Guitarist and poet, Toronto-born and Nova-Scotia resident, Arthur Bull enjoys a compound musical identity. He has been a part of the Canadian improvising community for decades, developing a personal idiom that draws in equal parts from the extended techniques of free improvisation and the slide and finger-style traditions of blues and folk idioms. These two CDs, from Spring 2018, present Bull in radically different, if equally radical settings.

The Surruralists is essentially a duo of Bull and electric bassist Éric Normand, though guests sometimes contribute to a music that’s at once timeless and timely. The two (sometimes subtly, sometimes not) merge free improvisation with folk singing, mixing French and English traditions to craft a primal music in which country tunes and proto-rhythm ‘n’ blues collide with flashes of an unearthly sound art. Bull’s raw baritone and slide guitar drive Jack o’ Diamonds and Frankie (and Johnny), while his gift for epigram emerges on the spoken Skidmarks: “I couldn’t count how many ways the woodpecker could divide the beat.” Normand adds weird electronic burbles to condition familiar themes, and he’s eloquent on the dirge La courtisane brûlée, with Bull adding plaintive harmonica and Ben Grossman a funereal vielle à roue (or hurdy gurdy).

Among Bull’s international associations is one formed in 2002 with drummer Roger Turner, a charter member of the British school of free improvisation. Turner’s sometimes machine-like approach can be traced directly to an early appreciation of the brilliant precision of Dave Tough, the drummer who propelled the rise of Chicago jazz over ninety years ago. Anyone who imagines free improvisation to be somehow vague in its contours simply hasn’t heard Roger Turner. In 2018 Bull and Turner expanded their duo with the addition of trombonist Scott Thomson for a tour (as Monicker) that stretched from Southern Ontario to Nova Scotia.

No blow by blow description could do justice to Spine: the music is mercurial, each of the CD’s six tracks a continuum of shifting, permutating relationships and voices, much of it conducted at incredible speed, from Thomson’s burbling register leaps and runs, squeezed through a metal mute, to Turner’s high-pitched clatter. Bull’s voices range from long, wandering bass glissandi to high-speed flurries of metallic scatter-shot, liable to be confused with some of Thomson and Turner’s own voicings, but the very determination with which the three proceed soon destroys any identikit game of “he said, he said” with a conclusive “When was that?” It’s a high-water mark in Canadian free improvisation.

Fred Frith jouera avec Daniel Heïkalo et Pierre Tanguay le 22 juin 2007 dans le cadre du Sonic Courage International Festival (SCIF) à Halifax, en Nouvelle-Écosse. Un peu avant cette date, soit le 27 mai, vous pourrez retrouver le Duo Arthur Bull-Daniel Heikalo en concert à la galerie ARTsPLACE à Annapolis Royal. Des extraits audio de Concentrés et amalgames sont en ligne pour vous.

Six ans après leur album Dérapages à cordes, Arthur Bull et Daniel Heïkalo reviennent sur Ambiances Magnétiques avec l’album Concentrés et amalgames. Cette fois-ci, en plus de leurs duos de guitare, maintenant familiers, on retrouve cinq pièces avec {nbio:heikalo_da} à la batterie.

Le duo des guitaristes Arthur Bull et Daniel Heïkalo sera en concert le 14 mars à l’université Sainte-Anne à Pointe de L’Église (NE) ainsi que le 15 mars 2004 au Oakdene Centre de Bear River (NE).

Le festival Guitarévolution (Montréal) offre un panorama de l’avenir de la guitare électrique du 28 septembre au 12 octobre 2002. Ne manquez pas, entre autres, le concert «Ambiances Magnétiques joue de la guitare» le jeudi 10 octobre à La Chapelle avec Bernard Falaise, Daniel Heïkalo, Arthur Bull en compagnie du saxophoniste Pierre Labbé. Également au programme, «3 guitares plus» avec André Duchesne, Rainer Wiens, Jean-Claude Patry et neuf jeunes guitaristes de la relève. Vous pouvez consulter le programme complet sur le site d’Innovations en concert ou bien en consultant La Liste.