In the notes presenting his new album, the composer and guitarist René Lussier writes this: “For more than twenty years, I have lived in an isolated countryside. From the road, the house seems buried in the trees, below the dirt row that ends in a cul-de-sac. No one comes to me by chance. My guests regularly get lost en route, especially those who rely on their GPS. You could therefore say that I live in the green devil. The expression serving as the title of this work is so joyous that one would not suspect that it is the result of two years of solitude.
Had it not been for the pandemic, René Lussier would not have designed this album at the end of his rank. He probably wouldn’t have been called To hell with green no more.
It was to be, he says, a second album of original compositions for his quintet — Julie Houle on tuba, Luzio Altobelli on accordion, Robbie Kuster and Marton Maderspach on drums, himself on guitar, as on the album released four years ago. “Except that I wanted to do it differently than the first, that we work on the pieces, everyone together, often enough for the musicians to appropriate the material and that we are less in the reading [des partitions]in the dismantling to finish, and it is from there, in my opinion, that the project really began”, the musicians having the compositions at their fingertips and pushing them elsewhere, in groovestextures, rhythms still unexplored.
“From there, we can say to ourselves: such a piece, we are going to play it as a waltz. This other, we’re going to play it piano”, he says, stretching out the sound of the “a”, “piaaaaano”. “Such another, as if there was a lack of ink in the printer: we just have the impression of the “tune”. I felt like going to a place I didn’t know. We even started rehearsing. The pandemic arrived, and it all screwed up, ”drops René.
“We had put our foot in the door and, all of a sudden, everyone becomes a little freak out. There are deaths. At first, we experienced a kind of little collective psychosis, ”recalls the musician. “In addition, I was isolated in a row of dead-end land…” The musician lives deep in the Appalachians, in a village called Saint-Jacques-le-Majeur-de-Wolfestown. “Wolfe County, the guy who planted Montcalm. A small village a little devitalized, we will say it: the church burned down [en 1992], the general store has closed. Apparently there used to be a golf course here, but I couldn’t say where. »
A family party
To hell with green it is delightful that the pandemic which saw him born did not transmit to him his gloomy and anxiety-provoking atmosphere. It is, on the contrary, a vigorous, mischievous album, made of this indescribable fusion of jazz, rock, Eastern European music, sound effects, skilful orchestrations and spontaneous flights, all that sometimes in the same room, as on Rod in opening. A disc like a quilt of recording sessions planned between two waves, or during periods of work by videoconference, René often recording these moments, even the conversations, with his telephone. “I left with that, I listened to everything again, and I took little bits [de pistes] of everyone to recreate what I would have liked to happen on its own in our studio sessions. »
It gives very good René Lussier, in short, with his passages emphasizing the musicality of Quebec speech in a nod to his masterpiece The treasure of language (1989), and titles of compositions to make you smile: tentacle dance, Assassin turkey, The Laughing Ox, Western oh pods. And despite the confinement induced by the pandemic, paradoxically, this album has become a family celebration, the quintet having opened the doors of the studio to other collaborators, including a few former traveling companions: trombonist Alain Trudel, drummer (and , here, British poet) Chris Cutler (Henry Cow, Pere Ubu). From Japan were added friends Takashi Harada on the Martenot waves and Koichi Makigami, a “smashed rock” singer, who was incidentally the first creation on stage of this album during the Festival international de musique contemporaine de Victoriaville, last spring.
Even the cat from the barn next door puts his voice on the album: René had the idea of leaving his dictaphone in the bowl of croquettes that he left for him near the door. “I used what I had around me, because this project had to continue to live” during the health crisis. “There’s joy in this album, that’s for sure. We hear it, the pleasure of having composed, edited, recorded, mixed it. »