Prolific French producer and composer Franck Vigroux is back with his latest release, Magnetoscope (raster, 2022), and today we are premiering a video for the track VHS directed by visual artist Kurt d’Haeseleer.

Magnetoscope is part of a series of releases, including Vigroux’s predecessor, Ballades Sur Lac gelé (raster, 2020), that interrelate strict and cool analogue sounds, drum machines and noise landscapes in an epic, almost cinematic way. Following his personal approach to sonic explorations of electronic textures and tensions, beats and use of white noise, this release sees the artists playfully flirting with the 80s, a time that, as with many of us, greatly influenced him; think of Blade Runner, dystopia, Polaroid colours and VHS video recorder aesthetics. I found some sounds that reminded me of that period and made some music with them. The sounds acted like a memory trigger or Proust Madeleine, Vigroux shares.

On further thoughts about the era, and memory and perception, Vigroux thinks that:  impression and memory of the past really depend on which social class you come from. The 80s certainly were the ‘apogee of capitalism’, Reagan, Thatcher …  and the acme of garbage production without any recycling etc.  The disaster didn’t stop then, but at least we finally started to be more conscious and consider the impacts. We were also permanently living with the nuclear war threat. The rich people had their own nuclear bomb shelters, I also remember well, even if I was a kid, when we ‘knew’ about the Tchernobyl explosion etc. Something that, like the Proust madeleine, the current Ukraine-Russia war has clearly revived. 

Talking about the creative process for Magnetoscope, Vigroux also shares that he was experimenting with some sorts of melodic lines with one of his synthesizers, some pseudo brass or trumpet sounds, very cliché, something he would probably never do in the past, but there was something between nostalgia and ambiguity that made him follow the path. There rarely are any proper melodic lines in his music,  but that changed this time.  The track VHS, Vigoux continues, is as simple as a regular pop song with a chorus and refrain: but conceptually and compositionally, for the making of the album, I was very attentive to make a whole narrative from the first to the last tracks; each one has his specific form. 

Η συνέχεια εδώ.