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Eric Chenaux is a Canadian guitarist, songwriter, singer and sound sculptor. He has released seven full-length solo albums on the Montréal imprint Constellation, charting an adventurous and uncompromising path through avant-folk and out-jazz compositions increasingly rooted in a unique and elemental juxtaposition of fried, frazzled, semi-improvised guitar and smooth, clear tenor balladry. Chenaux has been called “a musician like no other” by Tiny Mix Tapes; his solo work praised by The Quietus as “stunningly beautiful, genuinely inimitable, whose reputation will only grow with time.” Gracing the cover of The Wire magazine in 2017, the feature article declared: “A singer and songwriter possessed of angelic sweetness and clarity accompanying himself with largely improvised, visceral guitar textures that seem intent on undermining and obscuring his own songs. It’s the need to communicate tussling with the urge to obfuscate; lucidity versus opacity; form against chaos.”

Chenaux was a key figure in Toronto’s fertile indie and avant/improv music scenes throughout the 1990s and 2000s, co-founding the experimental music label Rat-drifting in 2001 and documenting a dynamic cross-section of Toronto music iconoclasts over the ensuing decade, including several projects in which he played. He has released collaborative records on labels like Okraïna, Avatar, Grapefruit and Three:four and has performed and recorded with countless artists, including Ryan Driver, Sandro Perri, Eloïse Decazes, Michelle McAdorey, Nick Fraser, Martin Arnold, Radwan Ghazi Moumneh, Pauline Oliveros, John Oswald, Michael Snow, Brodie West, Han Bennink, Christine Abdelnour, Michael Moore, Josephine Foster, Martin Tetrault and many more.

Chenaux also composes for film and contemporary dance, including a long-standing association with conceptual filmmaker Eric Cazdyn for his solo music, and in recurring collaboration with multi-media and sound installation artist Marla Hlady. Eric Chenaux has been based in France since 2011.

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It is on an old 4-track recorder that multi-instrumentalist and composer Cédric Dind-Lavoie, then a teenager, discovered his passion for studio recording. But what would occupy him the following years is a prolific career as a bassist/double-bassist, with a keen interest in West African Mandingo music (Balla Tounkara, Bolo Kan) and Québecois folklore (Bon Débarras, Yves Lambert).

More recently, Cédric came back to is roots as a producer (Kyra Shaughnessy, Bon Débarras) and as a composer for theatre and contemporary dance shows (Bigico, Les Archipels). Meanwhile, he has released two albums of original compositions: presenting Middle-Eastern-flavoured jazz pieces with the Mismar ensemble in 2015, then, a first solo release in 2018 on the British label Preserved Sound and featuring nine neoclassical inspired piano compositions.

This journey eventually led him to Archives (2021), an effort joining folklore to ambient and introspective music, which has the particularity of featuring French-Canadian archival recordings around which he deploys his arrangements. As if Cédric Dind-Lavoie had been able to slip through the cracks of time to meet these voices, hear their stories and play with them.

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