Good electronic music can not only be heard, but also seen.
This article complements the recently published Justice article:
Why do the French, of all people, always create such incredibly great, forward-looking electronic music?
I would like to put forward the following crude thesis:
What makes the French so good is that they can't just hear electronic music. You can see them too.
Some things point to this:
Jean-Michel Jarre regularly builds entire audiovisual cathedrals around his machines.
Daft Punk presented the most captivating videos on the rave idea of the 1990s and, with their cyber-buccaneer look, finally moved the image of the robotic music worker beyond the Konrad Zuse era.
In 2010, Vincent Belorgey, known as Kavinsky, created the exact neon tubes for his "Nightcall" track that Nicolas Winding Refn later used to build the lighting principle for his "Drive" film.
When a musician like Gaspard Augé plays one of his many synthesizers, what you see in your inner 3D eye when you listen is certainly not a man pressing keys. It's a scenery, some kind of spectacle, not even necessarily a beautiful one. They are energies, topographies, monstrosities, choreographies.
Augé has become known as the fuzzy one in the Justice duo. He won two Grammys with his partner Xavier de Rosnay, played several times at the world-famous Coachella festival and released his first solo album some time ago: "Escapades".
"Escapades" doesn't contain a single line of sung text, is as thoroughly escapist as the title promises, and provides some of the abysmal colorful, turbo-dynamic, sublime to ultra-kitsch images that you can hear on it, right there for you to watch.
On the cover, for example, which shows a near accident: In a vast, empty rocky landscape, a huge tuning fork fell from the sky, drilled itself into the hill of stones like a missile and only narrowly missed the artist, who, as a minifigure in a coat, continued the walk through the wasteland. A tableau that is a parody and continuation of the common imagery of progressive rock, on whose covers oversized eggs, keys or other objects from dream interpretation manuals often float above the quiet land.
But these agile synthesizer miniatures only have one thing in common with progressive rock, this art music morphed from LSD-fueled R 'n' B improvisation, folk and European classical music: they want to tell stories, move forward. Through various stories and states of knowledge, and under no circumstances remain in a loop like DJ pieces. However, they completely lack the epic patience until the drugs take effect, the sounds are nice and warm and the poet gets to the point.
And that's the most interesting question the album asks:
What exactly does the younger or differently socialized audience see when they hear the tracks?
How does "Escapades" work if you don't or no longer know all the TV intros from the 80s, the police, horror and erotic films whose sound aesthetics Gaspard Augé relies on here, like a pop culture cemetery where ghosts rise at night?
Without wanting to put too much pressure on this rather enjoyable record, you can also see it as an experiment. As an experiment on visual sound design and what the upcoming pop cohort will make of it. As a breeding of a new, emotional robot generation.
Thrilled!
