Record player Martin Tétreault’s first opus, Des pas et des mois (1991), was in the same humorously unafraid spirit as his collections of “snippettes”, of which this is the third volume. After his first experiments, when he made extensive use of “quotations”, i.e. record extracts whose content (instruments, various noises or snatches of absurd monologues) can still be recognized, Tétreault explored all the ways of playing the record player without a record, as others do with “no input”. Through his many collaborations, he has become a master in the art of making turntables sing, but we can’t get enough of Tétreault’s first style, which slips the suggestions of an amateur hypnotist between a crazy tango and an epileptic “three-in-one” (the “three-in-one” being made from three discs that are cut into thirds, the artist then taking a third of each to reconstitute a whole disc – it swings on a medium beat).
This third volume of “snipettes” also gives us the opportunity to hear Tétreault live, in a performance recorded in 1994. We also discover the “Zappa method”, where Sandy Nelson’s drums accompany Tony Romandini’s guitar in what evokes the American composer’s xenochrony (note that information on the records used is included). On the whole, it goes off in all directions and can scrape a few neurons along the way, so we wouldn’t recommend listening to all three volumes in one sitting, unless you’re predisposed, but in small doses it’s good where it goes.
