Ensemble Infini

L’Ensemble Infini is an intergenerational Montréal octet bringing together some of the city’s most active experimental musicians around drummer and composer Guy “Yug” Thouin, a leading figure in Québec’s countercultural music history through his work with Le Quatuor de jazz libre du Québec and L’Infonie.

With its debut album, Volume ∞, the group draws on six decades of Thouin’s creative activity to produce music that is open, dense, and fluid, where free jazz, collective improvisation, electronic textures, and kaleidoscopic collage drift together in a unified psychedelic flow.

The album was released by Cellar Music on May 1, 2026, with original artwork by Marie Lemieux and liner notes by Eric Fillion.

Montréal-based drummer, composer, and iconoclast Guy Thouin (b. 1940) stands as a towering presence in Québec’s countercultural history. A driving force behind seminal groups like Le Quatuor de jazz libre du Québec and L’Infonie, he has also collaborated with artists ranging from Robert Charlebois to Sonny Greenwich and Steve Roach. Now approaching 86, Thouin continues to radiate the same vitality that fueled his earliest work, embracing new cross-generational collaborations such as this one.

Ensemble Infini is Thouin's ever-evolving workshop collective rooted in his expansive vision of free jazz. The group primarily performs bespoke arrangements of his compositions, drawing from every phase of his long career. Their debut release, out on Cellar Music May 1, 2026, on CD and digital, with a 2xLP edition arriving August 7, brings together driving improvisation, molten psychedelia, and abstract atmospherics—a combination they’ve already demonstrated in acclaimed live performances such as their 2023 appearance at FIMAV. Here, their exploratory spirit carries into the studio, where the ensemble incorporates overdubs, electronic treatments, synthesizers, and collage-like approaches drawing in part from their archive of live and residency recordings, all while retaining the immediacy and vitality of their performances.