M83‘s Anthony Gonzalez is set on straying from modern musical technics on Digital Shades Vol. 2 (DSVII), a 15-cut production that conceptually centers on vintage sound. Gonzalez explained his vision for the LP in a blog post recently published on M83’s website.

“At first there was this vivid memory of Dungeons and Dragons, this childhood sensation of living in an imaginary world set in a faraway past or a lost future,” Gonzalez writes. “I wanted to create some music that could be part of this adventure and journey with all of its solitary knights, dreamy landscapes, strange animals, forgotten myths, and old spells.”

Gonzalez credits five months spent in France’s Cap d’Antibes as the creative incubation period for the approach that would guide Gonzalez’s construction of DSVII. During the summer of 2017, Gonzalez alternated between reading, watching films, swimming in the Mediterranean Sea, and playing ’80s video games.

“The inspiration behind this record is mainly video game music,” Gonzalez continues. “It felt so refreshing to play all of these old school games again. There is something so naive and touching about them. It’s simple and imperfect. And this is exactly what I tried to achieve with Digital Shades Vol. 2.”

DSVII is expected to embody the past in both the sound that will permeate the album’s individual inclusions, and in the equipment that Gonzalez used to craft the LP. In accordance with Gonzalez’s pledge to “…only feed [himself] with older art,” Gonzalez solely relied on analog tools to make the record. Gonzalez recorded DSVII in his own studio, and at Justin Meldal-Johnsen’s studio in Glendale, California during the final stages of production between the fall of 2017 and the spring of 2018.

DSVII is due September 20, and will arrive as the followup to Digital Shades Vol. 1, released in 2007. Listeners can pre-order DSVII here, and can read Gonzalez’s blog post in full, here.

Photo credit: NPR

Tags: album, DSVI, DSVII, M83

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