Portrait Robot is French for identikit photo, and with his second album Bertrand Burgalat certainly offers us a poetic portrait of his own musical obsessions, drawing no distinctions between genres. Now 41, and something of a musical sleuth, Bertrand Burgalat elegantly goes about his business of destroying the barriers between genres and vanquishing all preconceived ideas. His friend the novelist Elisabeth Barillé, who wrote the lyrics to one of the songs on this album, gave him his favourite maxim: "Hope for everything, expect nothing." His application of the maxim leads to all sorts of surprises, leaving "a lot of room for accident" in his music. It is this unpredictable spontaneity and Burgalat's predilection for experimentalism which gives Portrait Robot its agitated, mysterious atmosphere. When not playing the piano or bass, Burgalat is experimenting with the vibraphone, guitar or harmonica, and along the way trying out the flute or tenor sax, improvising with nervy, fantastic rhythms. He is also a songwriter, for others as well as himself, combining dreamy lyrics with old-fashioned melodies which he whispers with his "fine lips that favour discreet singing". Burgalat wrote and recorded the album in his home studio, "collecting a multitude of sounds, takes, and musical motifs before throwing most away," and only keeping the unconscious elements of his work. Because ultimately it is these moments that are both the simplest and the most fascinating.

He draws his inspiration from "twentieth-century music, Ravel, psychedelia, northern soul, stoner rock and bubblegum pop." His latest musical discovery is French composer Olivier Messian's Le Banquet Céleste. He also listens to the radio, with the France Info news station his current favourite. Bertrand Burgalat is something of an introvert with a perverse sense of humour, hiding behind his long hair, glasses, and his "old fogey" look. He has always been on the margins of the fashionable and the kitsch, unconcerned with the logic of the marketplace. It is now ten years since he set up his idiosyncratic record company Tricatel: "It was tough to begin with, but now things are better because I've learnt to expect very little from the music industry and to accept the fact that I'm on the margin." That doesn't mean he hasn't had a lot of good ideas that he's been able to put into practice. He has produced an album for the dissolute novelist Michel Houellebecq, as well as for the latest rock sensation AS Dragon. His efforts may not always be crowned with commercial success, but in any case Tricatel is a record company that "never repeats itself. We always sign up artists who we admire and who do things differently."

Portrait Robot reflects that sense of independence and the avant-garde that so characterises the output of the Tricatel label. What Bertrand Burgalat specialises in is "difficult listening", mixing pop, rock and funk with themes Baudelaire would have been proud of. It is a response to all the critics of his first album The Sssound of Mmmusic, which on release in 2001 was classed as easy listening, when in fact it heralded the eighties revival which swiftly followed. "The last album was both sunny and sad at the same time. This album is the same but done in a different way." Burgalat has concocted a subtle mix of sound which leaves you with a sense of both freshness and déjà vu. The rebel songwriter joins the greats with these nineteen unusual tracks designed to open minds and breathe new life into the musical.