Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts

M83

album cover

Shimmering Triumphs of Texture

Two young musicians, bored with techno, sneak into the workshop of French electronic pop pioneer Jean-Michel Jarre. They're not criminals, just clubbers looking for kicks. They power up the massive synths and the odd vintage beat machines. They play cautiously at first, not wanting to mess with equipment that sounds like it's still set up for Jarre's grandiose 1977 hit Oxygene. Gradually they grow bolder, seeking swirls of synthesized strings and oscillating organ chords way too psychedelic for a rave. Pretty soon they've got an aural portrait of a barren cityscape still smoldering in the aftermath of some cataclysmic event.

The twelve-track epic Dead Cities wasn't actually created in Jarre's studio, but it might have been. Antibes-born Nicholas Fromageau and Anthony Gonzalez utilize many of the French electronic pop pioneer's favorite predigital sounds, and share Jarre's notion of the majestic. One key difference has to do with perspective: This duo approaches everything from a distance, as though filming a wonder of nature. The wide-angle panoramic views give the music an Eno-ambient aura and a Pink Floyd spaciness. It transforms what would, in other hands, be slow-to-congeal ambient music into shimmering triumphs of texture.

Since the two multi-instrumentalists live in the techno world, the music hums along at a hyperefficient clip, the pace of an urban rush hour. Yet there's nothing frantic going on here. Throughout, M83 tries to loosen up the deadening assembly-line grind associated with post-millennium electronica—sometimes weaving sleepy female voices into the atmosphere, sometimes abandoning rhythm entirely to conjure placid pools of still water. These guys are thinking about the world beyond the dance floor, and their organic, deeply engrossing sequences unfold into music that's strikingly picturesque, a soundtrack in search of a movie.

Genre: Electronica
Released: 2003, Gooom Disque (U.S. release 2004, Mute)
Key Tracks: "America," "Cyborg," "Beauties Can Die."
Catalog Choice: Before the Dawn Heals Us
Next Stop: Jean-Michel Jarre: Oxygene
After That: Four Tet: Rounds
Book Pages: 493–494