Vitalic: “DISSIDÆNCE Episode 2″
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 to 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.
