Le's Knit

Tricotage is a 2000 collaborative album between Joëlle Léandre and Danielle P. Roger. Léandre plays along percussion and nothing but. This came through on Ambiances Magnétiques of Canada.

With her sleek bob haircut (usually with a flower placed just so), vintage fashion sense, strikingly beautiful looks and artfully customized ukulele, Janet Klein might seem at first to be a simple novelty act, a 21st-century hipster "ironically" recreating the subtly naughty looks of a fin-de-siecle French postcard. Then she opens her mouth to sing. There's no Betty Boop hiccups or Mae West-style brassiness in her charmingly original voice. And when she starts to play her ukulele, it's clear that this oft-ridiculed cousin of the guitar is neither prop nor gimmick, but a delightful and under-utilized musical instrument. Bearing an ever-expanding repertoire of, as she puts it, "obscure, lovely and naughty songs from the 1910's , 20's and 30's," Janet Klein is a musical archeologist hiding in the body of an F. Scott Fitzgerald heroine.

August 2022; appearing here in the much maligned "199.X" serié is this two-fer single-disc compiles both LPs released on the Swiss "Les Disques De L'Art Gué" label in the mid-80s, collecting the work of a tight-knit cadré of musicians working on & around each other: Victor "Fizzè" de Bros, Gilles-Vincent "Dizzi" Rieder, Laurent "Lorenz" Viennet, & Serge "Djodjo" Baudat, all working out of the former's Mensch studio.