly also evoke Django Reinhardt fronting The Fugs; an informative French speaker is taken over by staccato nylon-strung Caribbean music and an off-kilter transformation of the Tango; Michèle Bokanowski “cirque’ comes to town under a bendy hallucination of shooting effects and Library music zaps; an echo of Jef Gilson is lost in the background cacophony of classical theatre; articulated ideas on science and reality sit next to feminine coquettish French annunciation and the scraping, rubbing and distorted abrasion of paper; and retro computerised calculus and sci-fi is paired with the spooky gothic theatrics of Edgar Allen Poe. These are just some of the happy accidents or intended results (in my mind) of these often humorous and amusing snippets. The uninspiring concrete mundanity of loading the tape recorder and other mechanised clicks, the dialling of an old telephone, stretch the imagination, whilst also stretching the listener’s patience in what can only be described as another of these Tétreault teases or in-jokes.

Originally these recordings would have been directly recorded on to a reel-to-reel, bypassing any mixing console. And so all the “quirks” the surface noises, the fizzes, crispy crinkles and muffles are kept as part of the makeup, the character; as Tétreault puts it, in keeping with preserving as much of the original recordings as possible.

Reanimating and morphing a diverse range of collected fragments from lessons in hypnotising to Marx Brothers like nights at the opera, and from echoes of the Art Ensemble of Chicago to recontextualised lofty addresses and sketches, Vraiment plus de Snipettes!!! is in many ways an antidote to the seriousness and earnestness of this art form.

Facilitated by the Canadian Ambiances Magnétiques — just one of the many labels that gathers under the Distribution Ambiances Magnetiques (or DAME as it is known) platform umbrella — this third collection of fragments, variations further cements Tétreault’s playful and experimental legacy, whilst also introducing a new generation to his pioneering work in the field of turntable-led, but also radio and cassette tape, exploration and transference. I’d recommend to anyone interested in Philip Jeck, Christian Marcley, People Like Us and Milan Knizak.

Étrangement, c’est en anglais que l’on utilise «snipette», alors que le terme français est «snippet»… Il s’agit selon Wikipédia d’une «petite portion réutilisable de code source ou de texte, (…) à incorporer dans des modules plus larges».

Le tout premier opus du joueur de tourne-disques Martin Tétreault, Des pas et des mois (1991), était dans le même esprit, qui ne craint vraiment pas d’avoir recours à l’humour, que ce que l’on trouve sur les collections de «snippettes» dont ce volume est le troisième. Après ses premières expériences, alors qu’il utilisait beaucoup la «citation», c’est-à-dire des extraits de disques dont on peut encore reconnaître le contenu, instruments, bruits divers ou bribes de monologues absurdes, Tétreault a exploré toutes les manières de jouer du tourne-disques sans disque, comme d’autres font du «no input», ou avec des «disques préparés», tel un John Cage du phonographe.

À travers ses nombreuses collaborations, ici et ailleurs, avec René Lussier, Michel F Côté, Diane Labrosse, Otomo Yoshihide et bien d’autres, incluant son propre quatuor de tourne-disques, Tétreault est devenu un maître dans l’art de faire chanter (si j’ose dire) les platines sur tous les tons. Mais on ne se lasse pas du Tétreault première manière, qui glisse une imprécation lancée par un hypnotiseur amateur entre un tango déjanté et un «trois dans un» épileptique (le «trois dans un» étant fait à partir de trois disques qui sont découpés en tiers, l’artiste prenant ensuite un tiers de chacun pour reconstituer un disque entier — ça swingue sur un moyen temps). On était donc heureux quand Ambiances Magnétiques a publié sur CD en 2007 le premier volume Snipettes! (et Morceaux choisis), paru sur cassette à tirage limité en 1992. Puis, en 2018, surprises! Plus de Snipettes!! était lancé, toujours chez Ambiances Magnétiques.

Le troisième volume, Vraiment plus de snipettes!!!, a ceci de particulier qu’après une floppée de snipettes, il nous donne l’occasion d’entendre Tétreault live, dans un concert enregistré en 1994. On y découvre aussi la «Méthode Zappa», où la batterie de Sandy Nelson accompagne la guitare de Tony Romandini dans ce qui évoque la xénochronie du compositeur américain (notons que des informations sur les disques utilisés, tous plus obscurs les uns que les autres, sont incluses). Dans l’ensemble, ça part dans tous les sens et ça peut écorcher quelques neurones au passage, alors on ne recommande pas l’écoute des trois volumes en une seule séance, à moins d’avoir des prédispositions, mais en petites doses ça fait du bien par où ça passe.

Vraiment plus de Snipettes!!!, the third in free improviser Martin Tetreault’s’ Snippets’ series, is a reminder of his solo work after many recent collaborations. It uses recordings that date between 1984 to 2023 to create a 78-minute ride — not a smooth ride; more of a ’toboggan ride’. One that may use material from the eras of Snipettes! and Plus de Snipettes!!

Don’t know him? Want to hear him? Preparation is key. The uninitiated should check him out on You Tube, and perhaps consider the Five Comments which follow below. This may put his found sound, spoken vignettes and turntablism within an understandable context. 24 tracks of Vraiment are manageably short, but conclude with a 27-minute finale that, for many, may be a challenge. I was hooked, anyroad, and not only because of his use of Yoko Ono’s Why deep in the mix.

It uses French-Canadian sources that are over a half century old, which means that intertextual references may escape non-Francophones. But there are entry points for admirers of all audio bricoleurs. The sleeve notes help us discover the source of the samples, and help us distinguish between sounds from distorted samples and sounds from deconstructing turntables. (This would be clearer in live performances, where he has played standard DJ sets alongside ’deconstruction’ ones.)

My initial interest was more conventional in that I’ve always used snippets in audio recordings. Snippets to foreshadow or to make abrupt changes. Snippets to cushion or to confound. But Vraiment plus de Snipettes!!! is a considerable body in itself and has an arched air. It is distinct. It isn’t hip-hop (but I likedd it) despite his chopping up and slicing up of vinyl prior to putting the needle on the record. Sprinkling decks with sand, covering parts in plastic, he manages to maintain grooves.

The album covers (and quotes) in the sleeve notes could be an entrance point to his work or be an added communicative text to accompany the sounds. Much of it comes from a past Canada through MOR, How To, and Relaxation LPs of the 1970s. But the overall effect transcends time and geography. The air is quirky and subversive, holding back on overt calls for change, yet perhaps inspiring more bricoleurs of the world to arise and unite (if not to take over).

Five Comments:

1. The Turntablist As A Young Artist
   The germs of these songs may have begun decades ago. Is ‘Vraiment’ a condensing of his early ideas? It may be. Tango enthousiaste has “at 65, what happened to the enthusiasm of a 25-year-old?” I wonder how Tetreault would answer? He is older. He seems enthusiastic. Does he have a secret?
2. Irreverence is everywhere
   Do I hear brays, roars and grunts? Is that a moose sampled in GusChickMousse? The music is certainly adapted from something by Ti-Gus Et Ti-Mousse. I laughed. I learned. It’s fun to trace these links. He makes horse galloping sounds from damaged records and turntables. Who can’t respect this?
3. Big Issues are tackled, jokily
   Tétreault uses Tittley et Barker’s L’Art De Dépenser in at least five tracks. It leads to quotes on materialism, the soul, and free will. God knows if we improvise is used in another song (after which we hear what I thought were horse galloping sounds). It makes me want to see him perform.
4. Scientific advice can contradict common sense
   Edward Teller’s words may be sampled in Bonjour fromwhere. A warning not to talk about space and time separately. Science may contradict common sense. Communication, offers this timely sample: “(M)achines can have experiences, apparently, and transfer them to another.”
5. There is a Lumpy Gravy aesthetic
   This is apparent in the later tracks, and in one with Zappa in the title.
   It is not unwelcome.

What lies beyond these snippets? New avenues appear.