Live at Beaubourg by Limañanas–Album Review
Live at Beaubourg by Limañanas–Album Review
Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers are best known as the architects of Le Centre Pompidou in Paris. If you’re reading this (and it’s clear you are), you’re surely familiar with this feat of 1970s avant-garde. You know the series of blue, green, red and yellow conduits that look Etch-a-Sketched all over the building’s exterior. An HVAC system surfaces at its perimeter with giant white ducts that stand at attention just as some Mummenschanz trio of wormlike entities -also avant-garde!
I was just in Paris this spring, and although it was marvelous to visit Stravinsky Fountain and le Quartier de l’Horloge, I was disappointed to see that Le Centre Pompidou was barricaded behind giant white particleboard fences. It is now under renovation and will reopen in 2030. But for fans of psychedelic happenings, you’ll be happy to know that French alt-rock band The Limañanas managed to slip in their garage-psych performance Live at Beaubourg (October 2025) just before the place closed its doors. A live recording of this event is due for release on June 19.
The Limañanas are Lionel and Marie Limañana, high school sweethearts from Perpignan, France. They have played together in various bands and eventually caught the attention of indie labels Trouble in Mind and HoZac. They have collaborated with Brian Jonestown Massacre’s Anton Newcombe, who produced their 2018 album Shadow People, and also produced a very grainy black-and-white tremolo-laden version of The Kinks’ “Two Sisters”. They have also recorded with Emanuelle Seigner, whom you might have seen in several films, including Polanski’s Bitter Moon and, more recently, as Marilyn Monroe in the TV movie/stage performance Bungalow 21. It is clear that Lionel and Marie have enjoyed a very successful indie rock career together.
Live at Beaubourg features eight tracks (or seven if you consider “Intro Drone” and “Spiral” as one continuous foray into the séance. With satisfyingly dissonant guitars that echo an air raid alarm, “Intro Drone” realigns your nerves as you approach a soothing, endorphin-igniting state of relaxation. Then “Spirale” commences. Perhaps there is zero connection, but if you have seen a map of Paris, you’ll know that it is organized in a giant “spiral”, beginning at the Louvre and coiling outward through twenty arrondissements. “Spirale” is a perfect track to immerse yourself in if you can imagine yourself navigating the giant spiral of Paname! This song is a toppy, hoppy number with exuberant tail-wagging drums that give the same face as Prince’s “Raspberry Beret.” It has the perfect pace for walking briskly. A wavering Mellotron is the cushion of air you need to carry you through la foule of tourists. Synth and guitar synchronize and arpeggiate in a giant invisible arc over your head. This is the force field that protects your inner thoughts.
“Je Rentrais Par Le Bois” is an instrumental. At its outset, it might remind you of the Sex Pistols’ “Pretty Vacant,” but as soon as the drums jump in, you set out on a journey.
We now leave Paris, and you can imagine you are on a dark, wooded path, with disrupted flashes of the sky that you see in slow motion. Could you be trying to reconstruct a memory? An eerie mellotron chorus arrives, ushering in raunchy buzzing guitars. You start to hear a periodic “ding” that orients you into thinking about a giant typewriter. At this point, you’ll realize the 16-beat pattern sounds like it’s keys. Your journey through the forest weaves you in a tangle of silk thread through the keys of this giant typewriter. The title is “Je Rentrais Par le Bois” (“I was returning through the woods”). This begs the question, “Where are you coming back from? A newsroom maelstrom? A writing retreat that went south? (Do they even have typewriters at writing retreats?) And is this journey back through the woods victorious, or do you still have many more questions? You have 11 minutes and 28 seconds to figure this out.
“Autour de Chez Moi” is a meditation or perhaps a rumination on our changing times.
Antoine Jaussaud
We know the population is growing exponentially worldwide, and this is causing a lot of fear and anxiety everywhere. More specifically to France, I agree that there is a lot of misunderstanding about people who aren’t from l’Hexagone (I lived there for several years as an étrangère). There is a lot of fearmongering about d’autres types de personnes, or even people who listen to certain kinds of music, eat in a certain way or who simply embrace being themselves. Could this song be a welcome to all, and to all our differences? The lyrics in this track list and acknowledge people of many nationalities, but it also nods to punks, mods, vegans, etc. If you are familiar with the punk group Bérurier Noir, “Autour de Chez Moi” might remind you of “Salut à Toi”;
Salut à toi ô mon frère/
Salut à toi, peuple khmer/
Salut a toi l’Algérien/
Salut à toi,le Tunisien…
But could “Autour de Chez Moi” be mocking fearful, curtain-twitching folk who long for the old days? Who knows! But with the song’s Alan Vega/Suicide allure, it could be interpreted either way.
If you cannot wait until the June 19th release date, hop onto YouTube and catch their performance of “One Blood Circle.” But when Jour J (that’s French for D-Day) rolls around, you’ll be able to enjoy the whole recording. It will take you places. Whether or not you were right there in the room for “Live at Beaubourg”, you can bet your soul could be lifted and carried up through all the blue and green pipes, ejected out as a small billowing cloud of tiny golden particles that float over The City of Light, or even the many OTHER parts of France.*
*Un petit message à Lionel et Marie…je sais bien que Paris n’est pas le centre de l’univers. Il existe aussi de nombreuses autres villes, ainsi que des paysages, des côtes, des montagnes et des vallées, sur lesquels son âme peut planer au son de votre musique!
Riffindots is Britta Pejic–a musician, songwriter, artist, and foreign language teacher who grew up in Maine, lived in Paris and later in the Basque Country. Follow @riffindots for cartoonish fun and visual mayhem or simply enjoy her music at https://brittapejic.bandcamp.com
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