The Dead Mauriacs
Le Parc, Rapport d’observations
POLAND SUBLIME RETREAT SR016 CD (2024)
Field recordings, samples, and sound effects with lots of layering and edits from this possibly French project, who may or may not be Olivier Prieur. With his selection of sources, and carefully structured track titles, he’s not only working hard to suggest a narrative (or many narratives), but he’s striving to project the air of a neglected surrealist artist, or a flâneur from Parisian cafe society, most likely around the time of Satie, Ravel, and Rousseau. I mean he relishes such petit-bourgeois concerns as parakeets in the park and landscaped gardens such as we see in Last Year at Marienbad, mingling with church organs, street sounds, and other such associative murmurs.
In these aims, he’s ably supported by the artworks of Evan Crankshaw, who I see has provided visuals for him before, on releases with evocative titles such as Beauté de Mirages and Expedition. Crankshaw assembles exquisite collages from photos and old engravings, like Max Ernst without any of the menace, or Joseph Cornell without the poetry. To add a further layer for the busy mind to decode, The Dead Mauriacs have included a short fiction-text in the booklet, alluding to a “dangerous game involving agents, observers and parakeets in a park” – all of which sounds promising enough, like Fantômas and Juve meeting in the Parc de Bruxelles, and the detailed text adds further accretions to his skewed, alternative history of Europe between the wars.
All of these hints and clues are cultivated to perfection, yet they amount to very little of substance in the end, and the entire effect is very mannered. But even so it’s a diverting enough listen, like an hour spent in a garden maze being followed by a sinister man in a bowler hat, with the promise of croissants and patisserie at the end. (30/04/2024)