Michel

If that name sounds like déjà vu, it’s not worth relying on. Michel is as unique as his name sounds familiar. Just like real spies, his music comes from the cold: a block of deep house from Eastern Europe pierced by French rap, in which he has chosen to place his faith. A style below zero that already sets him up as the future of electro, in the land of antiheroes.

Raised near Valenciennes, it was in fact in Belgium, at the Beaux-Arts, that he first started out. Technique, unpublished, no sequel. One train later and a few illusions left behind, he started a school of sound engineering in Paris, where the big names of the scene were sifting through the studio before his eyes. Why not him, after them? With a flow contaminated by a Soviet dance, whose cold drunkenness he reflects, Michel launched himself into it.

From his musical education, he retains the game and his words, a unique diction, a personal weapon to develop his storytelling which makes everyday stories clash. All of this takes place in sharp bends, often at the second degree, like the title “Mal Agi”, a manifesto in homage to defeat, or “J’me barre”, like the point of a vanishing line from which it is difficult to find a way out.

His musicality and sense of detail could already lead him towards comparisons, a potential reflection of the new guard of French rap. But beware of hastily made analogies. Michel disperses any desire for comparisons, if not on a solitary night, precisely. On a dance floor that looks like an iron wall, where a synthetic tension tinged with melancholy lights up the sequel. Written in Cyrillic.