PUCE MARY - The Girl With The Needle (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

Frederikke Hoffmeier this time lays herself bare and decides not to use the moniker Puce Mary, which had brought her a fair amount of recognition in the noise-industrial scene, alongside musicians like Pharmakon or, in part, Lingua Ignota. More than a new debut (she had already used her real name twice before, in 2012 and 2013), this is likely a parenthesis devoted to film scores that doesn't break with her previous work. The great opportunity comes courtesy of Swedish director Magnus von Horn, who with his third film, "The Girl With The Needle" - a remarkable Mubi production - tells a true story set in an impoverished, desperate Denmark ravaged by the Great War, where every single individual is a victim of the era's militarist nationalism.

Magnus von Horn employs a magnificent black and white, capable of truly digging deep into the tragic sense of the story-with-a-small-s being told (that of individual people), which lives within the frame of the Story-with-a-capital-S (the backdrop of the First World War), where the madness of individuals seems a faithful mirror of the general paranoia.

Frederikke Hoffmeier fits magnificently into the desolate images and settings of "The Girl With The Needle", maintaining a certain consistency with the discography of her Puce Mary project, with an abrasive score that amplifies the disruptive impact of the director's work. Noise and electroacoustics alternate with piano passages, creating an often disturbing mix, for example in tracks like "The Orphanage", where the keys underpin cutting string drones, with a barely sketched melody that resurfaces in similar form in "Dagmar's Enigma" with the addition of near-symphonic synths, and later in "Playful (Karoline)", a slow and agonizing succession of notes moving at a funereal pace.

When Frederikke Hoffmeier stays within territory that suits her, she does so with her usual class, as in the electroacoustic "Stuck, Faces", the decaying distorted strings of "Karoline's Theme" and the brief noise pieces "Peter's Downward Spiral" or "Dark Matter (Ether)". At times she also manages to branch out, departing from her usual sound palette in search of electronic textures vaguely reminiscent of Carpenter ("Coming Down").

The synths turn ethereal on "Seagulls", six minutes that repeat a sequence of notes over which two layers are laid, one expansive and atmospheric, the other noise-driven, creating a strange duality that reveals just how serious and praiseworthy the Danish musician's work truly is.

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18/03/2025