The Web has blessed and cursed us with critics. Any kid with a keyboard can go online, start a website with some dumb phonograph-related name, and then squawk about music, literature or their double-crossing best friends. Consequently, there's a whole lot of squawking going on. But something the Net has also done is to bring the world's best professional critics, the ones you used to nod in agreement with as you read the Sunday Style section, and made them close enough to touch.

Foremost among these, for me, is Mr Carl Wilson. When I lived in Canada, Carl's work as a critic at the Globe & Mail was some of the most resonant writing I could find in the major press. (It probably still is: I just can't pick up the paper!) He wrote (and writes) about the sorts of sounds I care about, and with a passion that feels familiar. Free jazz and Canadian indie; "lit rock" and Jandek. Yes, Carl taught my parents (both literally and literarily) about the New Pornographers.

Please make him welcome. - Sean

ON ERIC CHENAUX

The elders gathered us around the hearth last night. The patriarchs were combing their beards with scalloped seashells, the matriarchs programming dusty dot-matrix printers to sing reveilles to the sun. They praised our metric system, our swift response when the fire struck the arcade (with unicorns coming to rescue victims from as far away as Tangiers), and the expertise with which our new pornographers have wielded their hidden cameras. But then they had to heave a sigh: "For all that you have achieved, still we are disappointed: Why is it," they asked, "that when the men with headphone eyes and camera ears gossip about you, they do not hail the name of Eric Chenaux, surely one of the most fandangolous spelunkers ever to hoist our ropes?"

MICHELLE McADOREY - "MONA".
Eric Chenaux plays with guitars. After childhood in Switzerland, the teen began luring awestruck listeners as a member of art-punk band Phleg Camp in the late 1980s, followed by duo Life Like Weeds, and some time in King Cobb Steelie. A growing infatuation with free improvisation (in the Derek Bailey vein) lured him out of the rock and into the woods, and among those vines and mushrooms, he began to build a colony of twigs, edible grasses and decomposing warning signs. Former Crash Vegas vocalist Michelle McAdorey had made the same exodus. And for a while, that was that. There was promise in More Remote than the Puma, his solo guitar disc, but the first landmark is his collaboration on McAdorey's 1999 album Whirl. "Mona" is the opening track and the only Chenaux solo composition. I can't help imagining it an epistle to McAdorey, disguised by being sung by its addressee. And sung extraordinarily. "I'm much too young to be feeling so old ... I want to feel simple" - reminiscent of Dylan's "I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now," it declares a break with a style of self to pursue a less transparent truth, a more singular climate. The music teems -- with Martin Arnold on melodica, McAdorey on rhythm, Blue Rodeo's Greg Keelor on drums and Chenaux's swarming lead ("my friends are such sloppy lovers...") -- but the song lags, cussedly, would lop its own head off before it would surrender to the current. I've been down there before, it says, and it's not the quest I seek. Look back over your shoulder, while I slip into your arms.

MICHELLE McADOREY & ERIC CHENAUX - "AMAZING BACKGROUNDS".
Love Don't Change, the follow-up to Whirl, arrived in 2004, a year or two too late and, for me, a little too loose. I had been intoxicated by these songs live many times and hoped an album of concise, distilled versions could introduce new listeners to the duo. And then by the time this disc reached us, that duo was no more, lending a twist of rue to the album title. Another crossover fantasy withered. But no matter, because that yearning we heard in "Mona" for a soft place to fall had in many ways been answered - listen to the langorous authority of this song...

Chenaux had become part of the community of Toronto musicians who would form the Rat-drifting series, and later record label. particularly Chenaux, Martin Arnold, Ryan Driver, and Doug Tielli, who form the core of six or seven ongoing ensembles. There are other, more intermittent participants; intermittency being part of the blueprint. "Rat-drifting" is a term for weaving your way through residential neighbourhoods to avoid the congested main roads, but it's also a modest northerly variation on the flaneur and boulevardier's creative drift. It's the route of the disobedient ones who are not fixing for a fight: "So that way's jammed with cliche and suspect intentions? No bother, we prefer the detour. There's joy in being barred from the temple." The group evolved its own idiom, almost its own subgenre, each player with a characteristic voice but all remarkably in accord. 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 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. Consider this one, about how much more beautiful love is for being so easily lost, about how near wonder sits to waste. Doesn't it sound like a song you've always known, an amazing background to your own life? Chenaux's demure vocals (with whispery support from McAdorey), his ever-hypnotic spinning-pendant guitar and the long running time may delay the realization, but like the album's title piece, it has the punch of a classic.

DRUMHELLER - "IT MUST BE SO EASY".
On any given night, Eric Chenaux is likely to be playing somewhere in Toronto - at the Australian folk-club-turned-improv-nexus the Tranzac Club in the Annex (as at this weekend's 416 Improv Festival); in the Arraymusic Space in a Liberty Village loft; or anywhere a musical friend has called for a dose of Doc Guitar's medicine, often administered with a wah-wah pedal or a slide. There are groups such as the Reveries, who play jazz standards (and most recently the songs of Sade!) through cellphone speakers held in their mouths, for a drizzling, drooling, silly-serious effect; there's his guitar-banjo duo with Martin Arnold, using old-time music as a launch pad for serious psychonautic-rock journeys; and the Tristanos, an avant-string consort. The closest thing the Rat-drifting scene has to a "supergroup," however, is Drumheller, with Rob Clutton (bass), Nick Fraser (drums), Doug Tielli (trombone), and Brodie West (alto sax - currently absent in Amsterdam), who apply the waywardness of the aesthetic to the hoary form of the composers-workshop jazz combo. Both elements are evident in this Chenaux-penned piece, which sounds a bit like "Ain't Misbehavin'" except that, as you can hear, it's misbehaving all the way.

I can sometimes be caught carping that unlike the rock kids, the younger experimental musicians in Toronto don't assert their ideas and presence as boldly as they could, both in their public presentation and in their sound. But Chenaux's work, and Drumheller as a group too, pose a potent counterargument: We live in a culture of flash and sass, of stockpiled information-bombs and kamikaze crossfire - if you will, of pop and noise. If the question is what art can do to seduce you out of these habits, to break these stalemates - to help save the village without first destroying it - then what use is more of the same? Drift through the neighbourhood and rattle the mailboxes. Lace up your clown shoes and hydroplane across the puddles. Make the difficult thing easy. Hide the noise under your tongue.

[Do buy Whirl, Love Don't Change, and Drumheller at Scratch Records.]

[Carl Wilson writes at Zoilus and and is an editor & critic for the Globe & Mail newspaper. His writing has appeared in Saturday Night, The Nation, This Magazine and other publications, and has been republished in the annual Da Capo Best Music Writing anthology. He lives in Toronto.]

(Previous artist guest-blogs, in and out of the Said the Guests series: Hello Saferide, Edward Droste (Grizzly Bear), Will Sheff (Okkervil River), Devin Davis, Michael Nau (Page France), artist Tim Moore, Brian Michael Roff, Howard Bilerman (producer: Silver Mt. Zion, Arcade Fire, etc.), Damon Krukowski (Damon & Naomi). There are many more to come.)