Francois Houle: Making the Clarinet Sing

Celeste Sunderland

CD/DVD Reviewer since 2003

Celeste makes pillows for Futopia, her mother's store on Kent Street in Greenpoint, Brooklyn

Recent articles (104 total)

Published: November 23, 2006

"When you're working with extended techniques, slap tongue and multiphonics and all these things that we do, you run the risk of sounding like a circus act, he explained. "I wanted something that made a strong musical statement and that really reflected my state of being, as a musician and as a human being.

Francois Houle Eliminating redundancy and shoddy passages, he reduced six hours of recorded music to seventy minutes, broken into eighteen tracks. "I was able to come up with a sentence that was satisfying to me and seemed to be able to hold the interest of the listener. When you're working as a solo musician the ultimate challenge is to make it sound like you just played for five minutes, when you go for a whole set. I wanted to create something that would continue...to have this constant unfolding discourse that even when it's finished it doesn't really end and when you pick up the instrument again you start off from where you stopped previously. I want things to be in constant evolution and constant permutation so when I'm playing this music live, I'm not just recreating what's on the CD, but there's a feeling of growth. It's not just a CD project but much more a lifelong endeavor to discover and broaden the possibilities of the stuff that I'm doing.

Selected Discography

François Houle, Aerials (Drip Audio, 2006)
Yitzhak Yedid, Myth of the Cave (Between the Lines, 2002)
François Houle, Cryptology (Between The Lines, 2000)
François Houle, In the Vernacular: The Music of John Carter (Songlines, 1997)
François Houle/Marilyn Crispell, Any Terrain Tumultuous (Red Toucan, 1995)
François Houle's Et Cetera, Hacienda (Songlines, 1992)