"Playing With Lightning" Part ONE - Gesaffelstein
“It’s a bit ironic for me to do dark music, you know, because I’m not like that. But if I use a dark thing to make people happy, I win.” - Gesaffelstein in an interview with Vice.
Mike Lévy is Gesaffelstein. Gesaffelstein is Mike Lévy. Proclaimed by fans as the “Dark Prince of Techno,” Lévy is a French producer and DJ who has been making dark sounding techno and industrial sounds for almost twenty years. He’s kind of a man of the shadows, both figurative and literal. He has produced for many big names when you least expect it, rarely does interviews, and he has some lengthy gaps in between album drops. Oh yeah, he also dresses from head to toe in black during shows and music videos, complete with an obsidian colored helmet in the shape of his head with menacing, glowing orange eyes.
Let’s back track for a moment, what does that name mean? Gesaffelstein is a combination of two words: The first is gesamtkunstwerk, a German word that means “total artwork,” and the second word is Einstein. In that same Vice interview I quoted earlier, Lévy is asked about how gesamtkunstwerk takes part in his music, to which he said,”It means the perfection of art with video, photographing, music, every art in one. It may be pretentious to say, but yeah, I try to touch the magical.”
From the jump, through his Variations and Conspiracy EPs, you hear the cold and sharp synth sounds, like in tracks like “Opr,” “Variations,” and “Hatred.” You can also clearly hear his influences, which lie primarily on classic techno and industrial acts like Green Velvet, Kraftwerk, and Depeche Mode. Before putting out his debut album, he would even get the attention of Kanye West(before he went off the deep end) and Daft Punk, in which he would help them produce songs on “Yeezus.” From that, he would even add some hip-hop influence in his sound. Which leads to how the world was introduced to Gesaffelstein, through the first single for Aleph: “Pursuit.”
“Pursuit” is probably the defining song for Gesaffelstein. Loud and thunderous chants mixed into the unrelenting synths creates something menacing with incredible control. It lives up to its name by having this pounding momentum from beginning to end. The song even had a controversial and dystopian music video which matches the polished, yet dirty sound of the song.
His debut album, “Aleph,” would go on and be even more tight sounding than his EPs, with songs that are just as intense as “Pursuit.” Tracks like “Duel,” “Hellifornia,” and “Trans,” are goth club ready bangers, and the album even more slow and contemplative tracks add to the atmosphere to the album like “Nameless,” “Wall of Memories,” and the title track. For a debut album, Lévy seemed to find his sound super quickly to deliver such a compact album. The world seemed to agree as well, with it placing in multiple top 10 and top 20 electronic album lists in 2013 from Spin Magazine, Complex, and Billboard. Though with the success of the album, it would be 6 years until he put out a follow-up.
From 2013 to 2018, he would do quite a few collabs, from features to remixes to even film scores. The biggest one was with The Weeknd, where he helped produce tracks for “My Dear Melancholy.” Throughout 2018, Levy would start to tease his sophomore album, “Hyperion,” which would drop in 2019.
I’m going to make this brief, “Hyperion” sure is an album. An album that doesn’t have much of an identity. From the blank, black square cover to the songs with features(Pharrell Williams, The Weeknd, HAIM) subtracting more than adding to Lévy’s sound, nothing on this album really lands. Even the instrumentals feel like rejects from “Aleph.” It probably should have been over for Gesaffelstein with this sophomore slump, as it didn't really do well critically or even do well on the charts. Luckily, I have more to say about the next one. Bring on the “Gamma!!”
It would be another five years where Lévy would go private again, putting out some smaller projects every once in a while(the Novo Sonic System EP is an underrated deepcut), but something would happen early 2024. “Hard Dreams” takes things back to the harder industrial sounds, with an almost retro feel. It feels like Gesaffelstein is leaning more into a Depeche Mode type of new wave sound, with a new singer. Enter: French-American singer, Yan Wagner. The two will team up together for Gesaffelstein’s third album, “Gamma.”
This album is heavily underrated. Like, I didn’t really hear much about it last year. It’s clear from the sound and the album cover that this isn’t a “Hyperion” situation, though. It’s a mostly tight and focused twenty-seven minutes, filled with heavy synths, other-worldly vocals, and ground shaking bass. Levy is back to a controlled chaos feel to his songs. The previously mentioned “Hard Dreams,” “The Urge,” “The Perfect,” and “Digital Slaves” utilize Wagner’s heavy voice perfectly, matching with Lévy’s edgy synth sounds. Even the instrumental tracks like “Hysteria,” “Mania,” and “Tyranny” hit like caffeine compared to the previous album. It’s for sure one of my favorite albums from 2024.
Sadly, this album didn’t do much. While he’s on tour for “Gamma,” outside of some music videos Lévy hasn’t done much else to promote it. Luckily, that’s not all he did in 2024, though. He also produced “B2B” and “I might say something stupid” by Charli XCX for “Brat.” I actually didn’t know that until I was doing research for this. Something even bigger than that is that he would produce some tracks for Lady Gaga’s “Mayhem,” and even showing up during her Coachella performance to do a remix of “Abracadabra.”
What will Gesaffelstein do next? I’m not actually sure, as I couldn’t find any interviews with him beyond 2015. But outside “Hyperion,” I think he has a very solid discography, and there’s even features, remixes, and production credits that he did that I didn’t list. After this tour, he’ll most likely just go back into the shadows, waiting for the perfect time to strike again with his menacing synths.
Thank you so much for reading the first Part of “Playing With Lightning!” Down below is a playlist with songs I listed off, as well as some other Gesaffelstein related links.
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5mEyv1gbfYfGzfuRKJNGQZ?si=an5__8mmSdqPhVE2_VbROA
https://pitchfork.com/features/interview/9322-gesaffelstein/
https://youtu.be/oRSijEW_cDM?si=IuQas2M5eVfikvP7
https://youtu.be/4HnUmZOjsyU?si=kKqsA1JO3GVESi-1