This latest LP from Mondkopf finds Paul Régimbeau returning to his solo electronic music guise following stints as a member of groups such as Autrenoir, Foudre! and Oiseaux-Tempêtes. Prompted by the Paris attacks of 13 November 2015, Régimbeau started laying the foundations for They Fall But You Don’t that same night, and continued adding tracks over the following days and weeks, mostly recording in the hours of darkness.
The results are often as melancholy as the title suggests, and its interesting that Régimbeau sees the resulting album in terms of folk rather than purely electronic music, in that he intends it to evoke a mood and a time and place (in this case, Paris on the night of the attacks) rather than being abstracted from reality.
This he expresses in “Vivere Partes I-V”, shimmering and occasionally shuddering drones and tones filling and voiding the stereo spectrum. Sometimes the music holds a brightness, but distended and filled with a maudlin minor-key emotional content that rarely lets the mood rise too high, but always maintaining a vivid presence. When the vocals come in, they are wordless and full of a dreadful passion, spiralling in tandem with the swell of a beatless organic vibrato alongside the Mellotron and pocket piano of Frédéric D Oberland. As an expression of grief and a shedding of the burden of readjustment to shattered realities which follows all acts of war and terror, They Fall But You Don’t is full of emotions, sometimes despairing, often elevating themselves above the context in which they are recorded. Is this folk music? Perhaps, in the way that an elegiac requiem mass can be, or a threnody of loss and suffering felt on the part of a musician for the shocking violence which unfolded in his home town.-Antron S Meister-
