Diane Labrosse

Diane Labrosse (1950, Québec, Canada) takes pleasure in juxtaposing lyricism and absurdity, harmony and dissonance, and structure and improvisation. Her fascination with unconventional sounds naturally led her to digital sampling, to which she brings a bruitiste approach. For the last fifteen years she has regularly appeared on contemporary, improvised and avant-garde music stages both in Canada and in Europe, where she has appeared at a number of important festivals.

A founding member of Justine, she has also worked with Joane Hétu and Danielle Palardy Roger in Les Poules and Wonder Brass. She is presently involved in a number of other projects, including Île bizarre with Ikue Mori and Martin Tétreault, and L’Oreille à Vincent with Christof Migone, Michel F. Côté, Martin Tétreault and sound sculptor Jean-Pierre Gauthier.

In 1998 she and Michel F. Côté wrote the music for Robert Lepage’s play La géométrie des miracles, an Ex Machina production. Labrosse and Côté also wrote and were on stage to play the music for Lepage’s Zulu Time, a techno-cabaret performance at the Theater Spektakkel in Zürich in 1999. In recent years she has been especially active, creating music for dance (for Gilles Simard, Catherine Tardif, and Andrew Harwood), for the theater (Thirty-eight tales from Shakespeare), for the cinema (Montréal vu par…, Pendant que les arbres tombent, L’entrevue and Plan de fuite) and for radio (Le Navire Night and Les Décrocheurs d’étoiles).

In 1997 she received a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts to write a work for thirteen instruments that Espaces Sonores Illimités commissioned for the Symphonies Portuaires. She also obtained a grant from the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec to write a work for the Toronto quartet the Burdocks that was first performed in January 1999.

She has been featured on over twenty recordings, including Petit traité de sagesse pratique (2000) and Face cachée des choses (1995), her two solo albums; Télépathie (2003) with A_dontigny; Prairie orange (2002) and Les contes de l’amère loi (1986) with Les Poules; Parasites (2001) with Martin Tétreault; Île Bizarre (1998), with Martin Tétreault and Ikue Mori; Langages Fantastiques (1995) and Suite (1990), with Justine; Duo Déconstructiviste (1994), with Michel F. Côté; and La Légende de la pluie (93), with J. Hétu, Z. Parkins, Danielle Palardy Roger and Tenko. She has also collaborated on compact discs by Jean Derome, Joane Hétu, Danielle P. Roger, Michel F. Côté and Geneviève Letarte.Diane Labrosse is an artistic co-director at Productions SuperMémé and her work is available on the Ambiances Magnétiques label.