2080

2080 is a cheerful character who takes great pleasure in playing his synthetic music live in the city’s clubs. An atypical composer, his beats have a hint of déjà-vu, echoing the games of our childhood and our old 8- and 16-bit consoles, from the days when Super Mario Bros. and Street Fighter ruled our living rooms. He openly embraces this influence and pairs it with his first musical love, Jean-Michel Jarre, then Orbital, The Prodigy, The Chemical Brothers, as well as Motown and Stax soul from the 60s and 70s. All of these artists have shaped his music, making it unique, somewhere between techno and hip-hop. It’s a clever mix of 80s influences, a strong taste for chiptune and other forms of audio recording, and a desire to create futuristic music. His bold, multi-influenced sound appeals as much to fans of chiptune as to electronic music lovers in the broadest sense. 2080 composes electro-chiptune — a blend of electronic textures, traditional analog synthesizers and sound chips from game consoles such as the Game Boy and the Commodore 64. A video-game enthusiast and a key figure of the French independent electronic scene, 2080 plunges listeners into a retro-gaming universe. We remember his much-talked-about video “My Megadrive” (over 600,000 views), his VJ set for French duo dDamage, his live shows inside the online game Minecraft, as well as numerous collaborations with Red Bull, Arte and Canal+, and several scores for video games and documentaries. He explores the world of video games as a source of emotion, erasing the boundaries between reality and virtual worlds. He loves to mix massive Moog and Doepfer modular synths with a Game Boy. His sounds come from a Juno-106, DX7, Game Boy, Doepfer A100, Oberheim Matrix 6R, Moog Slim Phatty and Minitaur, Commodore 64, TR-808, 909, 707 and CR-78. At barely four years old, he heard the track “Popcorn” for the first time, convinced it had been composed by Jean-Michel Jarre (while it was in fact written by Gershon Kingsley on the 1969 album Music to Moog By). As a teenager, he kept listening to Jarre, but also discovered Vangelis, Queen and Pink Floyd, before diving into the raw, brain-melting hardcore compilations Thunderdome. Step by step, he found his way into the complex, twisted universe of the Warp label. For a long time he wrote fairly dark music — heavy, ambient tracks with slow tempos and intricate rhythms — before deciding to express something more positive and turn his music into a source of fun. Like him, it became colorful, smiling and playful, the exact opposite of the moody, tortured, nit-picking side often associated with the electronica scene. 2080 has only one goal: “Make simple music that still has meaning.” The result is energetic, round-sounding electronic music, packed with video-game-flavored tones (his first passion). A geek in all his glory, who has managed to mature his childhood obsessions with art, music, comic books and video games into a unique musical universe.