Prospect recommends: Charlotte Gainsbourg

Musicians today spend as much time worrying about the public stealing their work as they do creating it. The result is a covetous, paranoid industry more akin to Scrooge & Marley than a purveyor of musical cheer. Beck Hansen, on the other hand, is one of a few artists to avoid such attitudes, happily feeding his fans free, inspirational and (dare I say it) educational content through a refreshingly cranky website.

His Record Club, run very much in the spirit of music rather than commerce, invites notable guests to team up and record covers of favourite vintage albums (The Velvet Underground and Nico, Skip Spence’s Oar), posting up the rude but meaningful results for public benefit.

Lately, his collaborative genius has extended to a new project with Charlotte Gainsbourg, the Anglo-French daughter of Serge, and winner of Best Actress at Cannes in 2009 for her role in Lars von Trier’s Antichrist. Having suffered a minor brain haemorrhage after a waterskiing accident two years ago, Gainsbourg was repeatedly stuffed into a magnetic resonance scanner, the clunks and beeps of which inspired a kind of music in her.

Together with co-writer and producer Beck, whose cut-and-paste innovation is evident in the pre-released tracks, “IRM” and “Heaven Can Wait,” she has translated this life-threatening experience into music of a surprisingly liberated and experimental nature, which—though pop enough to be considered mainstream—may yet, like her acting, win her leftfield acclaim.

IRM is released on 25th January 2010