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Jean-Claude Vannier

Jean-Claude Vannier is 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.

Jean-Claude Vannier is 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.

Roses Rouge Sang
Temporary Super Offer! *2024 stock* Precisely four decades since the original release of the 1971 LP Histoire De Melody Nelson, Serge Gainsbourg’s most celebrated composer, arranger and composer Jean-Claude Vannier now returns to the same artistic territory that has since come to represent his most iconic period and continually inspire almost five generations of experimental rock luminaries. Respected throughout France as a long running singer-songwriter and experimental composer in his own righ…
La bête noire/Paris n'existe pas
Temporary Super Offer! From deep in the vaults of the Parisian composer who arguably created the stylistic blueprint for decades of orchestral French funk and symphonic psychedelia, "the arranger's arranger" Jean-Claude Vannier (Histoire de Melody Nelson/L'enfant assassin des mouches) finally liberates two previously unreleased and fabled film soundtracks that mark significant milestones in the career of this legendary composer and his close connection to the French free jazz scene. Comprised on…
La Bete Noire
When braving the oblique corners of Jean-Claude Vannier's vault, few lost souls cast a darker silhouette than the cinematic obscurity known only as La Bête Noire ("The Black Beast"). Lost and presumed missing for decades the soundtrack tapes to this lesser-known 1983 French thriller, captures the revered composer and arranger of Serge Gainsbourg's Histoire De Melody Nelson embarking on a darker exploration of free jazz, frenzied batucadas, and cyclic carousel psychedelia. Counting key players of…
Les Chemins De Katmandou
Temporary Super Offer! **The long awaited repress of this much anticipated long lost Gainsbourg/Vannier Holy Grail is back** This history of music is filled with legends - what was, what might have been, and all that which was lost. Among these narratives is Jean-Claude Vannier and Serge Gainsbourg’s soundtrack for André Cayatte’s drug fueled 1969 film Les Chemins De Katmandou. Since being recorded, this sonic marvel has been steeped in mystique. For more than forty years it was thought lost - t…
Electro Rapide
Temporary Super Offer! Electro Rapide is a collection of rare and unreleased archive material from the studio archives of legendary French orchestral pop composer Jean-Claude Vannier. Taken from the period before and during his revered creative relationship with Serge Gainsbourg (reaching their halcyon with 1971’s Histoire De Melody Nelson) these tracks reveal a rare glimpse of Vannier’s self-initiated instrumental projects that were crowbarred between an airtight studio diary as one of France’s…
L'Enfant Assassin des Mouches (alternate takes)
Few copies back in stock. Late in 2015, exactly ten years since Finders Keepers Records first liberated Jean Claude Vannier’s 1973 French Holy Grail concept LP L’Enfant Assassin Des Mouches, the label was handed a very unexpected anniversary gift in the form of a small clutch of lost Vannier studio master tapes.  Having worked closely with Jean Claude to leave no stone unturned both label and artist were shocked and delighted to be given what turned out to be further insights in to the musical i…
L'Enfant Assassin des Mouches
Temporary Super Offer! To mark its 2015 ten-year anniversary, the Finders Keepers label presents an improved, remastered repress, with updated liner notes in a gatefold sleeve, of its first release, a reissue of Jean-Claude Vannier's 1972 album L'Enfant Assassin des Mouches. At the time of the 2005 reissue the resurgence of '60s Gallic pop, once known as yé-yé music, had escalated beyond an interstellar height. Without a shadow of doubt, the flagship LP with the best odds on becoming a discernin…
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