Paris With a Parisian

The French Touch visits the 80s : Hop on in Kavinsky’s red car

Air, Justice or Daft Punk are the big notorious names of the French Touch, that special electronica movement that mixes digital rythm and smooth melodies in a typical French way. With « Outrun », Kavinsky shows he belongs to the movement, but he has something more to offer.

 

Born Vincent Belorgey in 1975, Kavinsky comes from Paris’s northern suburbs, and has been fooling around with sounds for a while. Hanging out with the crème de la crème of French electronica, he was able to score for musician/film director Quentin Dupieux (aka Mr Oizo, who made the yellow puppet Flat Eric famous in Flat Beat) and appeared in several movies and clips. But it’s really with « Nightcall » in 2010 that he’ll get on the stairway to success.

Surrounded by an eerie ambiance, between fear and fascination, Nightcall has that typical Kavinsky 80s sound, almost New Wave. For a lot of us, it has a « Madeleine de Proust » flavor, something both very modern yet that brings us back to a long gone time. One can relate it to « Fade to grey » or « Taxi Girls », with a digital twist. The piece will be chosen for the soundtrack of « Drive », a great Quebecois movie, which partakes in creating the legend around it.

3 years later, Kavinsky finally releases an album, Outrun, with Nightcall and 12 others songs that comes from the same unique source. The ambiance created, which takes us back to the 80s weird movies like Stephen King’s Christine or Freddy, manages to develop a very consistent musical thread on which each sound conveys its own personality. One of these, Odd Look, was chosen for the BMW advertising campaign right before the LP was released.

Kavinsky is now considered as one of the high members of the French Touch, and has well deserved his rank, as he almost brings more to that concept than he takes out… And it’s a good way to listen to something else than Daft Punk these days !

Here is a sample:

Nightcall (the video clip, with images from Drive I believe): Nightcall Kavinsky

Protovision (with Kavinsky driving…): Protovision