LP or Cassette
Aguirre's second showing this week marks the return of French duo Jean-Marie Mercimek with a third album of warped minimal wave chanson that's both intimate in its arrangement and extrovert in its sensibility. Had the term not been co-opted to the point of meaningless by the TikTok elite, I'd have been tempted to describe Dans Le Camion De Marguerite Duras as its own kind of defiant bedroom pop, the intrepid music made when you're alone in your little room without the world breathing down your neck - the sort of room where, as Brian Wilson said, you can do your "dreaming and scheming". A better term, then, might be private universe sound, and Jean-Marie Mercimek are most certainly building their own world of understanding across these ten tracks, collectively recorded across two locations and six years. That prolonged period of gestation speaks to the purposeful but wide-vista nature of the songwriting, which lands somewhere between Flaming Tunes, the alien oddness of compatriots Nina Harker and Kou, and the artful elan of Stroom-associated homemade electronics of Hessell Veldman, Cybe, Enno Velthuys et al. There's another version of this world out there in the infinite expanse that positions this kind of sound as the pop apogee. Until we get there, we can but dream. And be sure, it's the true dreaming that brings something like Dans Le Camion De Marguerite Duras into being.
FFO: Nina Harker, Kou, Flaming Tunes, Hessell Veldman, Cybe
