The French duo Peine Perdue brings us heady synthwave on their upcoming LP Disparitions, due out on vinyl via Medical Records March 20th. The project began back in 2010 when the Berlin-based musicians Stephane Argillet and Coco Gallo began working together, and while the pair have a handful of releases on European labels like Cold Beats, Kernkrach, and Vocoder Tapes, Disparitions will be their first for a US label. Recorded in the Baltic state of Latvia during the summer of 2014, with the crisis in the Ukraine brewing, the new work was inspired by the atmosphere of their chosen location–which the band chillingly describes as that of a “suspended” threat” and possible return to war.
On the track “Cerceaux“, this anxiety is palpable, and while the duo’s arrangements have a minimal, geometric elegance, narrated by Gallo’s laconic, yet sensual, vocal delivery, there’s a minor key melancholy and mounting tension here that reminds one of a sky graying over as an ominous storm builds. Meanwhile, Gallo’s spoken vocal delivery, intimate and direct in it’s appeal, only seems to heighten that mood, even as her poetry layers itself in shrouds of mystery.
The band reports that video for “Cerceaux” draws from a number of “reshot…distorted and mixed up” filmic sources including Vincente Minnelli‘s 1944 musical “Meet Me in St Louis”, Sergei Bondarchuk‘s 1968 adaptation of Tolstoy’s “War and Peace”, as well as footage of Agrillet and Gallo in Riga; but many of the more direct images depicting the consequences of war were repurposed from Bill Morrison‘s archival collection of WW1 footage entitled, “Beyond Zero-1914-1918”. Drawn to that source’s distressed and scarred imagery, the duo explains that they choose “the most “damaged” parts, abstract evocations of destruction”.
While “Cerceaux” is indeed grave in scope, Argillet and Gallo state that the music and video point to a “secret link” between a “personal tragic episode”, and “the fate of our continent–which has twice committed some kind of cultural and moral suicide in the past century”. A sobering reminder, for sure, and important evidence that this band intends to use the nostalgic leanings of their project to probe the more difficult realms of our collective cultural history.
