martes, 21 de agosto de 2012

Jean-Claude Vannier, L'enfant Assassin Des Mouches (1972)


Jean-Claude Vannier is best known in Europe (and all but unknown in the United States) as a celebrated composer of film scores, and as an arranger and producer of French pop music, he has worked with everyone from Brigitte Fontaine to Françoise Hardy to Johnny Hallyday. He is also known among music aficionados as the genius-arranger behind Serge Gainsbourg's classic concept LP Histoire de Melody Nelson. That recording, with its bizarre and otherworldly blend of musical and non-musical sources, which effortlessly wound rock, jazz, pop, found-object music, avant-garde, and even funk into a seamlessly, utterly disconcerting whole, has been sampled worldwide by hip-hop artists and DJs. L'Enfant Assasin des Mouches ("The Child Killer of the Flies") is Vannier's first solo recording, and an underground Francophone (and now worldwide) classic. Inspired by the work he did with Gainsbourg on Melody Nelson in 1972, he and his ensembles Insolitudes, set out to create his own concept work, blending everything he'd been working on and extending his range with total studio and aesthetic freedom. This suite, comprised of 11 parts (with truly weird and creepy track introductions by Gainsbourg), is a wonder, a truly strange bit of '70s musicalia. This set is the terrain where soundtrack music, classical music, gauche pop, hard rock, French café music, Middle Eastern modal music, vanguard musical iconoclasty, and sound effects collide, stroke, and ultimately come into union with one another -- often in a single cut. This music is alternately violent, garish, tender, elegant, silly, and gritty. Vannier plays piano, clavinette, and flutes, and directed the orchestra. The strings here are the result of a multi-tracked string quartet sounding like a 10001 string orchestra. He used three guitarists, electric bass, a single drummer and two percussionists, a reed and brass section, an accordionist, and a choir to achieve this. Its seamlessly beautiful yet hideous juxtapositions should never have worked, but they become the face of something so far beyond their individual parts that the end result is singular in both conception and execution. L'Enfant Assasin des Mouches is to music what surrealism was to literature: a bold new step that has been unmatched in vision and unequaled in performance since it was recorded. Highly recommended to anyone interested not only in soundtrack music, but in anything adventurous. This is a truly underground classic. [The CD version, released in 2005, contains a pair of bonus tracks taken from another Vannier LP entitled Point d' Interrogation.] (allmusic.com) 

1. L'enfant la mouche et les allumettes (4:22)
2. L'enfant au royaume des mouches (3:57)
3. Danse des mouches noires gardes du roi (3:20)
4. Danse de l'enfant et du roi des mouches (2:52)
5. Le roi des mouches et la confiture de rouse (6:28)
6. L'enfant assassin des mouches (1:52)
7. Les gardes volent au secours du roi (6:55)
8. Mort du roi des mouches (3:29)
9. Pattes de mouches (0:51)
10. Le papier tue-Enfant (2:44)
11. Petite agonie de l'enfant assassin (0:31) 

Claude Engel: guitar
Denys Lable: guitar
Raymond Gimenez: guitars
Tonio Rubio: guitar
Pierre-Alain Dahan: drums
Jean-Pierre Sabar: piano
Jean-Claude Vannier: piano, little piano, harpsichord, bombard, flute, recorder, bells
Marc Chantereau: percussion
Michel Zanlonghi: percussion
Jean-Louis Chautemps: soprano saxophone
Philipe Mathe: soprano saxophone
Marc Steckar: trombone, tuba
Marcel Azzola: accordion
Pierre Llinares: bugle
Jean and Ginette Gaunet, Pierre Llinares, and Hubert Varon: string quartet
Louis Martini: choir director of the Choir of Young Musicians of France
Jean Gaunet: rule strings (note: questionable translation to English)
M. Pailleux: tuner 


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