Celebrity endorsed discs too often tend to veer between utter claptrap or deeply average music elevated way beyond its level by virtue of extreme rarity. With names like Jim O'Rourke, Jarvis Cocker and David Holmes plastered all over the front you may start to think this might be something different. And you'd be right, this fantastic slab of 70’s exotica from Jean Claude Vannier is the kind of album they most definitely don’t make ‘em like anymore. It has a picture of a naked guy on a beach on the cover ferchrissakes, how could it fail?.

Vannier was most famous as Serge Gainsbourg’s arranger on the classic Histoire de Melody Nelson. There he managed to seamlessly integrate Gainsbourg’s louche vocals with moody string arrangements and funky rock backing. L'Enfant Assassin Des Mouches takes that sound to its extreme conclusion in a suite of instrumentals that runs the gamut of out there styles, cramming strings and choirs against funk backbeats, eastern melodies, clattering percussion, psych wig outs and music concrete.

It’s like getting a quick glimpse of another universe, one where the worlds of popular and experimental music have collapsed in on each other: Where the chopped up found sounds and abrasive tone clusters of Edgard Varese and Pierre Schaeffer sit next to acid guitars: where Harry Partch’s microtonal percussion is welded to blaring horns: where the rules of standard composition and arrangement are bent out of shape, thrown off course by pointillist, pizzicato strings or sudden juxtapositions of music concrete to end up in insane waltzes or full-on choral blow outs.

The CD version also comes with two bonus tracks in the form of two versions of Vannier’s theme for the French TV show Point D'Interrogation. Titled Je M'appelle Geraldine it’s classic euro soundtrack material. It's little more than a harpsichord melody (recalling both John Barry’s Ipcress File and the funkier side of Ennio Morricone) against a loping backbeat supported by a steady drone and a short organ middle eight. At under 90 seconds in each take it’s also short and sweet and, while the sound has some obvious vinyl distortion, its worth buying the cd for these takes alone.

This release marks the launch of the Finders Keepers label which aims to “introduce fans of psychedelic/jazz/folk/funk/avant-garde and whacked-out movie muzak to a lost world of undiscovered vinyl artifacts from the annals of alternative pop history.” Hardly a new idea and Johnny Trunk has been there and done that already but they have to be congratulated for digging up this treasure.

Reccomended for fans of exotic easy listening, library music, avant-garde, soundtracks, Mothers era Zappa, Ennio Morricone and David Axelrod.