by LORRAINE CARPENTER

Merging strains of primordial rock ’n’ roll, gogo, garage, electro and Ennio Morricone with images of 19th-century saloons, swingin’ ’60s nightclubs and Jean-Paul Belmondo’s mirror image, Call Me Poupée have forged their very own sexy outlaw sound on their debut LP, Western Shanghai. Keyboardist Ken Fortrel and singer Poupée, whose combined credits include les Secrétaires Volantes, les Slotmachines, les Slips and les Breastfeeders, floated the idea of a collaboration as they crossed paths over the years, until 2002, when fate would find them both bandless.

“It was great,” says Poupée, “because we liked the same music and we had the same vision of what a show should be.”

Part of their vision was to go without a drummer, a challenge for musicians with a conventional rock ’n’ roll pedigree. Under the tutelage of les Georges Leningrad’s Mingo l’Indien, however, they learned the art of the “cheesy beatbox.”

Surprisingly less difficult was acquiring the perfect producer, Ramachandra Borcar (aka Ramasutra’s DJ Ram). The duo knew that he could enliven their stylistic pâté chinois with Western motifs, as he’d done with Eastern ones on his own projects.

“We said to ourselves, ‘Maybe he’s the only person who will really understand what we want,” she says. Though their attempt to hire him was admittedly half-assed (they didn’t think he’d be interested), they got Borcar’s coordinates through mutual friends and contacted him in an e-mail entitled “Call me poupée,” which he initially took to be sex spam. “He told us that normally he doesn’t look at those,” says Poupée, “but this time he did, he doesn’t know why.”

With a shared fondness for dolls, blow-up or otherwise, Poupée, Fortrel and Borcar joined forces to record and ultimately release Western Shanghai on Borcar’s label, Semprini.

“Ram helped to structure our sound and to push us towards what we wanted to do,” says Poupée, naming the addition of silence and brass and the subtraction of synthetic beats as key developments.

“After a lot of meetings with Ram and a lot of beer,” adds Fortrel, “we realized we missed the drums.”

At Francofolies on Sunday, June 11, 10 p.m.,
free album in stores now

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