An amazing journey in sound and voice from saxophonist/vocalist Joane Hetu with five singers/narrators/musicians/noise-makers and layered field recordings, a remarkable and sophisticated work about sex, loss, death, art, & politics.
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Joane Hetu-voice, objects, melodica, director
Susanna Hood-voice, objects
Alice Tougas St-Jak-accordion, glockenspiel, voice
Jean Derome-voice, flutes, alto saxophone, objects
Isaiah Ceccarelli-percussion, objects, voice
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UPC: 771028121021
Label: Ambiances Magnetiques
Catalog ID: AM_210
Squidco Product Code: 17237
Format: CD
Condition: New
Released: 2012
Country: Canada
Packaging: Cardstock gatefold foldover with booklet with text and color photos.
Recorded at Studio 270, Montreal on December 20th and 21st, 2011 by Robert Langlois.
"Featuring five singers/narrators/musicians/noise-makers and the composer's layered field recordings (of wind, rivers, various birds and frogs) as well as percussion, bells and piano, Joane Hétu has composed a fascinating and rich soundscape.
Incorporating texts by Cavafy, Shakespeare, Cechov, Caille, as well as her own's, Hétu explores again her favourite territories: from the intimacy of sex and the body, to the pain of loss and death, to art and politics.
These fragments of a woman's life co-exist in a tightly woven musical patchwork that is highly personal, iconoclastic and decidedly poignant."-Ambiances Magnetiques
"For over 25 years, throughout an unusual career, Joane Hétu has carved her own place on the Canadian creative music scene. A woman of reason and passion, she mostly expresses her art through the voice and the alto sax, two instruments she approaches in a similar way, bringing into a unique symbiosis the flexibility of one and the urgency of the other. She is self-taught and played in the cutting-edge groups Wondeur Brass, Justine and Les Poules, whose resolutely avant-garde rock carried her throughout North America and Europe. Later she reinvented the sensual song format through the prism of musique actuelle with her own band Castor et compagnie. Since then, she has left rock music behind, but still flirts with song, particularly with the duo Nous perçons les oreilles, in which she continues to explore the narrow line between laughter and tears.
Since the mid-90s, Joane has been more and more focusing on abstract composition in works that combine text, texture and vocal experiments. This research is at the core of her solo album Seule dans les chants and the triptych Musique d'hiver, of which the first movement (Musique d'hiver) is available on CD, the second (Nouvelles musiques d'hiver) received its live premiere in March 2003, and the last movement is in progress. In recent years, she also began to create improvisation structures that have been performed in Italy and Canada, by small groups of improvisers or by the Ensemble SuperMusique, in which she plays.
Joane Hétu may have come to music through rock (a feminist, jagged, avant-gardist form of rock but rock nonetheless), but improvisation has been a crucial part of her life for over a decade. Her unique techniques and crude sax playing make her a fierce improviser with a strong personality. Her acoustic experiments often emulate electronic textures, without ever actually resorting to electronics or getting trapped in a strictly intellectual level of abstraction. Joane's music has one foot in human emotion and the other firmly planted in the atavisms of primitive thought. She is a member of the improv trio Les Poules and has recorded with Lee Pui Ming, Mélanie Auclair and Ireneusz Socha, in addition to performing on a regular basis with Martin Tétreault, Lori Freedman and Jean Derome, among others. With the latter two, she co-organizes the improvised music series Mercredimusics. As a musician, she has taken part in numerous projects with such performers as Diane Labrosse (Petit traité de sagesse pratique), Danielle Palardy Roger (L'oreille enflée) and Jean Derome (Canot-camping). Since 2003, with Danielle Palardy Roger, she has given introduction to musique actuelle workshops for children in grades 4 and 5.
Since Wondeur Brass's first concerts, in which rock music and theatre intertwined, Joane Hétu has been actively seeking contexts calling for art forms to meet and interact. She has participated in a number of performances combining improv music and dance (Double-Sens, L'instant de l'instinct) or music and film (with Pierre Hébert and more recently Jean Detheux). Presented live in the winter of 2006, her latest major project Filature brings together music, dance and video art. Joane's goal is to give music a role equal to that of the other arts, thus creating a true form of sharing between the art forms involved.
Parallel to her musical activities, Joane Hétu has been a member of the Ambiances Magnétiques label since 1985, co-director for the past 25 years of the concert production company Productions SuperMusique, and president of the DAME record label and distribution service, which she founded in 1991 and whose catalogue now offers over 450 CDs of new music. She has also recorded some 15 albums - you can't say she hasn't been busy!"-Ambiances Magnetiques
The Squid's Ear!
Artist Biographies
• Show Bio for Joane Hetu "Joane Hétu. Born Montréal, Québec, 1958. Residence: Montréal, Québec. Composer, Performer (alto saxophone, voice), Author/ It has been more than 30 years now since self-taught composer, vocalist and saxophonist Joane Hétu has been following her own highly distinctive path through the vast territory of creative, contemporary music. From her beginnings with song-based new-rock bands such as Wondeur Brass, Justine and Les Poules, Hétu turned to composition (the evocative triptych comprising Musique d'hiver, Filature and La femme territoire ou 21 fragments d'humus) and improvisation, more often than not combining both within her general approach to music. She has co-directed the Ensemble SuperMusique since its founding in 1998, as well as the weekly series Mercredimusics since 2002. More recently she gave birth to La chorale bruitiste Joker (2012). Joane Hétu was awarded the prestigious Freddie Stone Award in 2006." ^ Hide Bio for Joane Hetu • Show Bio for Susanna Hood "Tiohtià:ke/Montreal-based performer, maker and educator in both dance and music, Susanna Hood has devoted her career to synthesizing voice and movement within her dynamic practice, creating intimate, sensual and raw performances both in dance-theatre contexts as well as in the context of improvised music. Founder and former artistic director of interdisciplinary performance company hum dansoundart (2000-2013) her work has been marked by significant collaborations with musical artists Nilan Perera (improvisational duo dialogues; and choreographic musical works still, She's gone away, Shudder), John Oswald (Spinvolver), and Scott Thomson (as band member of The Rent (repertoire by Steve Lacy) and The Disguises; and as co-creator/performer of The Muted Note - songs and dances setting the poetry of P.K. Page). Throughout her career as a creator, and particularly in the last decade, she has sought a total integration of the dance and music aspects of her practice, influenced by her internal, holistic experience of moving, sounding, and listening. Something she refers to as embodied music: the experience of movement as music and of sound/music as movement, where the two forms, in dialogue, remain simultaneously distinct and interchangeable, to create a listener/viewer experience that blurs the lines between what is heard and what is seen. In support of this interest, she pursued post-graduate research in the Research Studios at P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels, Belgium (2015/2016) with the program's emphasis on synergistic relations between dance and music. Her most recent creations (Music Is, 2016, and Impossibly Happy, 2019) have been driven by her own musical compositions arranging voices, instruments and movement. Recent projects include: the duo musical collaboration Tortues Vapeur, with Montreal turntablist, Martin Tétreault, mixing turntables, electronics, synthesizers, vocals and objects. (releasing their first disk on on DAME's Mikroclimat label in 2019); a duo with Belgian bassist, Peter Jacquemyn; and performances with the French trio Rrève Sélavy (Frédéric BBriet, double bass; Nicolas Pointard, drums; and Christophe Rocher, clarinettes). Unpacked, the first project with her trio with Toronto/Tkaronto musicians Tania Gill (piano) and Kayla Milmine (soprano saxophone), is a new arrangement and interpretation of the Packet suite by late American poet, Judith Malina and late American jazz composer, Steve Lacy. unPacked will be released as a recording in early 2024 on Quebec's DAME label.. Since 2004, Susanna has been teaching improvisation, composition, and voice and movement synthesis in various institutions and through independent workshops across Canada, internationally and online, including: The School of the Toronto Dance Theatre (ON, CAN), T.O. Love-In (ON, CAN), l'École de Danse Contemporaine de Montréal (QC, CAN), Studio 303 (QC, CAN), TransFormation (QC, CAN), L'École de Danse de Québec (QC, CAN), l'Artère (QC, CAN), Crimson Coast Dance Society (BC, CAN), Mascall Dance (BC, CAN) and E.D.E.N. Studios (Berlin, Germany). Since 2013 Susanna has become a teacher trainer of Open Source Forms, a practice fluidly expanded from and combining the principles of the Skinner Releasing Technique with the varied and developing practices of its teachers. In July 2023 she will complete the inaugural two-year teacher training program in Emotionally Integrated Voice with her teacher of 20 years, Fides Krucker. Awards include the 1998 K.M. Hunter Emerging Artists Award in Dance, 2006 Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding Performance in Dance, and the 2008 Canada Council Victor Martin Lynch-Staunton Award for Outstanding Achievement in the field of Dance. Susanna is the co-director with Sarah Bild of La Poêle Studio in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal, an art space dedicated to research, creation, education and informal presentation of dance, music and other related arts practices. An important and much-loved hub in the Montreal arts-scene, the studio celebrates it's 10th anniversary in 2023!" ^ Hide Bio for Susanna Hood • Show Bio for Jean Derome "Jean Derome. Born Montréal, Québec, 1955. esidence: Montréal, Québec. Composer, Performer (saxophones (alto, baritone, soprano), flutes (flute, bass flute, piccolo, alto flute, recorders), keyboards, small wind instruments (ocarinas, jew's harp, game calls, toys...), percussion, invented instruments, voice) One of the most active and eclectic musicians on the Canadian creative music scene, Jean Derome has managed to earn the recognition of a larger public, a rare feat in that field. Thanks to his large-scale musique actuelle projects, his compositions, his work as an improviser, his jazz groups and his music for the screen and the stage, Derome ranks as a major creative force, in Québec and abroad. He is experienced and innovative on both saxophone and flute, and his unique writing style cannot be mistaken for anyone else's. Sensitive and powerful, his music often features a funny strike that makes its complex nature more inviting. Ever since Nébu (one of Québec's first avant-garde jazz groups) in the early '70s, Derome has been consistently renewing and diversifying his approach of composition. He impressed audience and critics first with the flute, then with the saxophone, as a lead character in the musique actuelle underground. He took part to the various artists' collectives looking for new ways to express themselves freely, without esthetic or social constraints, including the Ensemble de musique improvisée de Montréal. Later, in the early '80s, he co-founded Ambiances Magnétiques, a collective and record label that raised his profile at home and introduced his name to the outside world. Among his numerous projects, let us mention the duos Les Granules, Nous perçons les oreilles and Plinc! Plonc!, the dynamic group Jean Derome et les Dangereux Zhoms, and the large-scale projects Confitures de gagaku, Je me souviens - Hommage à Georges Perec and Canot-camping. Most of these projects are based on a unique form of synergy between composition, structured improvisation and genuine creative madness, all this articulated with unmatched playfulness. In 1992, Derome became the second artist to be presented with the Freddie Stone Award (bassist Lisle Ellis was the first). Besides improvising on a regular basis with Ambiances Magnétiques' members and appearing in their projects, Derome has also shared the stage with several musicians of international stature, among others Fred Frith, Lars Hollmer, Louis Sclavis and Han Bennink. He performs regularly all over Canada, in the US and in Europe. He received a Prix Opus in 2001 for his exposure abroad. Lately, jazz circles have been praising his undisputable qualities as a jazzman, thanks to the Thelonious Monk tribute project Évidence, the Normand Guilbeault Ensemble (whose Mingus Erectus CD is devoted to Charles Mingus' music), and the much-lauded Derome Guilbeault Tanguay Trio. Although Jean Derome writes tirelessly for his own projects, he is much in demand in the fields of film, theatre and dance. A short list of this side of his work would have to include his numerous scores for the National Film Board of Canada (NFB), especially for films by John Walker, Jacques Leduc, Fernand Bélanger and animated films by Pierre Hébert, Michèle Cournoyer and Jean Detheux; his incidental music for Théâtre UBU, Théâtre de Quat'Sous and Théâtre du Nouveau Monde; not forgetting his work with several top choreographers, including Louise Bédard, Andrew de Lotbinière Harwood, Daniel Soulières and Ginette Laurin. Other music ensembles have commissioned works from him, including Tuyo, Bradyworks, the Hard Rubber Orchestra from Vancouver and Fanfare Pourpour. Incidentally, Derome is the musical director of the latter. Over thirty years of music and 70 record credits later, Jean Derome still has sleeves bursting with tricks." ^ Hide Bio for Jean Derome • Show Bio for Isaiah Ceccarelli "Isaiah Ceccarelli. Born Chetwynd, British Columbia, Canada, 1978. Residence: Montréal, Québec. Composer, Performer (drum set, percussion). Isaiah Ceccarelli is a drummer, improviser, and composer based in Montréal. His music has been qualified as "one of the most original approaches to come through our offices in recent times" (Marc Chénard, La Scena Musicale) and he has been described as possessing "a writing style with rare personality in this musical context" (Thierry Lepin, Jazzman Magazine). He participates in numerous creative music projects with Michel F Côté, Pierre-Yves Martel, Lori Freedman, Jean Derome, Bernard Falaise, Joshua Zubot and Philippe Lauzier, amongst others. He plays with Félix Stüssi and Ray Anderson, as well as with the Acadian singer Marie-Jo Thério. Proud ambassador of a new generation of creative musicians in Québec, his collaborations have led him on tour in Europe, North America, Asia and Australia. Isaiah has composed music for two of his own albums, Bréviaire d'épuisements and Lieux-dits (both on the Ambiances Magnétiques label), and for ensembles and musicians such as Quatuor Bozzini, Ensemble Allogène, the violist Jennifer Thiessen, and Ensemble Kô. He sings with the Schola Saint-Grégoire (Gregorian chant). A seasoned musician and composer, Isaiah Ceccarelli is, in the words of Charles Collard from La Scena Musicale, "a jewel in the crown of the Montréal scene and his presence is felt on several fronts at the same time." ^ Hide Bio for Isaiah Ceccarelli
10/2/2024
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10/2/2024
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10/2/2024
Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.
10/2/2024
Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.
Track Listing:
1. L'Habitat 4:20
2. Le Territoire 5:09
3. Fragment Territoire 1:19
4. Enthousiasme 4:31
5. L'habit 1:57
6. Opinion 3:31
7. Fragment Territoire 2 1:04
8. L'amoureuse 4:29
9. Fragment Amour 1:03
10. En parlant de la chose 4:03
11. Fragment Bruitiste 0:59
12. Cochonne 4:53
13. Fragment Memoire 2:40
14. Ma Memoire 2:34
15. La visite medicale 1:59
16. La magie du corps 2:05
17. S'la couler douce 2:52
18. Fragment O 2:13
19. Nue 5:16
20. Fragment Discipline de vie 2:45
21. O madame la mort 4:06
Improvised Music
Musique Actuelle
Unusual Vocal Forms
Hetu, Joane
Jean Derome
Ambiances Magnetiques
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Quintet Recordings
Objects and Home-made Instruments
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