Brigitte Fontaine

Featuring: Areski

condition (record/cover):  NM / NM

Gatefold sleeve. 

The fifth Brigitte Fontaine album, issued in 1972 on Saravah and produced by the label's founder Pierre Barouh, is the record where Fontaine's persona fully crystallised. Three years had passed since the landmark Comme à la Radio (1969) with Areski Belkacem and the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and Fontaine returned to the studio with a wider cast: Areski on percussion and co-composition, Jacques Higelin on multiple instruments, Georges Arvanitas on piano, Jean-Charles Capon on cello, Julie Dassin on backing vocals and lyric texts, Philippe Maté on saxophone, Olivier Bloch-Lainé behind the boards on one track.

The songs are short, fragmented, often interrupted by hidden tracks ("Brigitte" runs into "Pour le patron"; "Moi aussi" into "Famille"). The musical language sits between chanson, free improvisation and pre-punk recitation. "L'Auberge" is a four-minute tableau set against Capon's cello drone. "Le Dragon" places Fontaine's voice over Areski's percussion in something close to a gnawa rhythm. "Vingt secondes" lasts exactly that. "Eros" is a long sensual monologue. Throughout, Fontaine's diction is unmistakable: the half-whispered, half-declaimed delivery that would later influence Mathilde Santing, Bertrand Belin, Jeanne Cherhal and most French independent singers in her wake.

The original vintage Saravah pressing on SH 10034, gatefold sleeve, produced and distributed by Barouh's own enterprise. A pivotal album of post-1968 French underground music, and one of the more original singer-led records of its decade.