Snipettes!

This cassette must be Martin Tétreault's rarest album. It came out in 1992, in Ambiances Magnétiques' short-lived series "Archives Magnétiques," in a limited edition of 250 copies. At the time the turntable wizard was still widely unknown outside the province of Quebec and had only one album to his credit (Des Pas et des Mois, 1990). In two continuous suites of 20 minutes each, Tétreault rummages through his record collection to find the weirdest pieces of pressed petroleum. Citations, strange confrontations, and medium destruction come together for pure enjoyment of the ears. In 1992, Tétreault had not yet pushed his art below the record to work in the turntable's insides, but he was cutting up records to paste unrelated pieces together and using creative skipping techniques. In "Snipettes," the cast of the original TV series Star Trek (Spock: "I have never heard anything quite like it"), a Time-Life collection on the space race, a Muzak rendition of "South of the Border," and various records of classical and electronic music (including the infamous Perrey & Kingsley trilogy) form a twisted narrative. In "Morceaux Choisis," excerpts from self-help records (psychology, relaxation, and such) provide a loose structure for noise-based improvisations and a feature for glued LPs. The narrative contents of this piece will be lost on English-speaking listeners, but the English samples and the type of humor found in "Snipettes" can appeal to a wider audience (even the non-experimental type). This cassette presents Tétreault at his most irreverent. ~ François Couture, Rovi