The latest from Canadian composer Martin Daigle of Montreal is called Drum Machines (RAVELLO RECORDS RR8088). What a difficult one. Perhaps we could start by saying it’s got nothing to do with beatboxes or Roland devices, and is in fact a serious piece of modern composition played using drums and electronic treatments. Daigle is a classically-trained percussionist (and a composer in his own right) as you may remember from his Mossy Cobblestone which we noted in 2023.
Along with this CD, there’s a video of him doing it and there’s a binaural headphone mix of the main event, said main event being the remarkable piece La Rage, composed by Pierre Alexandre Tremblay. This fellow, also Canadian and also from Montreal, impressed us with his electro-acoustic collages on Quatre Poèmes, especially his very perceptive and pessimistic take on the state of UK society – and he’s earned the right to say it, since he’s currently living in Huddersfield, and accurately diagnosed the English malaise post-Brexit. I’m not prepared to make any random guesses as to what La Rage is “about”, even though there’s an abundance of clues; a ton of verbiage, 30 separate short titles here, organised under four headings, which include such statements of finality as “all bets are off” and “burned”, spoken in perfect French of course. I always thought the word Rage was something to do with “fever” or “plague”, rather than sheer furious hatred. Linguistic conundrums might not be the way to approach this music, however, and I feel ready to tip my hat to Daigle for the imaginative and unusual way he’s approached the treatment of this material. It’s all about the sound that he makes, rather than following a score (if indeed there was one), and further it’s about the way he can push the sound of his drumkit into places where it ought not to fit – much like a determined furniture removal man trying to get a 10-foot sofa into a tiny attic space, even though the suburban couple who live there are begging him to stop.
It’s partly achieved through electronic devices which give a leg-up to his powerful strokes and thuds – he calls it “unique timbres through electronic augmentations of the drumset”, such that half the time we’re hearing rudimentary electronica tunes, stabs and sketches played as if he wielded a crude keyboard, rather than the expected booms and crashes from a stickman or regular tubster. Electronica si senor, because our man Daigle is certainly not unaware of contemporary music from the avant-techno zones, and probably embraces it and other splinter genres with a circuit-laden heart. Another pioneer who favoured electronic modulation of his drumkit was the late Tony Oxley, UK improv pioneer, and one would like to think he might approve of Daigle’s adventurous treatments. Even so, I’m no closer to fathoming out the sheer oddness of La Rage, which on today’s spin arrives as something deliciously fragmented and bitty, a jigsaw for the mind given to us via the drip-feed mode, coded messages and cryptic crossword clues. None of that is a bad thing, and indeed might even prompt a return visit to this odd and intriguing record which on early spins struck me as well-nigh impossible to get a handle on. Curious listeners may want to investigate the 2009 recording of this same work (released as IMED 0999) where it was drummed by Stefan Schneider of the Bell Orchestre.
Also here is Daigle’s rendition of Beat, composed by Sylvain Pohu. Pohu is another Montreal musician, this time with a jazz bent, and he’s a member of the Musical Improvisation League in that part of the world. But no jazz here. Daigle presents us with another musical conundrum, this time featuring (possibly) more samples and plenty of chime/bell effects; fast-moving tapestry effects sit alongside slower uncertain passages where nothing much seems to be happening. No regular pulsebeat, despite the title, and at length I feel like I’m stranded in an unknown and unfriendly grey city where all the shops are closed, the buildings are deserted, and all I can hear is a church bell chiming. Daigle seems to be one who might not like too many pat explanations about his work, but he wrote a message to me on the envelope “this time, my album has a press kit!” with an injunction to follow a QR code in order to get to a website. A slightly roundabout path, which might tell you something about how the Daigle mind operates. From 25 April 2023.