Barbara - "Madame" Vinyl, LP, Album, 1970 (Philips)

The first seven songs on "Madame" is a seven-song tableaux or suite with lyrics by Remo Forlani, and music by our star, Barbara.   Forlani was a writer, screenwriter, and an actor who worked with Jean-Luc Godard (Made in the U.S.A.") and worked with Chris Marker and Alain Resnais.   Barbara is an iconic French singer/songwriter whose music and singing is very dramatic, and I think unique.   There is only "one" Barbara."  

"Madame" is orchestrated and arranged by Jean-Claude Vannier, who is a visionary musician/composer who worked with Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Fontaine among many others.  His work is on the border of the avant-garde and French pop song.  In a fashion, he's the bridge between Musique Concréte and the Yé-Yé.   So, the album has three unique voices, and it's a remarkable cocktail in an album form.    Barbara is the real deal and is considered to be the new version of a chanson singer.  Perhaps due to her songwriting, as well as being an early AIDS activist in France.   For the English speaking world, another avenue to explore through this French iconic singer/writer. 

Various - "La Musique dans Le Film D' Alain Resnais" Vinyl, LP, 2017 (Doxy)

Alain Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet's film La Valse De Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad) is a masterpiece that is not to everyone's liking.  The ultimate chic arty film of all time.  The score to that movie is the hit off this album of Resnais' soundtrack music to his films made in the 1960s.   All of side one is devoted to Marienbad, and it's written and performed on organ by Francis Seyrig, whose sister is the star of the film, Delphine Seyrig.  It seems he did this score and he also made the music for Robert Bresson's "Procès De Jeanne D'Arc"  -  so his career may have been short, but was clearly talented and in the right place at the right time.  The Marienbad soundtrack is just an organ.  I'm presuming a large pipe organ.  Incredible sound.  And very dark goth sounding that I think would have made a great piece of music before the band Bauhaus came on the stage.   When you see the film, you can't imagine another score attach to it.  The music represents the imagery which is beautiful, sexual, and a sense of regret or at the very least, a bad mood.   A very precise and pointed music.  The music was originally released as a 7" EP single.   I can't imagine how great that must have sound - just having that powerful organ coming from a speaker in the early 1960s. 

"Hiroshima, Mon Amour (Suite)" is by Georges Delerue and famed Italian film composer Giovanni Fusco.   It reminds me of early Stravinsky.  The film "Hiroshima, Mon Amour" is a doomed romance between a French woman and a Japanese man.  Like Marienbad, it deals with memory or how one perceives things in contemporary life.  Another excellent package from the mysterious Doxy Records.