Samedi Soir: Synthesized sounds, French Pop and Electronic Delights

This Saturday, 9pm - 3am at The West Hill, Brighton. F R E E E N T R Y.

we will be ensconced in the homely surrounds of The West Hill, in our very own tricolore-swathed corner.

There will be music:
French boys and French girls doing freakbeat, ye-ye and bubblegum POP!
synthesized sounds from the glacial to the disco to the dirty synthcore.
electronic pioneers and bleeps and noises...
(basically anything that is French or electronic or both!)

There will also be fine wines, ales and spirits, bar snacks and parlour games to while away the evening. And you can dance if you can find a space. yeah!

Porno a GO-GO

Currently receiving repeat rotation at L'Amour Electronique HQ is this amazing French-Canadian porn soundtrack from 1969.

I discovered Valérie recently over at Psyquébélique. It seems it is one of those "lost" soundtracks, and has never been officially released. Together with Otis Fodder and S.Ébastien at Patrimoine PQ, Simon Psyquébélique has ripped the soundtrack direct from the DVD, complete with sound-effects and snippets of dialogue, and with some sleek artwork based on the original movie poster.

Michel Paje and Joe Gracy's compositions are surely up there with such heavyweight Frenchies as Jean-Claude Vannier and Serge's music for Pierre Koralnik's Anna. The dialogue snippets and sound-effects on Valérie serve to make it all the more evocative, with some tasty motorcycle action, answer-phone messages, and what appears to be a struggle with the most archetypal French porn villain imaginable (check the "Ah! NO, NO, No-No-No-No!" during Le Premier Client). Meanwhile the music veers from hypnotic, spy-flick piano to kitsch go-go, via sitar exotica, hammond funk, and some of the most maudlin tunes I've heard since those badly-dubbed foreign-serials they used to show when I was a kid, during school holidays.

You can download this unofficial version of Valérie for free from Psyquébélique, go there now and tell him L'Amour Electronique tipped you off.

The Autumnal Equinox

At around 3.09am tomorrow morning the autumnal equinox will occur. It sounds a little foreboding, but it's just the signal of the end of the summer months and the beginning of winter. Pagans will be celebrating and the rest of us in the northern hemisphere can just use it as a reminder to dig our scarves out and prepare for the cold months ahead. It would be depressing if it wasn't such a glorious sunny day outside today.

Here's Jean-Michel Jarre getting all autumnal:

covered and appropriated

Stereo Total have recorded the Brigitte Fontaine/Jean-Claude Vannier track Barbe à Papa for their latest album. For the video, they've appropriated a fictional advert directed by Serge Gainsbourg's character in the film Slogan...

NEW POSTER

Verity has designed a striking new poster. Hope you like it as much as we do.

In case it needs spelling out:
The next L'Amour Electronique is this Saturday, 9pm-3am at The West Hill, Buckingham Place, Brighton.
Entry is FREE as always, and we will be playing all manner of French Ye-Ye and Gallic Freakbeat, plus tons of synth-laden soundtracks and electronic ditties.

Plastic Bertrand admits: Ça n'etait pas moi

slow news day at The Guardian...

Belgian singer blames former producer after admitting his was not voice on Ça Plane Pour Moi.

"The Belgian singer Plastic Bertrand has admitted that the voice that gave the world the 1977 Euro-punk anthem Ça Plane Pour Moi was not his. Roger Jouret, the man behind the Plastic Bertrand persona, had previously denied that he was not the singer on the record. But in an interview with the Belgian newspaper Le Soir, he admitted it had been another singer – and laid the blame at the door of his former producer, Lou Deprijck. His admission came a day after a linguist commissioned by a judge concluded that the singer's accent did not match the voice on the record."

..........................................................
Looks like Mr Bertrand had a pang of guilt, the allegations were only reported on Tuesday! Unbelievably a linguistic expert was brought in to analyse the vocal phrasing on the song and concluded that all was not cool.

Serge-fest

Last Sunday, Verity and I went to a free screening of the Gainsbourg film. For some reason it's been re-titled Je T'aime... Moi Non Plus for the English speaking market, perhaps to make it more accessible to a new audience by referencing the one song most people know from his back-catalogue. But definitely a bit confusing for anyone who knows a bit more about Gainsbourg and has knowledge of his own 1976 directed film Je T'aime... Moi Non Plus.

I picked up this glossy little pamphlet at the cinema:



I won't spoil the film for anyone who's not seen it yet, but it was definitely a better viewing experience than when I first saw it on a longhaul flight (on a six-inch screen with altitude sickness and jumbo-jet engines roaring in the background). Joann Sfar has used his artistic-license in building the Gainsbourg narrative around the myths and tales that make Serge's life so colourful. There is much spinning of yarns and embellishing of myths, which turn what could've been a straight-down-the-line biopic into an almost fantastical, hallucinatory tale.

Later that evening, we reacquainted ourselves with some a little Serge-fest on DVD, comme ça...