“Daniel is a nice little squid. But today, it’s something else. It’s nighttime, and he refuses to go back to sleep. And it’s not just any night! It’s the Night of the Periwinkles!”
So starts Carmela Chergui & Timo Hateau’s story of Daniel dans la nuit, where Daniel escapes from home and wakes up the villagers one by one whilst on his aquatic odyssey. Accompanying the release of the book (which is sadly only currently available in French) is a delightful electronic soundtrack album by Funken – AKA musician and producer Julien Sénélas – who has perfectly captured the organic sounds of Daniel’s undersea world using electronic music. Sénélas says he drew inspiration for this from “the American minimalist music of the 60s-70s, known as “repetitive music” and used a modular synthesiser which generated polyrhythmic patterns and the arpeggios of his miniature synth (the 2021 Pocket Piano) to evoke Daniel’s journey underwater at night.
Music in children’s television, film and theatre is invariably excellent and often ground-breaking. Think of how futuristic the BBC Radiophonic Workshop’s electronic theme for Doctor Who was, or the bleeps and bloops of The Clangers, and how folk music was utilised so perfectly in Bagpuss. There are acres of pop bangers such as ‘Aglet’* in Disney’s Phineas & Ferb (including the super-catchy theme song by Bowling for Soup), Matt Katz and Richie Webb have been producing a consistently high standard of genre-hoovering songs for BBC’s hugely successful series Horrible Histories (see ‘Vikings and Garfunkel Song’), and anyone watching the Hey Duggee episode ‘The Music Video Badge’ will not only go nuts trying to guess all the music videos referenced but also find Enid the cat’s song stuck in their head forever.
The soundtrack for Daniel Dans La Nuit is gentle, stimulating and utterly engrossing, and reminded me of Domenique Dumont’s excellent 2020 soundtrack to the 1930 German silent film People on Sunday. The electronic curlicues that stand in for bubbles and buoyancy create a warm hug and its an album that will delight kids who enjoy it alongside Timo Hateau’s perfect illustrations in the same way it did for this big kid who got happily submerged in the music.
Funken’s Daniel Dans La Nuit is released through the Unjenesaisquoi label: Facebook | Bandcamp | Instagram | X (Twitter) | YouTube
* Aglet: An aglet is the plastic or metal sheath attached to each end of a shoelace which keeps the fibres from unravelling.
Review by Paul F Cook
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