(La Tribu)

René Lussier's Le Trésor de la langue deserves to be recognized as one of the major masterpieces of Canadian music and it might be, in Lussier's home province of Quebec. Elsewhere, however, the 1990 release has not been widely celebrated, perhaps because it was originally issued on a small label specializing in the Montreal avant-garde, but more likely because you need to speak French to fully appreciate its depths.

When the inventive guitarist, percussionist, and composer whose interests range from traditional fiddle music to Hawaiian swing to freeform noisemaking started work on what remains his most important release, he was bent on mining francophone speech for its rhythmic and melodic intricacies. Lussier soon applied the same analytical techniques to political oratory, including Charles de Gaulle's "Vive le Québec libre" barnburner.

His basic approach is to take a recording of someone talking or yelling, as the case might be and add musical accompaniment keyed to the speaker's phrasing. Sometimes the verbal utterances are linked together in suite form, and my French is just good enough for me to guess that these vignettes are often drolly humorous or even somewhat surreal.

But I'm far from being fluent in Canada's other official language, and here's where this expanded edition of Le Trésor comes in handy. In addition to the original release, this triple CD set includes a further two discs of outtakes, concert recordings, and film soundtracks, and in these Lussier often lets the instruments speak for themselves. This they do, bickering, grumbling, and cajoling as if possessed. Given that the performers include electronic composer Bob Ostertag, saxophonist Jean Derome, and multi-instrumentalist Fred Frith, the music is extraordinary and endlessly fascinating, even for linguistically challenged West Coast anglophones.