Jean Claude Vannier - 1975 - L'enfant Assassin Des Mouches

Jean Claude Vannier

1975

L'enfant Assassin Des Mouches

01. L'Enfant La Mouche Et Les Allumettes 2:15

02. L'Enfant Au Royaume Des Mouches 3:27

03. Danse Des Mouches Noires Gardes Du Roi 3:05

04. Danse De L'Enfant Et Du Roi Des Mouches 2:53

05. Le Roi Des Mouches Et La Confiture De Roses 3:20

06. L'Enfant Assassin Des Mouches 1:45

08. Les Gardes Volent Au Secours Du Roi 3:55

09. Mort Du Roi Des Mouches 3:38

10. Pattes De Mouches 0:51

11. Le Papier Tue-Enfant 2:38

12. Petite Agonie De L'Enfant Assassin 0:27

Recorded At – Studio Des Dames

Edited At – Studio Suzelle

Lacquer Cut At – Magnum International

Printed By – Dillard et Cie. Imp. Paris

Engineer – Jean-Claude Charvier

Engineer [Assistant] – Patrice Quef

Music By, Directed By – Jean-Claude Vannier

Photography By – Tony Frank

Producer [Réalisation] – Jean Renard

Text By – Serge Gainsbourg

Composer and producer Jean-Claude Vannier has spent much of the past few decades writing scores for French television and cinema, most of which have gone largely unheard outside Europe. Along the way he has also worked with pop artists such as Brigitte Fontaine and Françoise Hardy, but he remains most widely celebrated for his lavish arrangements on Serge Gainsbourg's classic jailbait concept album Histoire de Melody Nelson. Throughout his work, Vannier has displayed a fearless ambition to communicate a coherent narrative, primarily-- or even exclusively-- through his carefully programmed music. And never were Vannier's grandiose ambitions given freer reign than on his jawdropping 1972 solo debut L'Enfant Assasin des Mouches (The Child Assassin of the Flies). On this bizarre and astonishing album, which B-Music has now given its first official domestic release, Vannier uses every weapon in his considerable arsenal to craft a turbulent soundscape that deftly mirrors the endless commotion and confusion so peculiar to childhood.

Originally made available in only 100 promo copies, L'Enfant Assasin des Mouches has long been the stuff of legend amongst serious vinyl collectors, and it isn't difficult to hear why. In conducting the album's unruly pastiche, Vannier seems equal parts Van Dyke Parks and Carl Stalling, drawing impulsively upon multiple classical and soundtrack traditions, sleazy Euro-funk, Middle Eastern modalities, proggy hard rock, and what sounds like the full sound effects library of a large radio theater troupe. The piece's loose narrative structure is provided in the liner notes, written after the fact by Gainsbourg. This macabre little libretto-- which involves a young, fly-torturing child who receives his just desserts when lured down into the underground fly kingdom-- might be screwy enough to make Tommy read like Ibsen, but it does provide a suitably dramatic context for Vannier's violent, often jarring musical juxtapositions.

It seems a great understatement to say that L'Enfant Assasin des Mouches is exactly the sort of extravagant 1970s period piece that simply couldn't get produced today, even if someone had the studio resources and the sheer chutzpah to try. Without access to any of today's sampling technology, Vannier was forced to make all of his wild stylistic leaps in multi-tracked real time with real musicians-- employing a string quartet, the Jeunesse de France choir, a full horn section, and special effects ranging from billiard balls to a model helicopter. By using these live sound sources, Vannier was able to give the piece an impression of enhanced physical space and mass, as evident on the opening "L'Enfant La Mouche Et Les Allumettes" which shifts abruptly from an audio vérité intro of traffic and tolling church bells into a queasy, vertigo-inducing fog of reeds and roiling percussion.

Later, on the majestic "Danse Des Mouches Noires Gardes Du Roi", Vannier combines lush, Morricone-like orchestrations and jazz piano in a manner that suggests something of the child's ability to retreat unseen into the world of imagination, an effect further amplified by the playful calliope of "Danse De L'Enfant Et Du Roi Des Mouches". Soon, however, events take a darker cast on "Mort Du Roi Des Mouches", with the protagonist's unwholesome treachery effectively conveyed via the intrusion of raunchy wah-wah guitars and overcast prog-rock atmospherics. By contrast, the closing miniatures "Le Papier Tue-Enfant" and "Petite Agonie De L'Enfant Assassin" appear tranquil and practically organic. The flies in their kingdom have apparently chosen to celebrate their eventual victory by indulging in a brief interlude of flute and French café accordion, bringing the tumultuous album to a remarkably peaceful conclusion, as though the world has been returned to a more natural state of order in the child's absence.

The music on L'Enfant Assasin des Mouches can often seem so agitated and chaotic that it can become difficult to discern the figure of Vannier himself, unless the meticulously balanced discord can itself be taken to be his true signature. Occasionally the clouds do part enough to seemingly catch a recognizable glimpse of the artist, as when the choral passages of "Les Gardes Volent Au Secours Du Roi" provide a brief echo of Melody Nelson's "Cargo Culte". By and large, however, Vannier best expresses himself by drawing hidden links between outwardly incompatible musical vocabularies, a strategy later to be reflected in the syncretic concepts of artists like Matmos, dj/Rupture, or Matthew Herbert. That Vannier was able to do so with such a high degree of melodicism, manic invention, and a contagious sense of wonder seems just so much extra frosting.

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 Assassin 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 10,001-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 Assassin 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.