René Lussier

Through the entire 1980s & most from the ’90s, René Lussier was the prime mover on Montreal’s songs scene. His acoustic guitar work continues to be in comparison to Fred Frith, with whom he offers frequently toured and documented. Spread between single function, duos, and huge ensemble items, between studio room compositions, organized improvisation, free of charge improv, and film music, his amazing body of function represents a complete program in musique actuelle, a term he helped to peg down. His masterpiece continues to be the speech-music collage Le Trésor de la Langue, which gained him the Paul Gilson Award in 1989. He also received the Freddy Rock Honor in 1996 for his contribution to Canadian songs. Lussier started to play acoustic guitar in high-school rings. He began to develop his personal make of jazz-meets-folk-meets-freak within the collective Conventum. This group included guitarist André Duchesne, with whom he heart stroke a lasting companionship. He documented two albums with Conventum and a small number of film ratings, the to begin what would become an limitless list (over 50 by 2001). Following the group’s disbanding, Lussier signed up for the Grand Orchestre de Montréal, an experimental fanfare of types where he fulfilled Nébu saxophonist Jean Derome. Collectively they documented music for the Country wide Film Table of Canada and got involved with many projects, a few of including Duchesne and clarinetist Robert M. Lepage. The four of these founded the collective and record label Ambiances Magnétiques in 1983. That yr, Lussier released his 1st solo recording, Fin du Travail (Edition 1), the name which (“Finished Function [1st Edition]”) already shown his uncanny love of life. His big break arrived in 1986 when Michel Levasseur, creative director from the Event International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville (FIMAV), suggested a duo concert with Fred Frith. Henry Cow and the complete Rock-in-Opposition movement have been a big impact on Lussier; this is his possibility. The resulting record, Nous Autre, presented him to a global market. In 1988, Frith asked him and Derome to become listed on Keep the Pup. In 1989, by using Frith along with a cast of Ambiances Magnétiques players, Lussier documented Le Trésor de la Langue. Pressed by its politics resonances, the record became the label’s biggest vendor as well as the initial traditional item in the annals of musique actuelle. Further albums, single with Les Granules, set up him as an extremely innovative and witty composer and improviser. But simply because years transferred, Lussier sensed the collective fat increasingly more on his shoulder blades. The middle- to past due ’90s noticed him tinkering with even more abstract types of improvisation with blended outcomes and severing links with previous close friends, including Derome when he still left his music group Les Dangereux Zhoms. In 2001, Lussier resolutely stepped from the collective and released CDs on Ohm Editions and La Tribu. The record Tombola Rasa along with a country-folk task with American maverick Eugene Chadbourne indicated a go back to previously pleasures in the beginning of the new decade.