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The Happy World of Producer @martinsolveig

To see more of Martin’s colorful photos, head over to @martinsolveig on Instagram. For more music stories, check out @music.

Bright leather Tetris-block dresses, banana-yellow loafers and harsh green and red squiggles in an empty space. This is the visual feast served at the table of Martin Solveig (@martinsolveig), French national treasure and dance music’s most colorful character.

“I live a very happy life,” says Martin, from his studio in Paris. “I think there are so many guys who are good at being dark and mysterious. I’m the opposite of that.” The frenetic vibrancy of his image is carefully crafted in counterpart to his energetic sound. The Parisian producer first made waves on U.S. shores with 2010’s club anthem “Hello,” a collaboration with indie dance darlings Dragonette. The upbeat quirkiness continued with 2012’s “The Night Out” and 2014’s “Blow.” Both were a stark contrast to the hard-hitting big room and deep, meandering house music going on around him.

“The obsession for one beat and one format of dance music has really expired,” says Martin. “We can’t take any more of that. It is too much. We need something else.”

For Martin, “something else” is a hybrid of styles old and new. He’s breaking the cycle by turning to the past. On recent tracks “Intoxicated” and “+1,” he calls on the lessons of classic Detroit producer Kevin Saunderson and Chicago’s Lil Louis, as well as French Duo Cassius and other ‘90s-era “French touch” favorites. Both songs are as cheerful as they are commanding. It’s a style characterized by effervescent violence. The bass hits you in the face while the groove tingles your spine. It’s a sound fit for the lofty dance floors of Ibiza and the sweat-drenched grime of Los Angeles.

It certainly made a splash at Coachella in April, where Martin wowed audiences with a unique, one-time-only 3-D mapped stage production specially synched to his live mix performance. It was bursting with all the colors of the French designers that inspire him, featuring playful images of snapping fingers, Martin swimming through empty space and more primary color corkscrew squiggles than a ‘90s sitcom intro.

“It was a first for me, but it was something that I’m going to work on a lot in the future,” he says, of the set design. “It’s not going to be necessarily the same content, the same image, but I like the idea of editing some special video content that is really super connected to the sound, and not generic in a way.”

Martin promises more of that unique sound down the road –– new songs tied by the same pop art visuals and fanciful sonic flair. That project will culminate in a full-length LP of the simple and straightforward title, Dance Musique. Like himself and his inspirations, it’s all very French.

“The identity of everything I’m going to be doing, from ‘Intoxicated’ to the end of that, is coming from France,” says Martin. “I think that France has ‘it’ right now, especially in graphic design. It has a touch that is extremely interesting and is very refreshing compared to a lot of other stuff.”

D’accord, Martin. Bring on the banana shoes.

––Kat Bein for Instagram @music

by via Instagram Blog