Monday, December 08, 2008


... Porn Groove by Sober&Gentle.

I had to share this with you guys, Flirtyordirty.com now have a couple of rare CDs available with almost lost sounds from the 60s and 70s. Music composed for French erotic cinema and for sex education videos amongst others. The text below is from Sober&Gentle and gives a really good account and history of where this music comes from and why they complied it. So if you feel like a sexy evening in or just want to relax with your feet up (or maybe both those things are one and the same) put on your Porn Groove CD and get your funk on!

"Let us begin this riveting story with its sad epilogue. For quite a while now, porn flicks and erotic films have maintained a hot relationship with "music with vibes", full of carnal swells and harmonious back-and-forth fulfillment, while today, and for many decades, the two have moved to separate bedrooms. The naturally sinuous curves that the camera loved to caress have been spurned. Naughty films have since become a no-frills industrial trade focused on silicone-boosted digital images, Brazilian waxes and frankly unexciting music pounded out by pitiful supervisors, generally from the Transalpine region - which would seem to be cold on more than one level.

Who can we blame? Former French President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing who, in 1975, decided to condemn porn to specialized venues marked with a big, fat X, obliging producers to make major cutbacks in their film budgets? The producers themselves, whose original free-fantasy films are now controlled by smarmy accountants? The composers - some of whom are highly renowned and esteemed, ranging from Ennio Morricone to Vladimir Cosma - who gradually pulled their names from these images denounced by leagues of virtue, handing the reins to less talented peers, the new mercenaries?
Video, which took over from 35 mm and brought with it a kilometric flow of music that seems to have more in common with the background music of Bavarian superstore promotions than the subtle counterpoint that has played a major role since the golden age? Avoiding excessive nostalgia and using a simple lucid observatory - your ears -, you have to admit that since the end of the 70s, erotic cinema has revealed as many great scores as it has fine scriptwriters : you can count them on the fingers of a leper. For every John B. Root calling on the services of the improv guitarist Noël Akchoté, how many anonymous mullet-haired out-of-work "musicians" rush up to pollute our dreams with Eurodance, cheap techno or FM rock? A fact that says it all: porn music no longer exists outside of films, whereas it wasn't rare to see these soundtracks in the music store back in the day. Deep Throat and The Devil in Miss Jones, for example, are now snatched up by the highest bidders.

We can't say more for erotic cinema, which sometimes served as a laboratory for experienced composers who then switched over to classic cinema (the music for the French teen classic La Boum - released as The Party in the U.S. - for example, set the beat for an erotic-sentimental sketch a few years earlier, unfortunately without Sophie Marceau) or revealed the hidden side of singers (Pierre Bachelet or Gainsbourg, who
took a delicious rumble with Emmanuelle and her girlfriends). Today, on the French "erotic films" that air on Sunday night, it's all the same jumble of sleazy saxophones and wannabe jazzy atmospheres that make music lovers want to go out and shoot someone.

Fortunately, this contemporary absence of even the slightest musical desire in the porn industry is compensated by the patient and arduous quest of a few idealists who delve into the remains of the past to pull out a few gold nuggets. With fingers scraped raw in search of unknown vinyls and eyes reddened by the darkness where these treasures are generally found, these Champollions of a hidden world sometimes come back with the beaming smile of those whose fertile adventures are able to light up the daily lives of their peers, who stayed at home to eat chips and watch DVDs. Some abandon their families and leave their jobs, voluntarily cutting loose from necessities in order to succumb to the mystical attraction
of a superfluous obsession in the form of some dust-covered grooves, spurned and scorned objects that magically transform into the most sought-after prizes.

For many years, these records have resurfaced here and there, the souvenirs of another century when people knew what it meant to have a good time. These records filled with so many delights that it would be unthinkable and even criminal not to distribute them on a wide scale. In twelve saucy thrusts, Porn Groove gets down with music that you never knew existed and serves it on a veritable silver tray: hodgepodge excerpts from authentic soundtracks of non-simulated Rated-X films, subtler erotic creations (i.e. soft porn), racy comedies and even educational documentaries created for wide-eyed German children, who needed to learn that babies don't sprout from a cabbage patch showered with beer.

And the result speaks for itself: a veritable festival of funky grooves, pop spiced up with crisp guitars and deviant jazz in which violins copulate joyously with beats that would leave the coldest of Carmelites hot
and bothered, in which barbarian organs, the stretched animal hides of percussions and basses curved like the diabolical hollow of an African woman's back caress, pet, lick and nibble with voices that range from an unequivocal groan to the most suggestive exaltations. All of the titillating music that you hear is the result of an amazing mating in the exuberant theater of the thirty glorious post-war years. Concomitant and hand-in-hand, the liberation of Western morals and the progressive evolution of pop music, led to a shared search of ecstasy of all kinds in the 60s and 70s, with unexpected ramifications. A sensorial ballet in which hearing and sight claimed to have the power to replace touch. If your heart doesn't start racing, then it probably isn't beating at all."

Well now you've read all of that let me know what you think!

love

Syble
xx

Labels: , , ,