Electronic music has always had an unexplainable grip on me. Musically I gravitate towards melodies rather than lyrics, I've just been wired like that for as long as I can recall. Afrika Bambaataa's Planet Rock had an unforgettable synth track, something I just couldn't get out of my brain. I enjoyed A Night at the Roxbury on both an ironic and soundtrack basis. Then the Napster era opened up a world of euro-trance, happy hardcore, dance remixes and 1000 songs I might never find again.
In the late aughts, EDM had gone full mainstream (again). It was good, maybe a little too cleaned up. Too manufactured. But then I discovered Boys Noize, SebastiAn and Kavinsky. They reinvigorated that sense of excitement. It was as if I had stumbled upon something made just for me. Kavinsky lingered though. The sound was new but somehow familiar. It would later be known as synthwave or retrowave. A melodic throwback to what the collective mind thinks the 80s sounded like.
So why am I writing this? I'm not in the business of SEO-baiting headlines or capitalizing on an artist's untimely passing. Very few celebrity deaths have hit me, but when they do I try to think why. Usually it's because of a profound impact they inadvertently had on my life or creative influence.
Reading about Kavinsky passing away this week hit hard. My top played tracks are full of people who wouldn't sound the way they do without him.
A brief history
Vincent Belorgey didn't start as a musician. He was acting, or near enough to it, orbiting Quentin Dupieux aka Mr. Oizo. Dupieux handed him a used Mac with music software on it. That's it, that's the origin story.
The first EP, Teddy Boy, came out in 2005 and was made almost entirely on a Yamaha DX7. One synth. He also built a fiction around it, which was cool. Kavinsky was a character. A guy who crashed his Testarossa in 1986 and came back in 2006 as a zombie to make music. Belorgey said he didn't want his face on a sleeve.
He'd rather tell a story.
He signed to Record Makers. By 2007 he was touring with Daft Punk, Justice, SebastiAn and The Rapture. In 2010 he released Nightcall.
Worth stating plainly, because sometimes people get it backwards: Nightcall came out over a year before Drive. It wasn't written for the movie. Refn and Cliff Martinez just heard it and understood what it was: an autistic hammer-wielding Ryan Gosling driving through the LA evening to a forgotten 80s sound.
A memory of a lost feeling.
OutRun landed in 2013. Number two in France. The album title became an alternate name for the genre itself.
The French Dispatch
There's something about the French electronic scene and quiet, humble collaboration. It comes off as effortless and for the love of the craft above anything else.
Nightcall was co-produced with Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo (Daft Punk) and mixed by SebastiAn. Lovefoxxx from CSS on vocals. OutRun brought SebastiAn back for Odd Look, later re-cut with The Weeknd singing it, and put Havoc from Mobb Deep on Suburbia, which, at the time, was about as far from the Billboard Top 40 as you could get.
Reborn took nine years and arrived in 2022 with Gaspard Augé from Justice, Victor Le Masne, Cautious Clay, Sébastien Tellier and Kareen Lomax. That's a very specific slice of Paris. Some of the most influential artists working. I could not pick one of them out of a crowd if I tried.
The direct influences
It's simpler to just say that every synthwave artist alive owes everything to Kavinsky. It's not true, but again, it's simpler.
The Weeknd is on record calling Kavinsky "an inspiration to so many, including myself." Kavinsky's final show was opening for him at the Stade de France on July 10. Tim McEwan of The Midnight has said he watched Drive alone in a London theater, heard College and Kavinsky, and found the shared language he needed to start a band
The Midnight is great. The Weeknd got famous enough to think he should get into acting.
Sometimes the world just finds a balance.
Then there's the wider world of media. His own Testarossa Autodrive landed in GTA IV (SebastiAn's remix) and in Gran Turismo 5 Prologue.
Games with the same heartbeat as Drive popped up like Hotline Miami and Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon. The neon grid and sunset gradient that every indie game and YouTube thumbnail borrowed for a decade. He didn't invent the aesthetic, but he absolutely helped catapult it into the online zeitgeist.
Even this year, it felt like ALEXWAVE was a love letter to Nightcall.
The future without a legend
He was 50. He died at home in Paris on July 28, three days short of 51. French press reported a suspected stroke and that he'd complained of headaches beforehand. The investigation is open. Nothing official as of writing this.
He played the Olympics closing ceremony in 2024, Nightcall with Phoenix and Angèle. That version went Diamond in France. He had festivals booked through the rest of this year.
This wasn't a man fading out, if anything he was about to enter a second renaissance.
Personally, I'm less interested in how he went. I'd rather sing his accomplishments and lasting impact on a genre I love dearly. Kavinsky was a character who crashed in 1986 and came back to the present day. Vincent Belorgey made two albums in seventeen years and never gave the impression he owed anyone a third.
The genre survives him. It's self-sustaining and evolving every day. Thousands of producers deep, most working from a template he set without ever sitting anyone down to explain it.
