Before we now have to debate the big question, which has been pumping for decades, on an empty stomach, why the French of all people always manage to create such insanely great, future-oriented electronic music, whether that is due to the promotion of culture or the inherited rebellious gesture, whether laicism is to blame Or simply the fact that many there speak English so badly that they prefer to channel their energy into abstract synthesizers than into rock’n’roll – so before the discussion starts, let’s slow them down with a new, equally crude thesis aus: What makes the French so good is that they can not only hear the electronic music. You can see them too.
There is some evidence of this. Jean-Michel Jarre regularly builds entire audiovisual cathedrals around his machines, the duo Daft punk has presented the most captivating videos on the rave idea of the nineties and finally moved the image of the robotic music worker beyond the Konrad Zuse era with its cyber-buccaneer look. In 2010 Vincent Belorgey, known as Kavinsky, with his “Nightcall” track adjusted exactly the neon tubes from which Nicolas Winding Refn later built the lighting principle for his “Drive” film. And then there is that AirRecord cover on which the musicians float dreamily in an art building above Monument Valley, in the architectural space-pop update of Pierre Koenig’s Stahl House.
The accompanying images of rock’n’roll are relatively trivial in comparison, which is derived from its production. When the guitar thunders, you associate yourself with a person, for example Lenny Kravitz, who hits the strings. If, on the other hand, the musician Gaspard Augé, 42, lets one of his possibly 45 synthesizers play, then what one sees in front of the inner 3D eye when listening is certainly not a man who presses keys. It’s a scene, some kind of drama, not necessarily a beautiful one. There are energies, topographies, monstrosities, choreographies. The Düsseldorf from power plant tried to teach us that even in such cases people only push buttons, but they did the math without the French.
Augé is the fluffy one in the techno-rock duo Justice known. Has won two Grammys with partner Xavier de Rosnay, headlined the world-famous Coachella festival and recently sent pop star Justin Bieber a cease and desist because he plagiarized not her music but her visual logo. Now Augé and his synthesizers have also made a solo record called “Escapades”. It does not contain a single line of sung text, is escapist through and through, as the title promises, and provides a few of the deeply colorful, turbodynamic, sublime to ultra-kitschy images that you can hear on it for viewing.
The cover: a near-accident in which the artist barely survived.
(Photo: Ed Banger / Because Music)
On the cover, for example, which shows a near-accident. In a wide, empty rocky landscape, a huge tuning fork has descended from the sky, has drilled its way into the cairn like a bullet and barely missed the artist, who, as a minifigure in a cloak, continues the footpath through the wasteland. A tableau that is a parody and continuation of the common world of images of progressive rock, on whose covers oversized eggs, keys or other objects from dream interpretation manuals float above the quiet land.
VHS soft porn in an enchanted Brittany castle
With progressive rock, this art music morphed from LSD-driven rhythm’n’blues improvisation, folk and European classical music, these agile synthesizer miniatures have only one thing in common: they want to tell, to move forward. Through any stories and states of knowledge, and under no circumstances remain in the loop like DJ pieces. However, they completely lack the epic patience until the drugs work, the sounds are nice and warm and the poet gets to the point.
Augé rarely needs more than four minutes to completely shoot down his sawtooth riffs, to bring a jubilant desert race to the finish or to tell a beauty-and-the-beast novella with spinet and organ fluff, as VHS soft porn in an enchanted one Brittany Castle. Even the fantastic videos that are available for three of the songs are only a minute long, perfect for social media.
And that’s the most interesting question the album asks: what exactly does the younger or differently socialized audience see when they hear the pieces? How does “Escapades” work when you don’t or no longer know all the TV intros of the eighties, the police, horror and erotic films, on whose sound aesthetics Gaspard Augé builds like on a pop culture cemetery where ghosts rise at night? Without wanting to overcharge this rather enjoyable plate, it can also be seen as an experiment. As an attempt at visual sound design and what the upcoming pop cohort will make of it. As the cultivation of a new, feisty generation of robots. Enchanté!