Published:
September 28, 2017
Solo electronic artist Franck Vigroux has travelled the globe touring many vibrant cities including Tel Aviv, San Francisco, Tbilisi, Beijing, Bogota and countless others. He spent most of his time working backstage at venues in order to construct what evolved into ‘Barricades’. By morning he worked tirelessly on new tracks and performed them live by the evening, delivering a clean, sheer sound that gives one a sensation of a world on the brink of a dismal future.
Each track contains electronic glitches, sinewaves of fuzz and rhythm to the point of sonic scrutiny floating on a bed of pulsating beats, drones, kicks and clicks that are signature of Vigroux’s pursuit of audio purity. Yet ‘Barricades’ emerges as a sonic sculpture: chiseled and refined in Vigroux’s own vision of perfection. The album involved Vigroux stripping his pedigree of instruments down to a minimum of audio equipment consisting of both analogue and digital hardware gear. He states: I recorded it all in stereo, just two tracks, I think that because of that it carries the rawness of a ‘live’ recording to me. It’s the method that I’ve adopted to work by these days.
Listen: The Attic Podcast: 50. Franck Vigroux
Unlike most of Vigroux’s previous releases, ‘Barricades’ was void of specific concepts but instead carries a very strong reactive message. Though each track title reads like a vague scrapyard list of industrial items, the album works as a diary documenting Vigroux’s modern experiences touring various cities globally as he observed and witnessed issues resulting from the atrocities of humanization: urban decay, overpopulation, dehumanization, pollution, social injustice and the overall harsh and brutal realitIes of globalization influencing Vigroux’s style of music and further shaping his artistic vision.
This formulated what has come to be ‘Barricades’, an album with a stark atmosphere of austerity paralleled with the presence of Vigroux’s inventiveness as a sonic sculptor. Vigroux explains: I think the title ‘Barricades’ is a subtle salute to all those who attempt to and have attempted to resist, take risks and think differently. A radical movement that comes to mind is one that is the 1871 Paris Commune. Barricades is an old French word literally meaning ‘walls created by barrels’ which is a metaphor for describing the complicated and obstructive problems we’ve introduced and hide behind in the world we live in today.
Listen: The Attic Podcast: 50. Franck Vigroux
Track list:
1. Countdown
2. Concrete Island
3. La Chair
4. Sabotage
5. H+
6. Barricades
7. Steel
8. Rosso