ENSEMBLE INFINI

VOLUME ꝏ

Cellar Music

Guy “Yug” Thouin will turn 86-years old this year.  Regardless of the passing time, he remains exuberant and active in his radical music identity.  Thouin was a vital part of Quebec’s free jazz and experimental music, co-founding Le Quatuor de jazz libre du Québec in 1967, as well as serving as the first drummer for Walter Boudreau’s iconoclastic L’Infonie, starting in 1969. Now, here it is 2026, and he continues his legacy, gleefully reaching across boundaries.

He’s a genre smasher and a child of the psychedelic era.  Consequently, he has always reached across boundaries, throwing pop music, underground sounds, free jazz, poetry, fine arts and culture, along with new age spirituality in a pot and stirring it ferociously.  He loves cross-generational collaboration.  You will hear all of that in this free jazz, psychedelic, experimental music.

Ensemble Infini is a group of musicians who bring alive Thouin’s concepts. The group materialized in 2022. The title represents the perpetually unfinished, an endlessness or something quite infinite. Their first concert featured some compositions of Thouin spanning every decade of his life journey. They were invited to be the ‘live’ music component of an outdoor screening for Montreal’s Festival du Nouveau cinema. The producer asked Raphael Foisy (a multi-instrumentalist), just 72-hours before the event if he knew someone who could become the center of an extraordinary artistic evening. Foisy called his friend, Guy Thouin.

This performance was later touted as the highlight of the 2023 festival.  A music critic (Kurt Gottschalk) wrote that “an intelligent reworking of the big band format reminiscent of The Ex & Brass Unbound, Paal Nilsson-Love’s Lare Unit, and other equally vigorous big bands, following a winding path that can be traced back to Mingus.”

This album opens with “Free Parking Transcendantal” to briefly set the mood for what is to follow. It is only one minute, twenty-seconds long, but quite ethereal and cosmic. It made me sit quietly and listen. Thouin has no reservations about using the recording process and electronic engagement with technology to make their music more psychedelic and to reimagine the big band into a cluster of stars on the horizon, each sparkling with a specific universe, sun and moon. They probe the studio’s synth collection and stretch their own musical talents to the limits. You will hear this in “Jhaptala/Milford Spirit.”

This experimental collective built around the legendary drummer Guy “Yug” Thouin, unites 4-generations of the city’s most active improvisers into a band that pushes the boundaries of imagination.  Ensemble Infini draws on Thouin’s vast body of work as living material. Thouin has regularly had saxophonist Aaron Leaney at his side.  Leaney has also been responsible for many of the arrangements.

ENSEMBLE INFINI:  Guy “Yug” Thouin, composer/drums/percussion; Belinda Campbell, piano/ Fender Rhodes/synthesizers/vocals; Pablo Jiménez, double bass; Raphael Foisy, elec. guitar/synthesizers/ FX; Marilou Lyonnais Archambault, harp; Elyze Venne-Deshaies, tenor saxophone/clarinet/bass clarinet/FX; Felix-Antoine Hamel & Andrea Prochazka Mercier, tenor & soprano saxophones; Scott Thomson, trombone.

Reviewed by Dee Dee McNeil

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