Comme à la radio

"Of all the strange records this French vanguard pop chanteuse ever recorded, this 1971 collaboration between the teams of Brigitte Fontaine and her songwriting partner Areski and the Art Ensemble of Chicago - who were beginning to think about returning to the United States after a two-year stay - is the strangest and easily most satisfying. While Fontaine's records could be beguiling with their innovation, they occasionally faltered by erring on the side of gimmickry and cuteness. Here, the Art Ensemble provide the perfect mysterious and ethereal backdrop for her vocal explorations. Featuring the entire Art Ensemble of that time period and including fellow Chicago AACM member Leo Smith on second trumpet, Fontaine and Areski stretched the very notion of what pop had been and could be ... Remarkable stuff from a very adventurous time when virtually anything was possible".

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"As [Fontaine] began to work closer with proto-freak-folk/songwriter Jacques Higelin (he wrote one of Est ... Folle's songs) and her soon-to-be lifelong collaborator Areski Belkacem, her music mutated into something stranger and more wondrous. Comme à la Radio stems from the musical/theatrical works the three undertook at the end of the 1960s, where Fontaine's husky spoken verses went atop spare and propulsive rhythms that drew on folk and Arabic and African instrumentation. The album's coup comes in the form of Brigitte Fontaine and Areski bringing in the fiercely defiant jazz group the Art Ensemble of Chicago, who had decamped to Paris for a few years ... [Fontaine's] words only sound seductive to non-Francophone speakers, for Fontaine's lyrics for "Comme à la Radio" comment on that acute sense of alienation and horror in the modern world, with lines about thousands weeping, police beating a young man, an alcoholic doctor, repeating a line that translates as "It's cold intheworld" in a whisper that sends shivers ... The numbers featuring the Art Ensemble's contributions remain some of free jazz's most evocative crossovers, but what makes Comme a la Radio one of the era's most striking documents is that even without the jazz musician guests, it's a haunting acid-folk album underneath the brass".

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"If "Brigitte Fontaine est...?" captured May '68's mood of cultural agitation, her next album, 1969's "Comme à la Radio", documented the uneasy atmosphere that followed ... "Comme à la Radio" grew out of live concerts Fontaine and [French musician of Algerian descent] Areski performed with the Art Ensemble [of Chicago], concerts that were, stated one French reviewer, like "a kind of dream [or] dark poem". That rhapsodic hallucinatory quality carries over into the album ... While Lester Bowie and Wadada Leo Smith blow with squalling force on "Leo", for most of the album the Ensemble reposition their Great Black Music somewhere between northern Europe and north Africa, assisted by [among other sounds] more traditional jazz stylings of double bass and cello. Held up as an early radical synthesis of French chanson and world music, in the growing anti-Algerian atmosphere of post-68 Paris, "Comme à la Radio" was also a defiantly political album, the sound of displaced peoples inacountry that no longer felt like home ... Most striking, however, is Fontaine's own sense of dislocation, her lyrics of scummy Rimbaudian derangement joined by a new, chilly elemental imagism and melodic unrest. Singing in a higher register, Fontaine is a bewildered little girl, a France Gall on the other side of the looking glass".

"Members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, including Leo Smith and the Art Ensemble of Chicago, settled in Paris in 1969, where they were embraced by the city's radical student culture. There they fell in with the actress and erstwhile pop singer named Brigitte Fontaine and her percussionist, Areski Belkacem. The resulting album, 'Comme à La Radio', uses the AACM musicians' laconic horns mixed with Middle Eastern elements that conjure up an eerie atmosphere on a set of French-language songs".