Public Servant Lifestyle

Make friends with the sweetly sinister sound stylings of serial collaborating chanteuse Charlotte Marionneau, AKA Le Volume Courbe.

I Killed My Best Friend by Le Volume Courbe

A sweetly sinister river of lights and shadows, whispers and screams, the first album by Le Volume Courbe is the work of Charlotte Marionneau. Eclectic, experimental and strangely compelling, it's already (rather unhelpfully, really) been described as "impossible to describe", which is a very good thing, unless you're the guy writing this...

Inspired by the do-your-own-thing ethos of (sometime Velvet Underground some chanteuse) Nico, The Ramones and Yoko Ono, Charlotte muses, "I think it's a punk record, in many ways. But not rock. I don't feel like a proper musician, or a proper singer either. I guess I'm somebody that has ideas, puts things together. If you're trying to do your own thing, without caring what's going on around you, it can actually help if you sometimes don't know exactly what you're doing. Then it's automatically original. I can't copy anyone else, I don't have the technical know-how, so it's unique. Not being experienced gives you more freedom." Once heard, Le Volume Courbe's playful, powerful songs of innocence and intrigue are not easily forgotten.

Charlotte moved to London ten years ago, after growing up in a small town in Pays de la Loire in France. She had a brief spell in a band there, but found that in London, "music is just so much more a part of the culture, unselfconsciously. Here, music comes to you." In '97, two years after she arrived, she recorded a duet with Simon Raymonde (a single, In My Place - a Robert Mitchum cover).

Le Volume Courbe - it means ‘the volume curve’ - is the name of a sculpture by an old friend in France. "When I was a teenager, this painter inspired me to be creative. I'd loved this sculpture, and when I needed a band name it suddenly hit me. The beauty is, it can mean so many different things. I also dream of converting the waves of the curves on an electrocardiogram machine, from someone in a coma, into music - I'm still looking into the practicalities of that."

Confidence

Settling in England, Charlotte began composing and making tracks, receiving vital encouragement from musicians like - former star of Mazzy Star - Hope Sandoval, Kevin Shields (the man behind the genius of My Bloody Valentine and more recently the voice behind City Girl, lead track from the film Lost In Translation), David Roback and Colm O'Ciosoig, all of whom contribute to the record. Most of it was recorded at home. "Kevin and Hope have been very important to this project. They were the first artists that I respected to say I should make it happen, and I trusted their opinion. These people gave me confidence."

A single - Harmony - with Alan McGee's Poptones label ensued; giving Charlotte the opportunity to craft slowly but surely on her distinctive material, a breathless band apart. Serge Gainsbourg was her mother's favourite artist, so the first record Charlotte was given was his Love On The Beat ("full of orgasms - what was she thinking?"), before the more artful designs of David Bowie, The Velvet Underground and The Stooges captured her blossoming imagination.

The first song she ever wrote has survived to become the title track on this first personal salvo. So how did that come about? “I Killed My Best Friend was actually an improvisation when I first sang it,” she says. “I didn't speak English well at the time; in fact I don't remember writing it. But I do remember being annoyed at my mother and my best friend, and thinking: I must kill them, at least in my head, at least for a while! A lot of these songs were recorded at different times, in different states of mind, so the voices and atmospheres vary."

Would she agree that it's at times a scary record? "No! That's funny! I don't find it scary at all. It may be nostalgic, but I want people to get the humour as well. It may be intense at times, but I hope the elements of dark comedy come across."

Academia

After spells studying – variously film and photography - Charlotte concedes suggestions of cinematic influences are inevitable. Though they may not be the obvious nouvelle vague ones you'd predict. "When mixing Harmony, I was thinking about the structure and editing of (Orson Wells tour-de-force) Citizen Kane. I'm a fan of (Roman) Polanski (The Tenant, Repulsion, Tess), Cocteau (Orpheus), and the way Harmony Korine creates a mood." Charlotte claims – and we believe her - that Andy Warhol's grainy footage of Edie Sedgwick and his Factory superstars also made an impression.

"Ain't got no home, ain't got no shoes, Ain't got no money, ain't got no class, Ain't got no skirts, ain't got no sweater, Ain't got no perfume, ain't got no beer, Ain't got no man..."

Album track Ain't Got No...I Got Life is a radical interpretation of the Nina Simone classic. "She's one of my favourite women singers. I asked Martin Duffy to play the piano, and it was mind-blowing, but then I realised she was one of the hardest people to cover, and perhaps this was a stupid idea! It took me two years to sing it - eventually I just thought, well, I just have to try to make it mine." You're not a traditional chanteuse then? We ask. "That's not the way I see myself."

The Mind Is A Horse - all heartbeat and crackle – is – says Charlotte: "...about panic attacks. They're quite surreal things to have. I took the title from an exhibition poster. If that track's scary, then that's the whole point."I Shall Skip Your Judgement is a song about a friend, which involves wordplay around Alexander ‘Skip’ Spence; while the sing Locarno was recorded in the titular Swiss town.

The Le Volume Courbe album - hard to describe indeed - isn't rock 'n' roll, and isn't world music. It's out of this world music. It's in your own world music, what-in-the-world music. It's just a few seconds longer than Chris Marker's seminal 1962 film La Jetee. It comes to you with the I Killed My Best Friend video - "the quickest, cheapest video ever made" - which with delicious, tongue-in-chic noir style involves a girl, a gun and a cigarette. And is Bonnie And Clyde meeting (Jean-Luc Godard’s 1965 French New Wave road movie) Pierrot Le Fou. Only much shorter. And far more mischievous.

The full track-listing for this great new album looks like this:

1. Harmony
2. Papillon de nuit
3. Who are you?
4. I killed my best friend
5. I shall skip your judgement
6. Thank you
7. Ain’t got no…I got life
8. Sitting in your head
9. Through this time
10. Hanging around
11. The mind is a horse
12. This & that
13. Locarno

Patti Smith recently handed Charlotte her socks, which is something that doesn't happen every day. "I admire the likes of Patti, Nico, Yoko Ono for sticking to what they do, for their attitude as artists. I hope I'll always be doing something creative, something aesthetic."

Aside form the new album, if you’ve got a fat wallet, you might care to track down the band’s only former UK single: a vinyl of album opener Harmony. Featuring Charlotte on vocals, guitar and keyboards, with Spencer Bewley on guitar, keyboards, joined by the enigmatically named ‘Mole’ on drums. The single originally came out on Alan McGee’s defunct Poptones label as a seven inch format only – and is already changing hands for above the odds sums on the likes of eBay and Opal Music.

Enchanting and elusive, this diary of dreams is one of the year's most extraordinary debuts – and a good runner for album of the year (so far) by our reckoning. Part gentle Isobel Campell, part breathy Kim Gordon stylings, this is great stuff. Listen long and listen close.

I Killed My Best Friend is out now on Honest Jons Records.

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