Influences: Franz Kirmann

A very moving piece.
There is such warmth and longing here, the chords like slow waves of restrained emotions.
The processing is so sophisticated, subtle and unique, the whole record sounds like water. Stunning, perhaps my favourite piece of electronic music.

I tend to prefer Wonk Kar Wai’s pre “In The Mood For Love” period, and “Happy Together” is probably his strongest film from that period.
There is a real physicality in his movies, he has such a distinctive visual language where he accesses the emotional level of situations at the same time as the reality of them.
I just love the formal inventiveness of his films, the way he plays with time, the romantic tone, the impossible love. He has a very nostalgic look at life through fragments of moments that he tries to freeze in time.

I didn’t understand anything about the movie the first time I saw it (a lacerated print, dubbed in French sometimes in the mid 80’s in Senegal) but I have never forgotten it.
When it comes to influencing me, it’s not necessarily the fantastic Vangelis score, but more the film has a whole, the retro futurism aesthetic, the central theme of empathy as a defining feature of human nature. Can robots feel or love? The marriage of blues and retro 30’s music in Vangelis‘ mainly electronic score reflects this tension between human and machine.

There are a lot of things in the Depeche Mode of the mid 80’s to early 90’s that I think have influenced me simply because it’s the first band I really got into and listened to carefully.
They were very modern, even futuristic to my ears and they were also underdogs despite being so successful which somehow made them real.
Again, can machines feel? I think they can with Depeche Mode. The songs were just great and very touching despite the coldness of the music. And also as a teenager they told you about sex, guilt, loss of innocence and love in a very honest way, which was more important to me than knowing where to find the next whiskey bar! They were also my entry to EBM, industrial music and then techno.

Modiano’s books are strange, mysterious places where past and present mix up, situations vaporise or fizzle away, where words become hesitant and uncertain.
His writing is superb; the way he conveys an atmosphere or a feeling with minimal use of words and suggestive sentences.
I re-read his books all the time and it’s beautiful because they are all mixed up in my head, like a gigantic ghostly world full of evasive characters looking for forgotten people in lost Parisian quarters, the French riviera or indistinct border towns of Switzerland and Spain. His books always leave me with a beautiful sadness, stuck in some kind of nostalgic torpor.

I started reading Ballard late, three years ago maybe.
He’s a fabulous writer… behind the provocative subjects of his novels you have one of the most accurate eye on humanity you’ll ever find.
Elysian Park owes a lot to his later fiction, from “Cocaine Nights” onwards.
This clip is an extract of the South Bank show about that specific period in his work.

My Bloody Valentine is the band that got me into guitar music… Maybe because it didn’t sound like guitar music! It sounded like a souvenir or something I don’t know. It’s violently dreamy and strangely sexual music.
This song is from their album “Isn’t anything” which in my eyes is as important a record as “Loveless”

Cold as fuck, their slow disturbing songs channel the vacuity of modern society through tales of chemical induced lethargy, deviant desires and lurid dreams.
A pitch perfect representation of post empire 21st century blues.

At the time I discovered Vaporwave, I was using similar processing as you find in that music. I was experimenting with slowed down pop songs and feeding them through granular samplers and reverb etc… But I was more trying to do a kind of ambient version of The Field.
Some of these experiments have filtered down onto my record Elysian Park. But more than Vaporwave music, which can often be pretty horrible, it’s the comment on the sedated, lethargic, consumerist society that I found myself drawn towards.