French intellectual electronica from our good friends Geins’t Naït and L. Petitgand, who have been presenting their odd brand of textured-ambient industrial light-noise since 2014 with an informal series of records published under the Mind Travels imprint.
Today’s offering Ola (ICI D’AILLEURS MT16) is enriched by the appearance of English artiste Robin Rimbaud dit Scanner, and together the trio manage to summon up a perplexing array of loops, rhythms, beats, sampled voices, and layerings. All of these Mind Travels items are served up with sleeve photos of decaying buildings or interiors, sometimes office spaces or a rusty typewriter, and today we get some classical ruin on the front cover replete with peeling frescoes (apparently an ancient Italian bathhouse in Tuscany, selon Google Lens), while on the back the dilapidated interior with chunks of plaster on a wooden chair will induce instant existential despair in the heart of the viewer. We may have suspected these French geniuses to be pursuing some philosophical themes, however vaguely expressed, and now they make plain their allegiance to the work of – who else – Gilles Deleuze, a name which continues to crop up on records like this (for instance, the Sub Rosa comp Folds And Rhizomes For Gilles Deleuze which has been nagging at me since 1995 – Scanner was on that one too.) Actually this might be one of the more memorable and successful escapades from this duo, and when the multiple layers of antipathy stack up in just the right combination – for instance on the long fourth cut ‘370’ – it’s oddly compelling and hypnotic in the way I expect the creators are intending.
Once again I feel obliged to mention the long history of Thierry Mérigout, original member of the Geins’t Naït group which was active since 1986, and the fact that he perceives himself as keeping the “industrial” flame alive while Petitgand supplies the “movie soundtrack” dimension to these records of theirs. Scanner’s contribution may be the murmuring voices, or the loops, or just an ineffable floating presence brought about by his continual monitoring of the ethersphere, unless he doesn’t do that any more. (28/02/2023)