“Mirabeau” is a song that defies sound and style, genre, and indeed geography. It has an intriguing timeline and is the result not just of wilful hopping between musical demarcations but of jumping artistic disciplines themselves. Having first seen the light of day in the nineties when The Real Zenogram was experimenting with the merging of poetry and music in Milan, it is finally being released, thus proving that good, and indeed wonderfully strange, things come to those who wait.
It takes Guillaume Apollinaire’s 1913 French poem “Le Pont Mirabeau” and sets it to a dreampop-infused slice of experimental indie pop, landing somewhere between Peter Gabriel’s adventurous mindset and The Cure’s late-eighties, brooding alternative pop.
And the oh-so-attractive opposites keep…well, attracting. It blends old-school, analogue guitar textures with the digital deftness of the synth world. It feels like a nostalgic echo of the post-punk years and, in that cyclical way that music fashion has, also heralds a return to such rich and rewarding pop creativity. (Although calling “Mirabeau” merely pop seems to be doing it a disservice.) And those blends of contrast and compatibility are pushed even further as jazz saxophone and indie riffs, soaring synth washes, and spacious atmospherics dance beautifully together, waltzing a fine line between worlds.
It’s a remarkable track, one that sits apart from any sound tag or style label that you could hope to apply succinctly. But then, all the best music does.
And what is the song all about?
Apparently, The Real Zenogram found that one of the poem’s lines— “the days go by, and I remain” —resonated deeply with his approach to the track, reminding him that “…we are not in control when we find love and when we lose love,”. I will have to take his word for it, as the lyrics are in French, and I have to admit that my schoolboy command of the language was far from sufficient to grasp its meaning for myself.
But even without such a key, it is a truly infectious and inspiring, not to mention unique, song.
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