Features Disc of the day
Brigitte Fontaine
Brigitte Fontaine Est... Folle
(Saravah, 1970)
Avant-garde pop bonkers from the Existentialist sparrow of ’70s Paris.
Following an ultra-hip ’60s spent in Parisian theatres, singing comic chansons with Georges Brassens and performing her free verse plays with Jacques Higelin and Algerian musician Areski Belkacem, the 29-year-old Brigitte Fontaine cut, this, her debut solo album. With a title that translates as “Brigitte Fontaine is insane”, and a cover that has the singer peering from of a question mark cut into a grotesque Bosch landscape, Brigitte Fontaine est… undoubtedly bonkers, mixing arrangements from Gainsbourg collaborator Jean-Claude Vannier with frantic African drums, screeching jungle birds and lush Spanish guitar, all in the service of Fontaine’s own mordant ruminations plucked from the dank verges on the long miserable road to madness and death. It’s how Françoise Hardy might have sounded if she’d taken the brown acid, or Piaf if she’d stuck around long enough to work with late ’60s Gainsbourg. It’s also Fontaine’s most conventional album. After this she cut an eerily beautiful flute’n’percussion jazz poetry workout with The Art Ensemble Of Chicago (1971’s Comme À La Radio) and a handful of albums with Areski that can best be described as electronic Afro-Balkan chamber folk. Possibly. Now championed by the likes of Jarvis Cocker, Stereolab and Sonic Youth and she is still recording and, thankfully, remains completely insane.
Andrew Male
Posted by Danny_Eccleston at 6:00 AM GMT 20/06/2008
Further Listening
Brigitte Fontaine - Comme À La Radio (Saravah, 1971)
Jean-Claude Vannier – L’Enfant Assassin Des Mouches (Suzelle, 1972)
Stereolab – Emperor Tomato Ketchup (Duophonic, 1996)
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