Eric Chenaux experiments with song forms as a guitar player, composer and singer with an affection for balladeers such as Betty Carter, Gavin Bryars (specifically his piece “1-2, 1-2-3-4”), Willie Nelson, Silly Sisters, Sade, Jimmy Van Heusen, Nic Jones, Carla Bley, Waterson:Carthy, as well as Hardinger fiddle, late Medieval polyphony and Piobaireachd bagpipes. Chenaux writes songs whilst riding his bike.

And these songs wind up in all kinds of places and shape-shift from tender jazz standards to bossa to fried folk to meaninglessly romantic balladry. Sometimes these same songs are re-baked as modal tunes for guitar, banjo, drums, swinging speakers and wah-wah pedals (as they appear on Dull Lights) and become near-covers of themselves.

These songs begin as singular vocal lines and become thorny with Chenaux's elastic and mouthy guitar playing. About Chenaux’s guitar playing, a critic writes “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 reef…. 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”.

In the 1980’s and 1990’s Chenaux played rhythmically demented half-riffs with hoary post-punk band Phleg Camp and later wrote songs with the guitar duo Lifelikeweeds. Currently, Chenaux plays warped sweet-jazz in The Reveries, improvises fried polyphony in The Guayaveras and The Draperies, is a member of swinging jazz quintet Drumheller, plays languidly with Michelle McAdorey and psychedelically with Martin Arnold, writes jazz standards for the Ryan Driver Quartet, and composes skewed lyrical ballads for The Tristanos. Chenaux has played as a guest with Arraymusic, Deep Dark United, Veda Hille, Sandro Perri and Josh Thorpe.

With his music intertwined with that of friends and collaborators, Chenaux has written pieces for The Arraymusic Ensemble, the Neither/Nor collective and the CBC radio program Brave New Waves. He has played with Colin Clark’s new-music group Lions and Martin Arnold’s groups Cowpaws and Marmots. As a tinkerer, Chenaux invented the mouth-speaker used by The Reveries and has collaborated with kinetic artist Marla Hllady.

Chenaux has been improvising since about 1995. He has played improvised guitar with many people including: Han Bennink, Allison Cameron, Rob Clutton, Ryan Driver, Murray Favro, Nick Fraser, Mike Kane, Michael Moore, Kurt Newman, Stephen Parkinson, Pauline Oliveros, Rhonda Rhindone, dancer Aimée Dawn Robinson, John Oswald, Michael Snow, Doug Tielli, Zack Wallace, Rachel Wadham and Brodie West.

Eric Chenaux co-founded (with Martin Arnold) Toronto based recording label Rat-drifting in 2001, which has released twelve albums to date.