VITALIC (Live)

It’s been a good fifteen years now since Vitalic (aka Pascal
Arbez-Nicolas) took it upon himself to redefine techno using his native
French sensibility, mixing energy and melody to forge his own
recognisable style. Many of those tunes, like “Poney”, “La Rock 01”, “My Friend Dario” and “You Prefer Cocaine”
went on to become club classics, blurring the boundaries between
techno, disco, rock and pop, and profoundly inspiring and stimulating a
scene that had been struggling since the end of the ‘French touch’ to
find something a little more refreshing than filtered disco house.

It could be said that Vitalic ushered in the French Touch 2.0,
masterfully bringing bangers back into fashion and putting France back
on the dancefloor map. With his first production signed by tastemaker DJ
Hell for his Gigolo imprint, Vitalic paid scant regard to genre
boundaries and concentrated on simply knocking out some killer tunes – a
mix of irresistible melodies, stampeding synths and pure energy. Within
a few years, French electronica had changed direction, eschewing the
dancefloors for which it had originally been conceived and starting to
tour, live. A revolution was born – Vitalic opened the way and Daft
Punk, Justice and Etienne de Crecy followed.

Since his first album, “OK Cowboys” in 2005 which mixed
galloping techno, brass bands, 100,000 volt electric guitars and
languorous pop songs so sad they could make a stone weep, Vitalic has
constantly tried to reinvent himself, pushing his idea and vision of
disco to the extreme. This constant renewal is no doubt where the
producer finds his strength, exploring every facet (like a disco ball),
the myriad possibilities of what he calls metal disco, or more
prosaically “disco-poilue” – fuzzy disco.

For “Voyager”, his fourth studio album composed over the course of
two years and the one he considers his most ‘disco’ ever, Vitalic
remembers initially wanting to make something that could barely be
danced to, inspired by the electronic music of the 1970s. However, that
angle of attack was rapidly diverted. “I changed my mind during
production and added beats,” he explains. “Voyager” thus became a record
that has forgotten nothing of the cosmic disco heritage of the 1980s,
dominated by deeply energetic, orgasmic synthesisers with influences
from pioneers of the genre like Moroder, Cerrone, Patrick Cowley, Lime,
Spacer, Carpenter and Gino Soccio.