Michel Magne - Musique Tachiste (1959)

Pleasingly oddball half-hour of music by Michel Magne (1930-1984), who was best known as a French soundtrack composer, and for converting the Château d'Hérouville into a famed recording studio - its financial collapse in the mid 80s was a likely factor in Magne's suicide.  This album from the late 50s, charmingly illustrated by cartoonist Sempé, is now regarded as an early concept album: "part radical manifesto, part pantomime".

Drawing on jazz, modernist classical music and musique concrete, Magne took the album's title from the tachisme (spotism) movement in modern art, intending to create its musical analogue in "harmonies of colours".  Divided into six short pieces on the LP's first side, and a three-part concerto of sorts on side two, the former is more focused on odd sounds: echoing cymbalom, eerie voices and the vintage swoosh of ondes Martenot make up the opening track.  From there, orchestral sections and skittery piano parts are puncuated by more strange noises, prepared percussion and voices.  My personal favourite from these six tracks comes at the end, as the wordless vocal of Larmes Et Sol Pleurer soars upwards to become an ondes Martenot melody.  

 

The much jazzier Concertino Triple takes up the rest of the album and has a really neat vibraphone part, along with some Gunter Schuller-like orchestral jazz writing, a nice piano solo and occasional braying laughter and distant chatter in the mix. A really fun listen, and a real pioneering feast for the ears all round.

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