Eric Chenaux experiments with guitars, ballads, electronics and tunes as an improviser and songwriter with an affection for balladeers such as Betty Carter, Howard Skempton, Willie Nelson, June Tabor, Sade, Tony MacMahon, Archie Shepp, Jimmy Van Heusen, Nic Jones, Carla Bley, Peter Cusack, Anthonello de Caserta, Waterson:Carthy, Pascal Comelade and Paul Bley.
Chenaux's songs begin as singular vocal lines and become thorny with his elastic and mouthy guitar playing. Of this guitar playing, Toronto critic Carl Wilson writes, "Ornette Coleman might call it harmolodic. Chenaux might call it an amazing background. His strings chime with all those thoughts at once. I adore the way he teases out a melody, never beginning a phrase so much as joining one already in progress. The sound quivers and multiplies such that I picture his strings fraying and sprouting into more strings, weeds, nests, marshes, frogs' tongues, cancelled coins, nickel pipes, drainage systems, catacombs, coral reefs... I could pick Chenaux's guitar out of a lineup within a few woozy notes, because it's no longer confined to the orthodox pluck, squawk and scrape of [Derek] Bailey-influenced guitar improv; instead it has absorbed Bailey's open field of possibility into a love of song. And the songs are strong enough to take it".
In the 1980s and 1990s Chenaux sang and played guitar in the post-punk band Phleg Camp and later wrote songs with the guitar duo Lif …
Eric Chenaux experiments with guitars, ballads, electronics and tunes as an improviser and songwriter with an affection for balladeers such as Betty Carter, Howard Skempton, Willie Nelson, June Tabor, Sade, Tony MacMahon, Archie Shepp, Jimmy Van Heusen, Nic Jones, Carla Bley, Peter Cusack, Anthonello de Caserta, Waterson:Carthy, Pascal Comelade and Paul Bley.
Chenaux's songs begin as singular vocal lines and become thorny with his elastic and mouthy guitar playing. Of this guitar playing, Toronto critic Carl Wilson writes, "Ornette Coleman might call it harmolodic. Chenaux might call it an amazing background. His strings chime with all those thoughts at once. I adore the way he teases out a melody, never beginning a phrase so much as joining one already in progress. The sound quivers and multiplies such that I picture his strings fraying and sprouting into more strings, weeds, nests, marshes, frogs' tongues, cancelled coins, nickel pipes, drainage systems, catacombs, coral reefs... I could pick Chenaux's guitar out of a lineup within a few woozy notes, because it's no longer confined to the orthodox pluck, squawk and scrape of [Derek] Bailey-influenced guitar improv; instead it has absorbed Bailey's open field of possibility into a love of song. And the songs are strong enough to take it".
In the 1980s and 1990s Chenaux sang and played guitar in the post-punk band Phleg Camp and later wrote songs with the guitar duo Lifelikeweeds. In 2001 Eric co-founded the Toronto-based record label Rat-drifting, on which he releases the music of friends and collaborators. Rat-drifting projects to-date include The Guayaveras and The Draperies (fried improvised polyphony with Chenaux, Ryan Driver and Doug Tielli), and The Reveries (again with Chenaux, Driver and Tielli), an ultra psychedelic sweet-lounge jazz trio who sing and play jazz standards with cellphone speakers placed in their mouths to amplify each others instruments. About the latter project, Martin Arnold (another Chenaux collaborator) writes, "experiencing it is like encountering delicate ultra-lounge psychedelia picked up from afar on a static-ridden short-wave radio."
Chenaux plays with, and writes tunes for, the jazz quintet Drumheller and has written music for Arraymusic ensemble, neither/nor ensemble and the CBC program Brave New Waves. Currently, he collaborates with improvising dancer Aimée Dawn Robinson and the two recently performed and taught in Kuala Lumpur. Chenaux has collaborated with kinetic sound-artist Marla Hlady on the Soundballs project with Arraymusic and he continues his multi-disciplinary interactions in a current project with Ame Henderson, Michael Trent and the dancers of Dancemakers, writing the music for the April 2008 program Double Bill #1.
As an improviser Chenaux has played with a wack of folks including Han Bennink, Murray Favro, Michael Moore, Kurt Newman, Pauline Oliveros, John Oswald, Michael Snow, Rachel Wadham and Zack Wallace.
