Delirium In Hi-Fi - Elsa Popping

Delirium In Hi-Fi

Delirium In Hi-Fi

Elsa Popping And Her Pixieland Band

Recorded Somewhere In France

Columbia Records WL 106

1958

From the back cover: Listening to the music of Elsa Popping and her Dixieland Band is, to be truthful, an unnerving experience. It is not unlike watching a 3-D movie without the special spectacles, or carrying on a conversation under water. Mlle Popping for some months past, has been baffling the French nation –  group of people not usually given to easy surprise – with music such as the contained on this record. At last, word has leaked out that there is no such person (which might from the beginning have been surmised from the music); Elsa Popping is, in fact, Andre Popp, a talented and madly inventive arrange-conduct long famous in France. It many be that the listener will find himself swimming rough a pool full of jello as this amazing program unwinds, but the starling and rewarding presentation is well worth the effort.

Actually, Elsa Popping is made up of 50% Andre Popp and 50% Pierre Fatosme, the sound-effects wizard. Popp supplied the musial part, Fatosme the sound effects, and each of these short selections is the result of a cutting, assembling and splicing of tapes the complexity of which might compare with the work involved in editing a Beethoven symphony.

Andre Popp did not write his arrangements until he had finished a very careful and conscientious study of all the sound-effect possibilities developed buy Pierre Fatosme, who drew up a catalog of all achievable sound effects that he felt he could create. Popp squeezed and crammed all this into his head and then one by one, went drawing them out until he had used the full repertoire of twist, gags, jokes and shocks.

Besides the catalog of "social sound effects." Fatosme also drew up blueprints of sound. He divided his material into three parts: a close-up plane (somewhat without luster), a medium-distance plan (with some reverberations), and a distant plan (with echo). Achieving this three-dimensional music, he had three complementary sets of music with which he dealt in his own way, superimposing one on the other so as to obtain effects that you can hear in the record.

What is remarkable is that never for a moment has anything been sacrificed to obtain cheap or facile effects. Slapstick is studiously avoided. Slapstick could have been achieved, for instance, with more than one "At-choo" in Jealousy. Alone, this sneeze sound has a certain weird dignity; but if repeated, might have ruined the purity of the style.

From Billboard - March 3, 1958: Elsa Popping – a whimsical collaboration of arranger Andre Popp and sound expert Pierre Fatosme – does to familiar music what trick photography does to familiar sights. The result is a first-rate musical prank, providing such hilarious and startling trickery as trombones that skip like piccolos or singers who vocalize during a breath intake. It's all done with tapes – tapes that are mixed, speeded, slowed or run backward by the inventive Frenchmen, as they offer tunes like "Beer Barrel Polka" as no one ever quite heard them before. Good on all counts.

Perles de cristal

Java

La paloma

Beer Barrel Polka

Java du diable 

Jalousie

La Polka du roi

Java des bombes atomiques

Adios muchachos

La Polka du colonel

Java Martienne

La cumparsita