Album: Readymade FC

Babilonia, PEACE FROG

The music of Jean-Philippe Verdin, the Parisian producer and multi-instrumentalist behind Readymade FC, is mostly recognised in his homeland as the jingles accompanying ads for jeans and Coke, or as Christian Dior's catwalk soundtrack. It's easy to see why it should prove so commercially efficacious: there's a warm, comforting logicality to Verdin's methodical layering of keyboard and horn parts, while his palette of dainty music-box tinklings, harp glissandi, and antique calliope and kalimba keyboard sounds has a childlike charm that's irresistible. The youthful theme carries through in the summer reverie of "Bare Feet" and the childhood reminiscence of "Time Machine", which finds Verdin pondering, in engagingly fractured English, how "My toys they break so fast/They turn into vintage at the last". His understated manner with a melody recalls Erlend Oye, but there's an unmistakably Gallic charm to Verdin's creations, with tracks such as "Simple Appareil" and "Cirkus" sounding like something from the Belleville Rendezvous animation soundtrack. Lounge music for Europhiles.

DOWNLOAD THIS: 'Cirkus', 'Bare Feet', 'Snow Lion', 'The Last Time'