Comme à la Radio

Brigitte Fontaine was already a published playwright by the time her first album was released in 1965, and her songs owed more to spoken-word performance art than the pop confections of her yé-yé contemporaries. Following 1968’s playfully oddball Est…Folle, third album Comme À La Radio was a leap into the avant-garde. Made with members of the Art Ensemble Of Chicago, it also marked the start of Fontaine’s ten-year collaboration with multi-instrumentalist Areski Belkacem, whose background in Algerian Kabyle music brought an intoxicating North African allure to its stark, disjointed, and often disorienting mood.