3 out of 5

Label: Murailles Music

Produced by: Olivier Demeaux (arranged and mixed by)

I’ve tapped my toe and hummed along to hours of replays of Tsirihaka Harrivel’s & Vimala Pons’ album Victoire Chose… and I can’t really tell you much about it.

Going off of the translated French wiki, label, and bandcamp pages, Harrivel and Pons are, broadly, performance artists, and if you wanna go ahead and raise a red flag over the “it’s art, not music” pile, go for it. While you’re waving that, I’ll add that the duo are also both circus performers, but that Victoire Chose is (I believe) an extracted soundtrack from their presentation GRANDE — , which actually sounds kinda interesting, as an enacted narrative of sorts about the duo, staged in “photographs,” – i.e. a stage and actors (Harrivel and Pons?) posed in various ways, which is a fun inversion of using the living to portray the static, telling a living story.

Or something. I mean, it’s equally b.s. of course, but we can say all art and music is b.s. from a certain perspective, so… whatever. Is the music any good?

It’s interesting!

It’s very French, if you’ll pardon the stereotype. It electro-grooves like Stereolab, sing-song vocals included; there’s classic French strolling cinema tunes a la de Roubaix or some campiness from Gainsbourg; there’s some ambience we might tie back to Air, or you can buy into the media blurb: that the music is akin to (take a deep breath) “the psychedelic experimentation of White Noise, the great Italian soundtracks of Morricone and Rota, or the Japanese soundtracks of Yokohama and Kawai, intertwined in this very French underground, from Brigitte Fontaine to La Grande Triple Alliance Internationale de l’Est.”

I mean… that’s b.s., right? But I don’t have my French (or apparently Japanese) music bonafides, and I’m likely grasping only at what I know; I’m sure the those call-outs all make sense. At the same time, the “it’s art, not music” overrides a lot of this, and while not in a bad way, in a performative way: I don’t get a lot of heart out of the tunes; I get background, in support of something else. It’s well produced and totally catchy and pleasant stuff, but it’s also a stew of (whichever) influences that results in something quirky, if generic.