Andre Popp & Pierre Fatosme – Elsa Popping and her Pixieland Band – Delirium in Hi-Fi

I have been waiting for this album for a long time. I never really thought I would manage to find it on vinyl, since it was pressed in 1957, but then I didn’t realise there was a 1987 re-press.

Andre Popp was the son of a church organist, he was a Frenchman and he went on to do loads of boring easy listening music. Luckily, before penning the awful ‘Love Is Blue’ he recorded an album with Pierre Fatosme for Columbia’s Adventures in Sound series. The series presented exotic, worldly music on LP, and straddled the stereo revolution.

Posing as ‘Elsa Popping and her Pixieland Band‘ Andre Popp and Pierre Fatosme utilised early splicing and multi-tracking techniques which were pretty breakthrough at the time. The music is essentially polka but the compositions are schizophrenic and jerky, with strange vocal samples, quirky arrangements and surprising instrumental additions.

Some vocal parts were sung backwards, and then reversed. An orchestral sneeze is used at one point. Popp and Fatosme were thinking well outside the box, and a very odd polka album emerges as a result.

‘Java‘ was used on a Honda advert some years ago, and is a good example of this album’s strange vocal polka.

Download –> http://www.badongo.com/file/1203763