Several times through this review, I'm going to refer to the sleevenotes that are included with the CD. The reason for that is that the whole album is such a dizzyingly complex piece of music that it's utterly impossible to fully understand it without using the accompanying 'guide'. It begins by stating: "Listening to Delirium in Hi-Fi is, to be truthful, an unnerving experience. It is not unlike watching a 3D movie without the spectacles, or carrying on a conversation underwater." I might not have drawn the same conclusions, but I can certainly understand where they're coming from. The fact of the matter is that Delirium in Hi-Fi makes very little sense.

The album is an experiment in both compositional mastery and technological trickery. To call it just an experiment is to ignore the wonderful feel of the music and the true quality of each song, but at heart it's a conceptual album. André Popp, a conductor and arranger by trade, joined forces with sound-engineer Pierre Fatosme to create this complicated maelstrom of sound. The procedure to create each song mystifies me, and makes me want to weep at the lack of dedication that I must have for pretty much everything, in comparison to these two people.

Firstly, Fatosme would draw up a catalogue of all the sound-effects and studio tricks he thought he could produce (bearing in mind we're talking about 1955, here), when even cassettes were a long way off. Once Popp had read through the list of sound-warps, he'd write pieces of music specifically designed to incorporate those tricks, in ingenius ways. On top of this, Fatosme would create what the liner notes refer to as "blueprints of sound". He split the music into three individual parts, applying to each one a 'distance'. The close-up plan was the raw music, unaltered. The medium-distance plan incorporated reverb, and the distant plan brought echo to the mix. He then used these plans to make 3D representations of the music, with notes appearing in specific places along each of the three axis. Many times the pieces of music would criss-cross each other in 3D, giving he and Popp a kind of diagram of the final song. The resultant music is very impressive, incredibly difficult to fully understand, and above all totally and utterly bizarre. I love it.

Almost all of the songs on the album use fake instruments which don't actually exist. By this I mean that they totally changed the sound of certain instruments by speeding up or slowing down the recording of that instrument alone, whilst retaining the natural speed of every other musician. Obviously when sped up, the tone of the instrument increases in pitch, making it sound like something else entirely. This required some very gifted musicians capable of playing at very slow speeds. Anyone who plays the drums will tell you that it's infinitely harder to play incredibly slowly than quickly. To slow your playing down to 40 beats a minute and still remain in time with the music is mind-bendingly difficult. These musicians had to half their playing speed, so that when the recording was played back at double-speed, it would be 100% in time with the rest of the orchestra, and that's phenomenally impressive. This kind of tape-bending tomfoolery occurrs throughout the entire album. Pianos are played at half speed, accompanying pairs of violas that have previously been recorded at half-speed and are now played back to the pianist at double-speed, while vocalists sing their lyrics backwards at triple speed in 6/3. It may slowly be dawning on you that this album is quite literally insane.

Speaking of the singers, David Lynch would be proud. Once again, as the liner notes say: "You can turn a glove inside out, why not a voice?" That's the kind of logical thinking that makes humanity great! So they set about turning people's voices inside out, as it were. An ordinary lyric would be sung, and then reversed. This backwards vocal would be played back to the singer, who would spend however long it took to learn the line backwards, and then sing those words into the microphone. Then, the tape was reversed, so that the words were spoken as 'normal', and were coherent, but in a voice that was speaking them backwards. Does that make sense? Probably not. But the final effect is pretty damn snazzy, with the attack of each word occurring at its end, rather than the beginning. The emphasis of the lyric is on the intake of breath. If it sounds odd, it's because it is. In particular, La Polka Du Roi makes use of this technique, and fuck me if it doesn't scare the shit out of me.

The same procedure, incidentally, was applied to some of the instruments too. The difference being that Popp wrote these pieces of music backwards from the offset. Obviously it would be too much to ask for his musicians to hear a piece of music and then work out themselves how it should sound backwards, so he tasked himself with writing a piece of music specifically to be reversed. How you go about that I don't know. I can't write them forwards, let alone backwards. The man was a lunatic. Anyway, the sound was similar to the voices, technically, with the attack of each note appearing when you expect it to fade.

Not content with messing with our minds with single pieces of music, Popp and Fatosme decided to introduce multiple layers of sound to further confound our senses. Bless their little cottonsocks. If you listen to Java, you'll see what I mean. Two normal tapes are recorded and played back together, with a slight time lag between the two. This kind of artificial echo effect was then recorded onto a third tape which went into the final cut. The result makes it sound as though half the musicians were caught out when it came to their turn to play, and lagged behind the rest of the orchestra by a fraction of a second, never quite able to get their bearings in order to catch up. Some of the musicians were even required to play along to this echo'd track, which is something I don't even want to think about. Again, going back to drumming and time-keeping, playing 1 second behind the beat throughout an entire song is ridiculously hard to do. This kind of engineering of not only sound but fully realised music is evident throughout the whole album. The mastery with which Popp and his colleagues carefully crafted both music and effects to achieve impossibly emotive music boggles my mind. As the sleeve says: "In some cases, a little extra lag was introduces purposely in one of the tapes, so that one feels compelled to push the musicians on, to hurry them up, to help them overtake their quicker colleagues".

In addition to all of these recurring techniques and effects, Popp and Fatosme used a myriad of 'one-offs', my favourite being the bizarre fade-out achieved by blowing the fuses in all the microphones simultaneously. Not content with simply adjusting the "Fade" slider in the studio, a complex series of sun lamps were rigged up to each microphone, so that at the flick of a switch they could be shone directly onto the microphones, overheating them in an instant and causing them to slowly burn out. Yeah, well done, lads. That's some, er, quick thinking, batman.

The entire album is utterly superb. If you think that it must surely sound like a cacophony of random sounds and horrible effects, then you couldn't be more wrong. Clearly the whole thing sounds bizarre and alien, but the fact remains that it's so lovingly and above all expertly crafted that the songs just WORK. There isn't a single song that I'd say even approaches "unlistenable" ground, each one being first and foremost an enjoyable piece of music. Obviously the 1950's French sound is prominent, with accordions and French horns making numerous appearances, and if it weren't for the impossibly complicated series of effects and tricks that have gone into producing these songs, they'd be perfectly standard pieces of music from the period. The album is simply the best of both worlds. I can't recommend this whole CD enough. It's a vital addition to any serious music-lover's collection. If you're a fan of the experimental, the bizarre, the so-unique-it-hurts, then you simply have to buy this album.

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