Kavinsky turned the night into a soundtrack

He died on Tuesday evening at his flat in Paris, aged fifty. Vincent Belorgey, known by his stage name Kavinsky, leaves behind a career comprising two albums over twenty years and a handful of appearances at European electronic music festivals. But above all, he leaves behind "Nightcall". Everything else – his friendship with Daft Punk, the admiration of established DJs such as Jackson Fourgeaud and Quentin Dupieux, and his video game soundtracks – revolves around those four minutes of synthesisers and distorted vocals.

But this isn’t the usual story of a one-hit wonder, because before it was heard, “Nightcall” was “seen”. In 2011, it reached a wider audience thanks to the opening credits of "Drive", Nicolas Winding Refn’s film starring Ryan Gosling at the height of his action-glamour minimalism. And it works that way because it doesn’t invent anything new, but draws on a visual and sonic imagery that had already been circulating for decades, ready to be recognised. It is the final link in a musical tradition that began with Kraftwerk, who in 1974 dedicated an entire album, "Autobahn", to the car journey as a mystical experience: twenty-two minutes of electronic pulsation to describe the only form of public solitude that the twentieth century invented – that found within a car’s interior. A space in which to be together whilst moving and whilst stationary, exposed and protected. A motorised journey continued by Giorgio Moroder, who transformed that beat into a soundtrack language (“American Gigolo”, “Scarface”), and by Tangerine Dream, who composed a synth soundscape for Michael Mann’s “Thief” to accompany night-time shots of deserted cities. And then there’s the 1984–89 TV series "Miami Vice", with its aesthetic of pink and blue neon lights against wet tarmac, whose visual repertoire was revived by synthwave in the 2010s, imagining the 1980s as darker and more elegant than they actually were. Kavinsky follows that same path, and "Nightcall" adheres to every rule of the genre: a bassline like a heartbeat, vocals filtered through car windows, a single repeating chord, mimicking the hypnotic monotony of a centre line, of a strip of tarmac. It’s no surprise that these very traits – designed to remain in the background, never in the foreground – have worked better outside clubs than inside them. Even before that, another of his songs, “Testarossa Autodrive”, had featured on the soundtracks of Grand Theft Auto IV and Gran Turismo 5. And in 2013, the single “Odd Look” became the soundtrack for a BMW advert. 

Kavinsky’s tracks are ones that arrive already imbued with an image, which the ear then recovers later, by association. You recognise ‘Nightcall’ from the scene of Gosling driving at night in leather gloves. You remember ‘Testarossa Autodrive’ because it’s the track that plays whilst a video game is loading. It’s a reversal of the traditional order of musical discovery, which usually works something like this: first the sound, then, if all goes well, the image that accompanies it: a video, a concert, an album cover. A final touch of irony concerns the producer of “Nightcall”: Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, one half of Daft Punk. The French duo built their reputation on hiding their faces behind helmets to force the audience to focus solely on the sound. Kavinsky, on the other hand, has allowed the sound to disappear into someone else’s face – that of Gosling behind the wheel. It’s a language that every generation, sooner or later, rediscovers. Because every generation, sooner or later, drives alone at night and seeks out music that captures that feeling.