CATHERINE RIBEIRO + ALPES " ame debout " PSYCH PROG LP

$

57

CATHERINE RIBEIRO + ALPES AME DEBOUT

Media : LP

Label : PHILIPS
Press : 6332 017
Year : 1971

Magnificent as always!
The wind is blowing, Catherine is singing and the music reaches new levels. It is touching and dark just like Nick Drake. Still it is so experimental and it works really good. Many worlds come together on this album.

CONDITION:    COVER : EX

                       RECORD : EX

Led by Patrice Moullet, ALPES was founded in 1970 with Catherine Ribeiro as the lead singer. A very original band, highly prolific throughout the 70's and still alive. Their music is rather experimental and hard to define and involves folk, progressive and improvisation. Patrice Moullet is the inventor of several musical instruments amongst which include the "Cosmophone" and the "Percuphone". In a similar vocal style to Brigitte Fontaine, Catherine Ribeiro's low voice tone may also evoke Nico at times and is theatrical and declamatory. There's often an intense dramatic tension in the singing. The debut albums are the best, and "Paix", with its two long suites, is considered the most progressive and is the best one to start with.


Bio Written by Oliverstoned

Born in Lyon during the war, Catherine Ribeiro started her career in acting, even shooting a film for JL Godart, Les Carabiniers, he met future writing partner Patrice Moullet (then under the name of Albert Juroost), before she started singing, recording a bunch of singles throughout the 60’s, both in Portuguese (her parent’s origins) and in French. These singles are now compiled in a set called Libertés. In the late 60’s, Moullet asks her to starts a band, first named 2Bis (one record released under that moniker), than Alpes, where she’ll be the front person. The group was lucky enough to participated to one of the very few festival still organized in France in the early 70’s (most of them being banned to avoid further youth/student riots after May 68 both the group and festival getting the “go-ahead” from authorities a few hours before starting) in Port Leucate, then Avignon, playing to huge crowds and getting wide notice of the public.

During the early 70’s, Catherine Ribeiro & Alpes recorded a string of stunning albums, starting with Ame Debout and ending with Le Temps De L’autre, the most remarkable being Rat Débile Et Homme Des Champs, with stunning tracks such as Poeme Non-Epique and Ere De La Putréfaction (sic). The group is then centered around Catherine, (guitarist) Moullet and (keyboardist) Lemoine (future Gong) and Motron, but by 76, only Lemoine remained with Catherine. The later 70’s will see albums getting wiser in terms of provocations, but will gain in musician abilities and spectrum, but Ribeiro started recording solo albums dedicated to poets (Jacqueries for Jacques Prévert) and semi-anarchists singers (Ferré, Brel etc..).

In 8i, the group will disband in full glory (awards and academy prizes) after la Déboussole, Catherine recording a string of albums increasingly gentle and decreasingly interesting, until she will recontact Moullet for solo collabs. The very same Moullet will reform Alpes in the early 90’s without Ribeiro, and two more records will be released, both sounding a tad new age, but remaining prog records. Moullet is still playing experimental music through his project Atelier Alpes, while Ribeiro still graces discs of her voice.

As a quick conclusion: Catherine Ribeiro & Alpes have recorded a string of fairly successful albums, gathering a few plaudits and yearly awards from specialized press, played throughout Europe and even in Latin America and Northern Africa and are now seen as an iconic group of the hippy 70’s in France. Their use of seldom-seen percuphone and cosmophone (both alpine instruments), their lengthy Poème Non-Epique pieces, Ribeiro’s anarchist avant-garde and ecologist lyrics and doomed atmosphere (there is some VdGG feel in their music) made this group a very distinct and very original group that has their own sound. Their record company will print at the back of the cover that “the lyrics of the group only engage the musicians and them only”, therefore taking a distance to Ribeiro’s incendiary diatribes. This disengagement is to be seen as CR&A’s best compliment, as in their manner, they were at the forefront of the Counter Culture.



!!!! Bio written by Hugues Chantraine, Belgium !!!!
About the same time that Brigette Fontaine started releasing records that combined the tradition French chanteuse style with more radical and progressive music forms, Catherine Ribeiro was going along a similar route though remaining even more obscure internationally than Fontaine. Whereas Fontaine's voice is usually soft and sweet, Ribeiro can sometimes hit more harshly with lower tones, even sounding like Nico with far more emotion, over an experimental backing that can include folk rock, progressive rock, improvisation and more.



Her unique voice certainly hints at her troubled upbringing. Born in 1941 in France to Portuguese immigrants, Ribeiro's early childhood was quite traumatic. With the constant bombs going off from the war, her mother often locked her in the cellar in the dark. Ribeiro's younger brother was half a year old when he suddenly died, and when Ribeiro got older she was often in and out of psychiatric wards. In her early twenties she became an actor, appearing in a 1962 spaghetti western Buffalo Bill and the next year in French New Wave director Jean Luc Godard's Les Carabiniers (aka The Mercenaries or The Soldiers). By the mid 1960s she began taking her singing more seriously and in 1966 she cut two singles for Barclay Records, one of which was a version of Dylan's "It's All Over Baby Blue."



In 1969 Ribeiro had a new band, 2Bis, led by Patrice Moullet, to back her on her first LP, simply titled Catherine Ribeiro + 2 Bis, released on the Festival label. By 1970, on her second LP simply titled No. 2 and also on Festival, 2Bis had become Alpes, the band that would follow Ribeiro on her next several releases. Besides Moullet, who provided guitars, organ, electronics and vocals, Alpes consisted only of Denis Cohen on percussion and organ, though a pair of Portuguese guitarists Pires Moliceiro and Isaac Robles Monteiro were guest musicians on one track on No. 2. On subsequent releases, which came out about one a year on the Philips label, Alpes would often change completely from album to album, with Moullet as the only constant factor. These albums, Ame Debout (Upright Soul), Paix (Peace), Le Rat Debile et l'Homme des Champs (The Weak Rat and the Man of the Fields), and Libertes? are some of Ribeiro's most creative, with the music composed mostly by Moullet.



Even as Ribeiro continued to work with Alpes, she also started doing albums under her name alone where instead of her own material, she paid tribute to older artists. The first of these was the 1977 release Le Blues de Piaf, where she covered songs done by Edith Piaf, followed by the 1978 LP Jacqueries, with works composed by Jacques Prevert and Sebastien Maroto. She also worked with other artists like Peter Gabriel on the 1992 record Soleil Dans l'Ombre (Sun in the Shade). By the early 1980s her output had slowed down a little. In 1999 she wrote a memoir of her early childhood, L'Enfance, published by L'Archipel and she continues to occasionally tour live. ~ Rolf Semprebon, All Music Guide

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Grading table:

 

M / Mint : 100% mint

F / Fair : 30% mint

EX /Excellent : 90% mint

P / Poor : 15% mint

VG /Very good : 70% mint

B / Bad : 5 % mint

G /Good : 50% mint