Last year, French electrohouse maestro Vitalic promised to crash land back onto the scene with music that clashed “electro-mutant disco” with techno. Prophesied as a return to form toward his electro-funk roots, Dissidænce Episode 1 mostly delivered on its promise in its first half. The rest lapsed back into familiar Vitalic territory, louche electroclash-cum-French house that recalled earlier exploits in the vein of Poison Lips. While not entirely unsatisfying, the first episode of this new project left room for Vitalic to make good on his promise of bonkers, mutant club music and hope was subsequently pinned to its sequel to deliver on this. Finally here, the second episode of Dissidænce is immediately the stronger of the two, meeting Vitalic’s self-generated hype as some of the most acrid and sledgehammering music of his career.
Part of Episode 2’s success over its predecessor may lie in the way the album is sequenced. The sonic arc is at once far more impressive than Episode 1, which front loaded itself with heavy, techno spiked bangers before lapsing into drone synth pieces and electroclash. After the onslaught of Episode 1’s first three tracks, these felt lacklustre. Episode 2 avoids this by finding an arc that feels logical and conducive to the music, which happens to cover new territory for Vitalic. Sirens opens the album with music that picks up where Episode 1 left off, a classic Vitalic track filled with whining and wailing synths that sound like the heralding of some extraterrestrial overlord. Dancing In The Streets is a hard techno acid house hybrid, with a pounding beat and squabbling arpeggios that buzz deliriously and deliciously. These two tracks are balanced with the trance informed Friends & Foes, a mid-tempo slow burner that features a Koreless-reminiscent vocal sample chopped up to a preternatural stutter.
Download & stream Dissidænce Episode 2 here
The Void is where things get really interesting. Viatlic shifts into a somewhat minimal, somewhat big room style with a heavily distorted regular-time beat that plods with crunched out, industrial menace. It recalls, frankly, Nelly Furtado’s Maneater in its carnal baseness, just a lot meaner. A filtered vocal sample pitched down to the pits of Hell delivers indistinct spoken word, and then from beneath the chaos techno synths and hi-hats begin to simmer. It sounds like nothing he’s made before, but the Vitalic signatures are intact. The Light Is A Train is possibly one of the album’s strongest, and the closest Vitalic has come to making “electro-mutant disco techno” tangible. It’s techno, but with the pulse of a four-on-the-floor, blended with the demented rave synths and pads that Vitalic found on Rave Age. One of the longer tracks on Episode 2, The Light Is A Train swells and ascends as it moves along, building an ever propulsive sense of tension and anticipation as it raptures you in its wake. Marching is another oddity in the Vitalic catalogue; late 90’s inspired trip-hop and glitch. It’s dark, sweaty, and twistedly sexy. It’s like the death metal band T-shirt wearing little sister of Sweet Cigarette, but just as you get comfortable in its sticky, tar-like gunk, it’s over. These tracks feel the most essential to Viatlic’s Dissidænce era. As a producer, he’s always been intrinsically chameleonic and no two bodies of work have ever sounded quite the same. Episode 1’s biggest pitfall was feeling and sounding self-referential for the bulk of its runtime, whereas with tracks like The Void and Marching, Vitalic is doing what he does best. Evolving.
Taking the Dissidænce project as a whole into consideration, there’s a sense that the project is plagued mostly by being overstuffed. Trimming the excess of Episode 1 and combining it with the best of Episode 2 would have made for a more striking body of work, but at this point in Vitalic’s career he’s honestly able to do whatever he pleases. There’s no denying his inherent visionary, a deep, somewhat romantic understanding of electronic music’s darkest, seediest corners and no one is able to give these outskirts life quite like him. Over the course of the past few months, we’re grateful to have been blessed with a wealth of new material from his gorgeously twisted mind, and now that the world is opening its dancefloors once again there’s no doubt a good handful of Dissidænce is destined to become essential club staples.
Listen to The Light Is A Train from Dissidænce Episode 2 below.
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