Derome’s collaborations with his partner, reed player and vocalist Joane Hetu, represent the other side of his musical personality: intense, tighly focused and intimate. Full of word play — which works in both the original French and its English translation — and mouth sounds, their duets deal with life and relationships at the most elemental level. Their greatest triumph is in raising the banal everyday stuff to provocative art. As they say in the title track: “Death is simple, it’s life that’s complicated.”