Pierre-Yves Martel – viola da gamba, feedback, objects
Éric Normand – electric bass, speakers, snare drum
So many strings — almost everything you can imagine done to a string, done. (And then anomalously 3⁄4 way through the second piece — a bell.) This grundgy mid-range recording is everywhere distortion. Despite Pierre-Yve’s precise plucking and smooth bow — the air of the music is noisy, (is that amps hissing)?
Eric’s guitar growls through a snare. Magda’s sound board — a space for hittings, rubbings, pluckings, scrapings, cries and whispers.
There is a searching ongoingness, a moving forward from one state to another. 6 minutes into track 1 emerges a compelling coherence — for a few minutes banded. After, they revert to dark, brooding intentional polyphony.
When a child, I experienced ambiguous nightmares I described as oscillating between the rough and the smooth. The smooth was excruciating not because it was unpleasant, but because you knew it would end to be replaced by the rough.
This is compelling, nightmarish music.
—Jim Denley (Sydney, 2014)
Pictures : Sebastien Raboin
Recorded at Salle Desjardins-Telus, November 17, 2013.
Engineered by Robin Servant
Mixed by Éric Normand
Released April 20, 2016.