The Squid's Ear Magazine


Chenaux, Eric & Bent Spoon Duo: Live in Calgary (Bug Incision Records)

2nd meeting from summer 2009 of Toronto improviser Eric Chenaux & Calgary's Bent Spoon Duo, forward-moving yet rambling improvisation with a folksy intuitiveness of harmony and complimentary rhtyhm.
 

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product information:

Personnel:



Eric Chenaux-nylon string guitar

Chris Dadge-drumset, violin, percussion

Scott Munro-viola, trombone, electronics, voice


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Label: Bug Incision Records
Catalog ID: bim-37
Squidco Product Code: 13434

Format: CDR
Condition: New
Released: 2010
Country: Canada
Packaging: Paper foldover in a plastic sleeve
Recorded June 25th, 2009.

Descriptions, Reviews, &c.

"Eric Chenaux is a long-standing fixture of Toronto's creative music scene. He runs Rat-Drifting, a beautiful label that deals in the finest of the city's more creative musical thinkers. He also plays with Drumheller, a quintet that gives jazz a good name, and he also has a string of wonderfully cracked, song-based solo albums on Montreal's Constellation records.

The Bent Spoon Duo, Chris Dadge and Scott Munro, is one of Calgary's longer-running improvising units, and have played with a variety of people including Peter Evans, Chad van Gaalen (in the new group Blanket), Gordon Allen, Darren Williams, Simeon Abbott, and the late Dan Meichel (the Musk Cup).

The first performance by this trio took place in Toronto in 2008, on the same tour that produced the two BSD tapes (on Holy Cheever and Middle James Co.) and the recently-released collaborations with Abbott. Their follow-up to that initial meeting took place at the jazz fest in Calgary during the summer of 2009. The music they played that evening had two distinct qualities. There is a forward-moving, yet rambling aspect to the music that reminds one of Derek Bailey's notions of 'playing', treating the word in its most natural, unaffected sense. There is also a type of folksy intuitiveness to the proceedings that glazes the harmony and complimentary rhtyhm in a rather spectral fashion. Chenaux's playing conjures a sort of amalgam of Roger Smith's ultra-introverted scrabblings and John Russell's patient unraveling of patterns and inversions, but anyone who's spent time with his music knows he sounds mainly like himself. Munro is the wildcard here, playing viola, sampling keyboard, vocals, and trombone. He skirts around Chenaux, and Dadge's mixture of dry drumset playing and violin work, filling in odd, but excellent areas of the music."-Bug Incision


Artist Biographies

"Eric Chenaux is a Canadian guitarist, songwriter, singer and sound sculptor. He has released seven solo albums of experimental song on the Montréal-based imprint Constellation, charting an adventurous and uncompromising path through avant-folk, out-jazz and pop composition, increasingly rooted in a unique and elemental juxtaposition of fried, frazzled, semi-improvised guitar and smooth, clear tenor balladry. He has been called "a musician like no other" by Tiny Mix Tapes; his solo albums praised by The Quietus as "stunningly beautiful, genuinely inimitable, whose reputation will only grow with time." Gracing the cover of The Wire magazine in 2017, the feature article declared: "Chenaux succeeds in generating an astonishing array of timbres. A singer and songwriter possessed of angelic sweetness and clarity accompanying himself with largely improvised, visceral guitar textures that seem intent on undermining and obscuring his own songs. It's the need to communicate tussling with the urge to obfuscate; lucidity versus opacity; form against chaos."

Though based in France for the past decade, Chenaux was a key figure in Toronto's fertile indie and avant/improv music scenes throughout the 1990s and 2000s, releasing a first solo album of instrumental improv guitar in 1999 and co-founding the experimental music label Rat-drifting in 2001, which documents a dynamic cross-section of iconoclastic Toronto experimental music projects, including several ensembles in which Chenaux also figured as a member: The Draperies, The Reveries, The Guayaveras, The Marmots, Allison Cameron Band, Drumheller and Nightjars. Previously he was a core member of the cult Toronto postpunk/ math-rock group Phleg Camp and the related duo Lifelikeweeds.

Chenaux's first album as a singer-songwriter was Dull Lights, released on Constellation in 2006, and an acclaimed, highly original solo discography has unfolded since then: Sloppy Ground (2008); Warm Weather With Ryan Driver (2010); Guitar & Voice (2012); Skullsplitter (2015); Slowly Paradise (2018) and Say Laura (2022). He has featured on a range of collaborative records issued by other labels through this same span, including Okraïna, Avatar, Grapefruit and Three:four. He has performed and recorded with countless artists, including Ryan Driver, Sandro Perri, Eloïse Decazes, Michelle McAdorey, Nick Fraser, Martin Arnold, Radwan Ghazi Moumneh, Pauline Oliveros, John Oswald, Michael Snow, Brodie West, Han Bennink, Christine Abdelnour, Michael Moore, Josephine Foster, Martin Tetrault, Wilbert De Joode, Gareth Davis, Jacob Wren, Norberto Lobo, Nathaniel Mann and many more. Chenaux also composes for film and contemporary dance, including a long-standing association with conceptual filmmaker Eric Cazdyn for his solo music, and in recurring collaboration with multi-media and sound installation artist Marla Hlady.

Eric Chenaux lives at Le Pouget in the commune of Condat-sur-Ganaveix in central France."

-Eric Chenaux Website (http://ericchenaux.com/biography.html)
3/25/2024

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.

"Chris Dadge lives in Calgary, Alberta, where he works as a percussionist, producer, composer, multi-instrumentalist, record label operator, and concert organizer.

As an improvising musician, Dadge has spent the bulk of his years playing percussion, developing a voice based on an increasingly open-ended variety of sound-generating objects, integrating found items, extreme tunings, and re-purposed strings. Massimo Ricci writes, "the almost perfect balance between skin, wood and metal-derived timbres is definitely cherished," and a review from Volcanic Tongue noted, "Dadge has a fleet, needling style that would transpose Milford Grave's multi-pulse work to a looser, more thought-paced setting, working in bursts of propulsion and single emphatic sound events." This underlying quest for a personalized vocabulary led to the broadening of the instrumental palette, adding violin, broken electronics, crude sampling, and various other small instruments to the list. The current realization of this approach can be heard in Dadge's solo work (on albums such as A Bird Is A Light Thing and What Comes After Dust) as well as with Scott Munro in the Bent Spoon Duo. The duo, which has been active for over a decade, "approach[es] improvisation from an anti-classicist stance, instead opting for a scrape and drape sound that finds the two moving between instruments and mood in rapid fire succession," (Ear-Conditioned Nightmare) and The Wire's Byron Coley calls it "splendid, low-bore Improv racket in the classic pots-and-pans style." Dadge plays regularly with guitarist Cody Oliver (as The MIdnighties) and saxophonist Jonathon Wilcke, and has worked with Peter Evans, Joe Morris, Eugene Chadbourne, Jack Wright, Chris Riggs, Eric Chenaux, Mats Gustafsson, Christian Munthe, Ellwood Epps, Chad van Gaalen, Bill Horist, Fossils/David Payne, John Oswald, and Colin Fisher.

The activities in improvised music were umbrella'd over a decade ago, under the name Bug Incision (www.bugincision.com), which is a concert series and record label run by Dadge. Over 50 critically acclaimed recordings and over 10 years' worth of near-monthly concerts have occurred.

Concurrent activities in the world of pop music have resulted in appearances on over 50 albums and recordings, and countless shows and tours with acts such as Lab Coast, Alvvays, Chad VanGaalen, Un Blonde, Samantha Savage Smith, Crystal Eyes, Pre Nup, Jon Mckiel, Gold, Chairs, Jay Crocker, Monty & The Beasts of Monty, Lorrie Matheson, Sandy Cassels, Jon Gant, Extra Happy Ghost, Faux Fur, You Are Minez, Laura Leif, Snailhouse, Thighs, Crests/A Relative Distance, Dolly Sillito, Woodpigeon, Embassy Lights, John Rutherford, Ryan Bourne, Kenna Burima, Mama Safari, Tariq, Aaron Booth, Clinton St. John, Vail Halen/Key To The City, and Chris Vail. He has also spent two years as a support musician for the Banff Centre Indie Band Residency, where he worked alongside the likes of Brendan Canning, Charles Spearin, Kathleen Edwards, Shaun Everett, and Nyles Spencer. With Scott Munro and Jay Crocker, in 2009, he also recorded a solo album, which is available online. He is currently playing drums with Samantha Savage Smith and Chad VanGaalen and bass in Pre Nup.

Dadge co-leads Lab Coast along with David Laing. The two write and record the as a duo, while the live band features Samantha Savage Smith, Darrell Hartsook (Pre Nup, The Gooeys, Sissys), and Henry Hsieh (Crack Cloud, Cold Water). Lab Coast has released two short albums, Wilding and Pictures on the Wall, three split EPs - with Extra Happy Ghost (a 7" on Saved By Vinyl), Friendo (a 7" on UK label Faux Discx), and Diamond Mind (a tape on Tranist) - and an EP, Editioned Houses, on Night People. Walking On Ayr, their third album, was released on CD in 2013 and LP in 2014. FFWD Weekly praised their "effortlessly appealing pop songs" and Exclaim! refers to the music as "short, deceptively simple drops of catchy-as-hell indie rock". Their fourth full-length, Remember The Moon, was released on April 29, 2016, and the Toronto Star said of it, "Lab Coast has grown so good at making a certain species of scuffed-up, small-scale psych-pop that the rest of Canada really no longer has any excuse not to pay attention." In May of 2017, Faux Discx issued a compilation LP of the band's firstg four albums, called Lab Coast, which AllMusicGuide calls "catchy lo-fi pop gems ... solid from start to finish".

Over the last few years, Dadge has developed a reputation as a recording engineer and producer in his home studio, 606, where he specializes in "mid-fi" productions, hybrid analong/digital recordings incorporating unorthodox recording techinques and diverse instrumentation. To date, his recordings of Calgary acts such as Empty Heads, Hex Ray, Ashley Soft, Crystal Eyes, Pre Nup, Dream Whip, Sunglaciers, and Samantha Savage Smith have been released.

From 2010-2013 Dadge was a member of Theatre Junction's Resident Company of Artists, composing and performing music for original creations Lucy Lost Her Heart and Sometime Between Now and When The Sun Goes Supernova, and a production of Martin Crimp's Attempts On Her Life. He composed two scores - POLKA(dots) (2015) and We All Need To Say GOODBYE/ADIOS (2013) - to the dance/multimedia performances of flamenco artist Rosanna Terraciano, and accompanied Montreal-based dancer/choreographer Katie Ward on theremin for her piece Reality 1."

-Bug Incision (http://www.bugincision.com/chrisdadge/biography.html)
3/25/2024

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.

Scott Munro is a Canadian bassist, trombonist, vocalist and engineer, a member of groups Bent Spoon Duo, Bent Spoon Trio, Ghostkeeper, Preoccupations, The Bent Spoon Ensemble, The Unrepeatable Quartet, Viet Cong.

-Discogs (https://www.discogs.com/artist/1215637-Scott-Munro)
3/25/2024

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.


Track Listing:



1. Live in Calgary 41:08

Related Categories of Interest:


Improvised Music
Vancouver and Western Canada
Free Improvisation
Trio Recordings
Canadian Composition & Improvisation

Search for other titles on the label:
Bug Incision Records.


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