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LP
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TN 092LP
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2011 release. 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 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 right, it has taken this inclusive forty-year period for his music to travel beyond his central European fanbase thanks to a growing community of vinyl archeologists and French pop and conceptual rock enthusiasts who have come to clearly recognize the recurring production credits to JCV as a seal of quality and approval while taking gambles on Parisian picture sleeve pop. This LP comprises a personnel of the legendary European session players that appeared on classic Vannier and Gainsbourg scores such as Cannabis, La Horse, Slogan, and Les Chemins de Katmandou, as well as Histoire De Melody Nelson itself, and his own mythical follow up LP, the truly bizarre 1973 avant-garde ballet L'Enfant Assassin Des Mouches. The rhythm section line-up for the album comprises Pierre-Alain Dahan (drums), Dougie Wright (drums), Herbie Flowers (bass), Tony Bonfils (bass), Vic Flick (guitar), Denys Lable (guitar and banjo), and Marc Chantereau (percussion). Recorded partly in Paris and partly in the UK (not unlike the classic Gainsbourg LPs) the album Roses Rouge Sang ("Blood Red Roses") hears JCV taking care of vocal duties in his own unique style combining the macabre and the optimistic with ingenious world play and expert poetic use of the French language. Flourishing from initial rehearsal sessions for the first-ever live performance of Histoire De Melody Nelson, Roses Rouge Sang captures the authentic line-up just weeks after their initial reunion. With Roses Rouge Sang, JCV combines a lifetime of experience working with some of the best orchestras and pop rhythm sections in throughout the world with a return to his roots and his initial, radical ideas on how contemporary music could combine the two.
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LP
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FKR 109LP
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Finders Keepers Records present both the hallucinogenic orchestral music to Robert Benayoun's Paris n'existe pas (1969) and the rhythmic onslaught and cyclic waltzes from Patrick Chaput's La bête noire (1983) complete with an extensive booklet of essays, interviews, secrets, and rare images from both of these mythical cinematic obscurities. From deep in the vaults of the Parisian composer, Jean-Claude Vannier 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 this one vinyl disc you will find the only existing original historic recordings to his first ever 1968 collaboration with Serge Gainsbourg as well as the entire lost musical score for Vannier's first major star-studded solo film commission.
La bête noire: From the furious pen of controversial author Jean-Pierre Bastid (Let The Corpses Tan/Massacre Of Pleasure) and directed by one-time realisateur Patrick Chaput the gritty street crime thriller precedes the likes of La haine. Revealing itself to be one of Jean-Claude Vannier's most unique scores these previously unreleased studio master tapes capture self-styled batucadas and furious rhythm tracks next to frenzied carousel waltzes free from the stylistic time-stamp of their 1983 recording date. These experimental recordings remain independent from the pop and rock idiom and are both timeless as well as groundbreaking due to the deployment of key players from the French free jazz scene and the reunion of Vannier's long-standing Insolitudes. Showcasing a crack team of Palm/Futura/Actuel/Saravah label regulars such as saxophonist Philippe Maté alongside drummer Bernard Lubat, Arpadys/Voyage rhythm masters Marc Chantereau and Pierre-Alain Dahan, and session legend Michel Zanlonghi, this thunderous group bridges an authentic gap between The Jef Gilson Group and France's signature "cosmic" revolution. Previously unheard compositions, rhythms, and sound design experiments.
Paris n'existe pas: Previously the subject of biographical rock history, archival documentaries, and cruel bootlegging opportunity, the official master tapes to Jean-Claude Vannier's first ever studio date with Serge Gainsbourg poetically mirrors the title of the film... They didn't exist, until now. Culled from reference recordings, rehearsals, playback tapes, and work-in-progress TV magazine features, Finders Keepers in close collaboration with Jean-Claude present the genuine hallucinogenic orchestral and experimental sound design recordings that appeared on the 1968 film Paris n'existe pas. The brooding orchestrations and experimental music found on this record comes complete with interjections of modern jazz courtesy of French free jazz mainstays Philippe Maté and Jean-Louis Chautemps. With the help of an esteemed string ensemble Vannier also lays down an early orchestral blueprint for his own "approximately-Orient" signature sound in its earliest naked form just three years before Histoire de Melody Nelson would cause widespread controversy on its release.
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7"
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FKSP 016EP
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RSD 2019 release. 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 the French jazz scene within its ranks, The Insolitudes group comprises a crack team of Palm/Futura/Actuel/Saravah regulars such as saxophonist Philippe Maté alongside drummer Bernard Labat (Mad Ducks), and legendary Arpadys/Voyage rhythm masters Marc Chantereau and Pierre-Alain Dahan (Brutus Drums) all of whom alongside Michel Zanlonghi (Ensemble De Percussion De Paris) make up this thunderous, tumultuous, four-headed rhythm machine bridging an authentic gap between the Jef Gilson groups and France's signature "cosmic" revolution.
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CD
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FKR 050CD
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2011 release. For their 50th release, Finders Keepers Record's label heads Andy Votel, Dom Thomas and Doug Shipton return to their first release L'Enfant Assassin Des Mouches by Jean-Claude Vannier released by Finders Keepers in 2005 (BMS 001CD/ FKR 001X-LP), with a long overdue return to Jean-Claude Vannier's vaults! 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 most in demand arrangers and composers of the post Mai-68 generation. Alongside a handful of his contemporaries and collaborators such as Michel Colombier, Serge Gainsbourg, François de Roubaix, Brigitte Fontaine, Claude Nougaro and Gerard Manset, composer and orchestral arranger Jean-Claude Vannier is globally recognized as one of the key exponents of the Gallic pop cognoscenti to make the significant change from '60s yé-yé to the brooding conceptual pop which defined the following decade. His own masterworks, Histoire De Melody Nelson and L'Enfant Assassin Des Mouches (both of which benefited from the poetic prose of Serge Gainsbourg), are two such productions that continue to inspire and challenge popular music as long as five decades since they were first released to moderate audiences in the early 1970s. Electro Rapide is a collection of similarly underexposed instrumental works that combine a mixture of Jean-Claude Vannier's familiar trademark motifs and stylings from his coveted work for idiosyncratic French pop vocalists (such as Fontaine, Nougaro, Leonie and Anna St. Clair) with the seldom heard experimental music for ballets, fashion shows as well as his infamous film music (such as the soundtracks for Cannabis (1970) and La Horse (1970)).
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LP
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FKR 050LP
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2021 restock; LP version. For their 50th release, Finders Keepers Record's label heads Andy Votel, Dom Thomas and Doug Shipton return to their first release L'Enfant Assassin Des Mouches by Jean-Claude Vannier released by Finders Keepers in 2005 (BMS 001CD/ FKR 001X-LP), with a long overdue return to Jean-Claude Vannier's vaults! 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 most in demand arrangers and composers of the post Mai-68 generation. Alongside a handful of his contemporaries and collaborators such as Michel Colombier, Serge Gainsbourg, François de Roubaix, Brigitte Fontaine, Claude Nougaro and Gerard Manset, composer and orchestral arranger Jean-Claude Vannier is globally recognized as one of the key exponents of the Gallic pop cognoscenti to make the significant change from '60s yé-yé to the brooding conceptual pop which defined the following decade. His own masterworks, Histoire De Melody Nelson and L'Enfant Assassin Des Mouches (both of which benefited from the poetic prose of Serge Gainsbourg), are two such productions that continue to inspire and challenge popular music as long as five decades since they were first released to moderate audiences in the early 1970s. Electro Rapide is a collection of similarly underexposed instrumental works that combine a mixture of Jean-Claude Vannier's familiar trademark motifs and stylings from his coveted work for idiosyncratic French pop vocalists (such as Fontaine, Nougaro, Leonie and Anna St. Clair) with the seldom heard experimental music for ballets, fashion shows as well as his infamous film music (such as the soundtracks for Cannabis (1970) and La Horse (1970)).
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7"
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FKSP 008EP
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RSD 2016 release. Authentic 1970s promo artwork. Limited edition of 2000. Amazing master tape discovery of a misplaced 1973 Jean-Claude Vannier single, including previously unheard instrumentation and alternative arrangements and mix board levels from the first days of the L'Enfant Assasin des Mouches sessions (BMS 001CD, 1972), which occurred a few months after the release of Vannier's seminal work on Histoire de Melody Nelson (1971). These pieces were recorded as a proposed major label single, indicating that they were the first (and most exciting) tracks to emerge from the flamboyant, visionary sessions. This is the first in a series of vintage Vannier projects extracted from a vault of previously lost materials.
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LP
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FKR 001X-LP
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2024 restock. 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 discerning household object was Histoire de Melody Nelson (1971) by one Serge Gainsbourg, an inimitable 45-minute concept LP handcrafted by a bass-driven psychedelic rock group and a heaven-sent 1001-piece orchestral and choral symphony. The album left hip hop producers and progressive rock aficionados crying out for more and more for years to come. This LP was in a league of its very own... or was it? The seldom-sung musical arranger for Melody Nelson, Jean-Claude Vannier, is the lesser-spotted tell-tale seal of sample-friendly quality when it comes to crate-digging "en Français." Suitably, rumors among French record dealers claiming "the band who played Melody Nelson recorded a follow-up LP" became a legend of psychedelic folklore. Another unconfirmed rumor about JCV taking the remaining outtakes of the beloved Melody Nelson to create a promo-only experimental rock LP left sample-hungry producers and DJs in turmoil... The answers to these mysteries lay between the gatefold sleeve of an undiscovered conceptual album bizarrely titled L'Enfant Assassin des Mouches by a custom-built avant-rock entourage called Insolitudes. So here we have it. For record-collectors looking for that special something, this LP contains the extra-special everything. Peruse the following genres: psychedelic, classical, soundtrack, jazz, hip hop, samples, avant-garde, funk. Then place a copy of L'Enfant Assassin des Mouches in each section. History notes that when M. Gainsbourg first heard the initial bones of this LP he took his poetic pencil to paper and composed bizarre liner notes, thus consummating the most extraordinary concept album of all time. The story "The Child Assassin of the Flies" was to be included as the only information to grace the LP's highly collectible concertina-gatefold sleeve. The story in full is reproduced in its native tongue on this very special re-release package. DJs and producers such as Jim O'Rourke, Stereolab's Tim Gane, and David Holmes have spent sleepless nights in perusal of original copies of this perfect release and now regard it as "One of the Best."
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CD
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BMS 037CD
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2011 release. 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 right, it has taken this inclusive forty-year period for his music to travel beyond his central European fan base, thanks to a growing community of vinyl archeologists and French pop and conceptual rock enthusiasts who have come to clearly recognize the recurring production credits to JCV as a seal of quality and approval while taking gambles on Parisian picture sleeve pop. This all-new LP comprises a personnel of the legendary European session players that appeared on classic Vannier and Gainsbourg scores such as Cannabis, La Horse, Slogan and Les Chemins de Katmandou as well as Histoire De Melody Nelson itself, and his own mythical follow-up LP, the truly bizarre 1973 avant-garde ballet L'Enfant Assassin Des Mouches (which was finally rescued from obscurity in 2005 by Finders Keepers as the label's debut release). The rhythm section line-up for the album alone reads like a European record collector's wet dream. Recorded partly in Paris and partly in the UK (not unlike the classic Gainsbourg LPs), the album Roses Rouge Sang (trans. "Blood Red Roses") hears JCV taking care of vocal duties in his own unique style, combining the macabre and the optimistic with ingenious word-play and expert poetic use of the French language. Flourishing from initial rehearsal sessions for the first-ever live performance of Histoire De Melody Nelson (which was eventually staged by Finders Keepers at the Barbican Theatre in London in 2006) Roses Rouge Sang captures the authentic line-up just weeks after their initial reunion. With Roses Rouge Sang, JCV combines a lifetime of experience working with some of the best orchestras and pop rhythm sections throughout the world, with a return to his roots and his initial, radical ideas on how contemporary music could combine the two.
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CD
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BMS 001CD
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2006 release. Serge Gainsbourg's Histoire de Melody Nelson is an inimitable, 45-minute concept LP handcrafted by a bass-driven psychedelic rock group and a heaven-sent 1001 piece orchestral and choral symphony. The album left hip-hop producers alongside progressive rock aficionados crying out for more and more for years to come. This LP was in a league of its very own... or was it? The seldom-sung musical arranger for Melody Nelson, Jean-Claude Vannier, has become one of the most enigmatic names in French-funk; lorded by many as the "French David Axelrod." Vannier's name is the lesser-spotted, tell-tale seal of sample-friendly quality when it comes to crate-digging "en Francais." And the answers to all the floating mysteries, myths and rumors surrounding the man lay flat between the anonymous gatefold sleeve of an undiscovered conceptual album bizarrely entitled L'Enfant Assassin des Mouches. So here we have it. For collectors and enthusiasts alike looking for that special something, this LP contains the extra-special EVERYTHING. Peruse the following genres: psychedelic, classical, soundtracks, jazz, hip-hop, samples, avant-garde, funk.
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CD
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FKR 001CD
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This is the 2nd version of this album (previous edition on the French Night & Day label), with new/unique cover artwork and 2 bonus track. "The debut release from Delay 68 distant cousin label Finders Keepers Records, we present the seminal 1972 album from Serge Gainsbourg's right-hand man Jean-Claude Vannier. Recorded during the same sessions as Gainsbourg's highly acclaimed masterpiece Histoire De Melody Nelson it follows in a similar avant-garde rock-opera vein. L'Enfant Assasin Des Mouches (The Child Fly Killer) is a supernatural tale written by Gainsbourg depicting the journey of the young child travelling through a nightmarish 'Fly Kingdom.' Vannier narrates the story with sparse music concrete sounds coupled with choirs, funky beats, cowbells, wah-wah guitars and ethnic strings. Comparisons could be made with some of Frank Zappa's Hot Rats material and Alain Goraguer's creepy Le Planet Sauvge. At the time this was released as a promo-only in ridiculously small numbers (around 100) and is regarded as the Holy Grail among French psych and prog collectors. Also included on the CD are the obscure funk instrumentals taken from equally rare 7" issued to accompany the TV drama series Point D'Interrogation." Stickered w/ over-the-top hype from Jarvis Cocker (Pulp), Jim O'Rourke, Tim Gane (Stereolab) and David Holmes!
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