John MOuse – Le Pigeon (Keep Me In Your Heart Records)
Dropping a track a week as a lockdown project John MOuse has now released album The Goat, but it is to lead single and avant-garde alt-pop track Le Pigeon we refer you to today.
Artist: John MOuse
Track: Le Pigeon
Label: self-released
Released: 31 July 2020
Find it: Bandcamp | Spotify
Throughout the lockdown period we’ve all faced over the past several months, many creatives have been struggling to know what to do with themselves. It seemed like there was a wholly unavoidable pressure to birth as many projects as necessary, ‘Now you probably don’t have education or a job taking up the majority of your time, you can spend it all working on your next artistic baby!’. Some found the situation too overwhelming to create in, whereas some create year round and decided to take the opportunity for a well needed break. Of course, the process works differently for different people.
Welsh indie electronic artist John MOuse didn’t take a break, though. He instead seized the lockdown as a chance to work (with longtime collaborator Phil Pearce) on a whole album, dropping a new track weekly until the piece was complete. This album, entitled The Goat, is led by a paranoid, atmospheric and philosophically musing song with its roots in ’80’s German magic realism literature – Le Pigeon.
This song in particular features a protagonist whose peace is shattered by an unwelcome pigeon in his apartment hall, an experience which proves so traumatic he leaves the building that morning via the window with a suitcase and an intent never to come back – but the pigeon isn’t MOuse’s alone.
In fact, the whole inspiration for the track is drawn from 1987 Patrick Süskind novella The Pigeon, which thematically explores constant fear of an ever present danger; an unpredictable, unfamiliar hazard coming into your space and threatening the sanctity of your personal and private refuge. In the novella, the encounter profoundly affects the sanity of the main character and MOuse aims to capture – both sonically and lyrically – several of the feelings the source material presents.
Mirroring the themes of the book, John MOuse creates a deliberately claustrophobic and tense atmosphere championed by a sharp stabbing synth lead over a thumping beat and ominously repetitive bass line. The uncertainty and dread are palpable from the instrumentation alone, but what really finalises the feeling of a man spiralling into madness is the spoken-word stream of consciousness MOuse delivers with David Byrne esque shout-speaking wrapped in his personal brand – a signature Welsh twang. Each time his unpunctuated, unhinged free flowing monologues reach the focal point (the titular pigeon), he falls trapped into a momentary existential loop repeating only the name of the object, as if he were a phobic gripped by selective attention.
The intent behind Le Pigeon is clearly to create an ominous, threatening sense of foreboding and pursuit that the listener and protagonist can share in. If John Williams was famously the shark, then John MOuse is the pigeon.
The Goat by John MOuse is out now on Keep Me In Your Heart Records.
Find John MOuse: Facebook | Twitter | Bandcamp | Spotify
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