French musician Xavier Soquet returns this week with his excellent synth-pop project Orchidée Noire! Soquet’s new single La mémoire des souvenirs, roughly “The memory of memories”, contains the tracks “J N V I” and “Instrumentale“, and is currently available via his Bandcamp page. In addition, the artist’s video offerings set the tracks to clips from Fernand Léger‘s 1944 film La fille au coeur prefabrique, as well as Oskar Schlemmer‘s extraordinary Das Triadische Ballet.
Soquet crafts a Romantic melancholy from his minimal synth wave approach, underpinning “J N V I” with a deeply sublimated post-punk urgency, while “Instrumentale” simmers with a stark, retro techno vibe. The former, matched with edited clips from Léger’s film, uses the painter’s study of wooden mannequins to investigate the politics of courtship, as life-size male/female dolls act out a drama of voyeurism and vanity. “Instrumentale“‘s video uses scenes from Schlemmer’s amazingly surreal ballet, and again we see the dynamics of courtship, but this time played out in a dream-like setting of spectacular color and costume! Don’t miss Orchidée Noire’s Bandcamp embed for La mémoire des souvenirs, which follows the videos.
