VITALIC

VITALIC

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Vitalic: “DISSIDÆNCE Episode 1 & Episode 2”

Vitalic released his fourth album “Voyager” in 2017, a delectable burnbabyburn disco journey, filled with irresistible cosmic vitamin-fuelled vibes, confidently updated for the modern dancefloor. It also definitively confirmed his status as one of the most emblematic members of the famous French Touch, a producer perpetually reinventing himself, capable of mixing techno, rock, disco, pop and punk with equal energy, expanding minds and moving bodies with hits like “La Rock 01”, “My Friend Dario”, “Fade Away”, “Under Your Skin”, “Poison Lips”, “Second Lives” and a whole bunch more. And yet Vitalic is much more than just the sum of his studio albums – from the very beginning of his career, he has proved his love for electronic live shows, a genre that he has legitimised (in the same way as Etienne de Crécy, Daft Punk and Justice, for example) through his electrifying, near-psychedelic concerts filled with digital pyrotechnics and laser battles, leaving audiences breathless, ecstatic and exhausted.

While Vitalic has been extremely prolific since the release of “Voyager” and the extensive tour that followed, he has not been resting on his laurels. As well as resuscitating the Dima alter-ego under which he started attracting attention back in the day (a project that already contained the essence of the future Vitalic DNA), he also remixed French pop deity Etienne Daho, gave a wild techno makeover to Louisahhh, and formed Kompromat with Rebeka Warrior (formerly part of Sexy Sushi), a sublime homage to DAF and EBM (Electronic Body Music), sung in German. Let’s also not forget the limited-edition box set released to celebrate his twenty years of music making, featuring some of his most successful tracks and remixes (and now worth silly money on the web). And as if that wasn’t enough, Vitalic announced a special anniversary show in Paris’ biggest indoor venue for 12th March 2022.

Locked down and furloughed, Vitalic went back to his synths and beatboxes, resulting in his fifth album “DISSIDÆNCE” – the title of which is a whole story in itself – destined to be released in two volumes. He describes it as a return to the roots of his sonic identity, a kind of reinterpretation of the rock energy of his early albums. “More than anything, it was a question of timing. While composing I realised that eight tracks felt like too little for an album, and sixteen was really over the top, so I decided to cut the whole thing in half! The main reason though is that I felt I hadn’t been able to express everything I wanted to on the first volume – like something had been left unfinished.”

The first part of “DISSIDÆNCE” opens with “Haute Definition”, electro-mutant disco whose sounds unconsciously form a bond with the previous album “Voyager”, but the adventure quickly moves into harder, more techno-orientated territory, as confirmed by Vitalic. “I went back to a rougher style of composition than on my last two albums, a sound more influenced by the 1970s, more direct, less smooth. I wanted the production to be violent but still sexy.” “Rave Against The System” is the perfect example of this, and also the first single to be taken from the album, setting the tone with its martial rave-ready beat, overlapping acid loops and repetitive, angry vocals – “Rave against the system, we won’t stop, we can’t stop” – delivered by a fired up Kiddy Smile. It’s a furious, violent hit whose electro-punk feel indicates the direction the new album intends to take. Diving into this furious, sweaty swamp of unapologetic hard techno dredges up other pearls like “Boomer OK”, the humorous reply of twenty year-olds  to forty year-olds, sporting infrabass and wild vocals that transform the track into a mental and physical blender, “Carbonized”, with its crazy electronic gimmicks, score-settling lyrics, synthetic vocals and an energy that take us back (with great pleasure) to the incredible “My Friend Dario”, and “Cosmic Renegade”, like some kind of diabolical trance hymn that harkens irresistibly back the best of Jam & Spoon and German techno of the 90s.

Of course, as with all of his albums, Vitalic finds it amusing to play with our nerves (and bodies), alternating pure, visceral dance tracks destined for huge warehouses or festival stages with a whole swathe of sweet and soft ballads whose romantic tones take us delicately back to earth. We’re thinking of “Lost Time”, almost entirely ambient and beatless, like something from an imaginary film soundtrack, the sublime “Danse Avec Moi” which perfectly distils bouncy 80s electronic pop to tell the story of all the couples formed at 4am on a dancefloor, and “14 AM” which kicks off as a homage to Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman” before shapeshifting into earworm electronica doused in EBM.

By a critical and popular success, with strong tracks including the super-eurodisco “Haute Definition” and “Rave Against the System”, a percussive mix of high energy and even higher energy destined to exhaust the most gigantic of dancefloors, “DISSIDÆNCE” keeps its promise and delivers its second episode, seven brand new tracks that arrive together with a box to house the two volumes neatly together.

Vitalic started work on “DISSIDÆNCE Episode 2” immediately after finishing the first. “At the end of the first episode of “DISSIDÆNCE”, I already enough few demos for another album,” he explains, “but when I listened to them I realised they were missing something that would give them more coherence, something that would make the two albums come together as a single entity. To put it simplistically, the first one is kind of pop in a way, while the second is more industrial with a hint of rave. It’s more of a collection of tracks that you could call ‘functional’, tracks to play live or in a mix, really made for dancing. It was only after finishing the two volumes that I realised just how much all the tracks are an expression of frustration, the outpouring of everything we’ve been through in the past two years, from confinement to the closure of every club and cancellation of every festival.”

This policing of the dancefloor permeates the opening track of “DISSIDÆNCE Episode 2”. Fittingly titled “Sirens” and punctuated by the dreaded wails that have brought many a rave to a silent halt, the track whips itself up into a sweaty, dangerous electronic tornado before leading us to “The Void”, the perfect essence of minimal hardcore with its hypnotic repetition of “I belong to the void”, then on to “The Light is a Train”, a post-cold wave homage to Crash Course In Science, Vitalic’s favourite group.

The two episodes of “DISSIDÆNCE” – navigating between pop and hardcore, sweat and tenderness, melancholia and anger – are a sort of boiling down of what the artist knows how to do best, after twenty years of creating, from filthy whirlwinds that make your mind explode on the dancefloor to bubble gum pop songs about love that transport us elsewhere. On these two volumes of “DISSIDÆNCE” that now form one, the powerful beats and galloping sequencers translate the social and political anger of the global pandemic, and Vitalic looks into the past, channelling his love for off-kilter synth sounds, skew-whiff pads, heady refrains, distorted vocals and heavy beats. Above all, this dancefloor marathon expresses his obsessional passion for dance music and the primal need to dance. “DISSIDÆNCE” should be taken as both a celebration of celebration and a journey back in time to an era that maybe does not exist right now, but which will – and this album is the dazzling proof – be reborn from its ashes to burn bright once more, its BPM let loose and rage still blazing, because more than ever, to dance is to live.