In 1951, two years before Elvis Presley first entered a recording studio, a youthful Jean-Jacques Perrey made his recording debut on Charles Trenet’s “L'âme des Poètes.” He played a proto-synthesizer called the Ondioline that was known for its ability to mimic other instruments, as well as for its naturalistic vibrato, a result of the instrument being suspended on springs.
Jean-Jacques Perrey et son Ondioline, the first release on a new label from Gotye that is dedicated to uncovering lost works by pioneering musicians, rounds up Perrey’s work on the instrument, featuring unreleased tracks from his personal archives and selections from private-press releases. Given the role that Perrey, who died in 2016, would go on to play in popular music—inspiring the Beastie Boys and being sampled by Dr. Dre and Gang Starr, among others—it’s easy to make a case for this collection’s historical importance.
Important, though, doesn’t always equate with entertaining, and the latter half of this record, an extended demonstration of the Ondioline’s ability to recreate the sound of everything from the French horn to the banjo, feels more informative than it does engaging—particularly given that Perrey exhibited the Ondioline’s capabilities to far more amusing effect on a 1960 episode of the American TV show “I’ve Got a Secret.” By happy contrast, the opening 11 songs of this anthology are a riot: a collection of funkily weird, weirdly funky, and remarkably elegant Ondioline tracks that take in genres as disparate as chanson (“L'âme des Poètes”), galactic ambience (“Visa to the Stars”) and what we can only call barnyard funk (“Chicken on the Rocks,” based on the folk song “Chicken Reel”).
The Ondioline was, as the producers of “I’ve Got a Secret” clearly realized, a novelty. But the key to Perrey’s work, with the Ondioline and later with the Moog, was that he never treated it as such. Perrey was not interested in innovation for innovation’s sake; he used the Ondioline as a tool to help him create music that is sumptuous, extravagant, and soulful. It helps that Perrey was such a master of the instrument, known for his finesse in playing its keyboard with one hand while manipulating the filters with the other. You can hear the effect this produces on the semi-comic lament “Danielle of Amsterdam,” composed, arranged, and produced by long-time collaborator Angelo Badalamenti, where the changing tone of the Ondioline—from comical squawk to cosmic banjo via fairground organ—subtly alters the mood of the piece, nudging the song forward in a suitably dramatic fashion.
Elsewhere, Perrey uses the Ondioline to masterfully mimic a violin on “L'âme des Poètes”; impersonates the effect of falling stars on the beautifully far-out “Mars Reflector”; and teases the sound of pigs, ducks, and donkeys on the cartoonish “Barnyard in Orbit,” a song that gives ridiculousness a good name. By any standard, the Ondioline is an impressive machine, its slider switches and spring suspension capable of producing a dazzling array of velvety sounds. But Perrey is the one who makes it sing with sonorous electronic soul.
Along with these wonderful sounds are songs with a more cinematic feel, a few of which were actually used in films and commercials. “La Vache et le Prisonnier Main Theme (Excerpt)” is taken from the soundtrack to the French film of the same name, the haunting tones of the Ondioline lending pathos to the tale of a prisoner of war who escapes a German farm accompanied by a cow. “Danielle of Amsterdam” was adapted for the 1970s cop film Law and Disorder, where the song helped to bridge the movie’s mixture of comedy and drama. Similarly, “Cigale,” one of the few pieces of music written by the Ondioline’s inventor, Georges Jenny, may not have interested record labels at the time—it was unreleased until now—but you could easily imagine it soundtracking a doomed romantic encounter in a 1960s Parisian café, thanks to a sweeping, wonderfully morose Ondioline melody and a gorgeous change of key that sees Jenny’s compositional skills briefly steal the limelight back from the instrument he invented.
You could treat Jean-Jacques Perrey et son Ondioline as a history lesson, if you liked, with its rare and unreleased recordings cementing the instrument’s place in the annals of electronic music. Far better, though, to sit back, relax, and enjoy the enduring beauty of this record, whose sheer melodic delights eclipse its merely important qualities, much like Perrey’s Moog Indigo before it. Rather than a scratchy historical document, Jean-Jacques Perrey et son Ondioline is deceptively experimental music in the lineage of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop or Tomita: lush musical soundscapes that still come alive to modern ears, more than a half-century after they were recorded.
