Few musicians embody the spirit of Québec’s musical radicalism better than Guy “Yug” Touin (b. 1940). During the 1960s, he was a vital part of the province’s countercultural awakening, co-founding Le Quatuor de jazz libre du Québec in 1967 and serving as the first drummer for Walter Boudreau‘s iconoclastic L’Infonie starting from their 1969 debut. He also worked alongside influential musician Robert Charlebois at the peak of the singer’s wayward curiosity, notably playing as part of his At Olympia appearance in Paris and featuring in the infamous l’Osstidcho cabarets. His practice gleefully reached across boundaries, embracing pop culture, the psychedelic underground, free jazz, poetry, fine arts, and new-age spirituality at a time when these worlds rarely intersected.
Touin will turn 86 this year, but he maintains the exuberance that propelled these pivotal early projects. A key part of his continued youthful drive is his ongoing engagement in cross-generational collaboration. Ensemble Infni, the group heard on the present recording, exemplifies this ethos while speaking to its pioneering spirit of pluralistic exploration.
An early, ad hoc form of this group materialised suddenly in 2022, when a restored version of Roger Frappier’s 1974 documentary, L’Infonie inachevée (The Unfinished Infonie) was being shown at an outdoor screening for Montréal’s Festival du nouveau cinéma. The programmers, eager to also include some live music that honoured L’Infonie’s legacy, consulted with Mardi Spaghetti member and multi-instrumentalist Raphaël Foisy a mere 72 hours before the event. Foisy knew just the person to put at the centre of the ensemble for this event.
Touin and Foisy had been acquainted for a good decade already; Foisy had even chronicled some of the elder artist’s recent activities on his Small Scale Music imprint. Riding the momentum from this successful—albeit tentative—first show, Foisy suggested they apply to the following year’s Festival international de musique actuelle de Victoriaville (FIMAV), prompting the group to expand and formalise as Ensemble Infni. Its name gestures phonetically toward their forebears, L’Infonie, while playing on the different meanings of the word Infni (“infinite”). On one hand, it channels their boundless aesthetic sensibility, on the other, the notion of endlessness—the perpetually unfinished, an ethos reflected in the group’s ever-evolving, workshop-like collaboration, rooted in Touin’s long-running From the Basement sessions.
The lead-up to the FIMAV set saw them working up a repertoire selected and composed by Touin spanning every decade of his career, including previously unreleased material. One of the multiple saxophonists in the group, Elyze Venne-Deshaies (of Tempête Solaire) assumed arrangement duties, wrangling the large forces in a way that still allowed for them to fresh things out collaboratively in rehearsal. This became the band’s methodology going forward. The FIMAV performance was widely touted as a highlight of the 2023 festival. Respected critic Kurt Gottschalk characterised it as “an intelligent reworking of the big band format reminiscent of Te Ex & Brass Unbound, Paal Nilsson-Love’s Large Unit, and other equally vigorous big bands, following a winding path that can be traced back to Mingus’ passion” in the New York City Jazz Record.
By the time they recorded Volume ∞ in 2024, the band had already delved deeper into their musical universe and Touin’s work, particularly in preparation for a major Montreal concert presented by Hiatus at Saint-Pierre-Claver Church in October 2023, the very same church where Touin had served as an altar boy and cantor some 75 years earlier. The group also landed on their current lineup: of pianist Belinda Campbell, bassist Pablo Jiménez, trombonist Scott Tomson, guitarist Raphaël Foisy, and saxophonists/ reed players Elyze Venne-Deshaies, Andrea Mercier, and Félix-Antoine Hamel, all of whom congregate around Touin’s percussion and compositional foundation.
As they crafted the album, it became clear that the project was not only going to document the group, but it was becoming a means to capture the band’s prismatic spirit as well as Touin’s longstanding and wide-reaching eclecticism through extensive, multidimensional use of recording as a process. This engagement with technology wasn’t so much a case of applying additional polish; instead, it unexpectedly pushed the record into a more psychedelic territory than the band initially imagined. From folding in fragments of various concert performances to spontaneous overdubs—notably some late-night probing of the studio’s synth collection — the recording is a direct and deliberate extension of the playful and inquisitive Infni ethos.
The album’s contents were curated by its trio of co-producers Venne-Deshaies, Foisy and engineer Dominic Jasmin. It primarily comprises Touin originals (orchestrated in customary fashion by Venne-Deshaies and the band), but also includes improvisations, Félix-Antoine Hamel’s “Requiem & Fanfare (for Peter B.)” and the 1969 piece “Halloween à Québec” by Yves Charbonneau, a fellow member of Le Quatuor de Jazz Libre who wrote it in the wake of the Quiet Revolution’s sociocultural upheaval.
Volume ∞ stands as a singular release and a substantial release. There’s no question that its fundamental impulse emerges from freejazz, but this core is shaped by numerous sources—unsurprising given the profound sonic curiosity of its membership. Te four sides of music on this release encompass joyous blasts of spontaneity, churning psychedelic strangeness, ecstatic bluster, moments of dizzy abstraction and occasional repose. Te double LP set and CD are housed in a sleeve adorned with ink drawings from respected visual artist Marie Lemieux, Touin’s partner and a vital contributor to his artistic and personal life. They also include bilingual notes from Eric Fillion, author of Soundtrack to the Revolution: Free Jazz and Leftist Nationalism in Quebec 1967-1975 (Véhicule Press, 2025).
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Photo by Par Mlynello
Guy “Yug” Touin is a true pioneer of free jazz in Québec and Canada. A highly creative drummer and percussionist, he was also influenced by his studies in the visual arts. During the 1960s, he participated in landmark events of the musical revolution, such as Pierre Nolès’ rock opera Le Clan (1965) and L’Osstidcho (with his group Quatuor de jazz libre du Québec) (1968), accompanying stars Robert Charlebois, Louise Forestier, and Yvon Deschamps and duetting privately with revered American saxophonist Noah Howard. In 1969, he joined the legendary avant-garde group L’Infonie with Walter Boudreau and Raôul Duguay while taking classical percussion lessons with Pierre Béluse at McGill University. He toured the US with Les Grands Ballets Canadiens’ production of Tommy from 1969-70. Following this intense period of activity, Touin retreated to India from 1971 – 76, pursuing both a spiritual and musical education (including mridangam and tabla lessons). He was later recognised as a tabla specialist, a niche seldom occupied by his Western contemporaries and returned to the country from 1980-84. The 1980s also saw him active in groups such as Mirage and Implosion, performing with celebrated dance troupe La La La Human Steps, collaborating with everyone from Sonny Greenwich to Steve Roach and founding his Heart Ensemble quintet in 1989. The 2010s saw performing and recording with groups that reflected upon his artistic history—the Nouveau Jazz Libre du Québec was formed in 2012, and alongside Infni member Félix-Antoine Hamel, he formed a revitalised heArt Ensemble in 2015. Since 2020, Touin has performed regularly with saxophonist Aaron Leaney, releasing a full-length for the Astral Spirits imprint in 2023. Meanwhile, Touin’s legacy continues to be celebrated through archival releases such as reissues from Quatuor de Jazz Libre, Rien ö Tout ou Linéaire Un, a previously unreleased quasi-electroacoustic tape piece conceived for sculptor Roland Poulin’s 1971 exhibition (Tenzier 2018), and Eric Fillion’s aforementioned book.
Photo by Pierre Langlois
Ensemble Infni is a Montréal-based experimental collective built around legendary drummer Guy “Yug” Touin, uniting four generations of the city’s most active improvisers. Born from Touin’s long-running From the Basement sessions, the group approaches music as an unfinished process: compositions stay open, porous, and continually in motion. Drawing on Touin’s vast body of work as living material, and shaped in no small part by the flexible arrangements of multi-reedist Elyze Venne-Deshaies, the ensemble makes rigorous, mercurial music informed by free play, conduction, instinct, and compositional rigour—music that resists stylistic closure and remains, true to its name, unbounded and always in the making.
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Ensemble Infni volume ∞
Out: May 1st, 2026 (CD/DL) & August 7th, 2026 (2xLP) on Cellar Music
Genres: Free Jazz, Psychedelic, Experimental
Track list:
1 Free Parking Transcendantal 1:22
2 Jhaptala / Milford Spirit 8:28
3 Tabla Plus 6:21
4 Rock Memory 4:28
5 Guy médite et résonne 3:09
6 Black Hole 6:02
7 Industrial Jazz 7:24
8 Cartoon 2:43
9 Opus II 6:55
10 Requiem & Fanfare (pour Peter B.) 8:54
11 Sainte-Marie-Blonde-de-Guy 2:11
12 Halloween à Québec 7:37
13 Dream Story 5:36
14 Le sous-sol libre 1:08
Line up:
Guy “Yug” Touin: Composition, drums, percussion; Elyze Venne-Deshaies: Direction, tenor saxophone, clarinet, bass clarinet, FX; Félix-Antoine Hamel: Tenor & soprano saxophones; Andrea Prochazka Mercier: Tenor & soprano saxophones; Scott Tomson: Trombone; Belinda Campbell: Piano, Rhodes, synths, voice; Pablo Jiménez: Double bass; Raphael Foisy: Electric guitar, synths, FX. Featuring: Marilou Lyonnais Archambault: Harp (2).
All tracks composed by Guy Touin, except: 10 (Félix-Antoine Hamel), 12 (Yves Charbonneau), 1, 5, 11 & 14 (improvisations, Ensemble Infni). Recorded in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang (Montréal) at Studio Dandurand and Studios de Rouen.
Production: Raphael Foisy, Elyze Venne-Deshaies, Dominic Jasmin. Arrangements: Elyze Venne-Deshaies + Ensemble Infni.
Recording, mixing, mastering: Dominic Jasmin. Executive production: Cory Weeds. Production management: Dominic Duchamp.
Design/layout: Tilda Hedwig. Original Artwork: Marie Lemieux.
Liner Notes: Eric Fillion. For full credits, consult the album artwork.