Le Vinyle Club Vinyl Le Vinyl Club Léviathan - Flavien Berger

Calling his first album Léviathan is quite bold, especially since this creature is originally a sea monster, a cross between a crocodile, dragon, and serpent, often found in ancient and biblical mythologies...

To present the Léviathan by Flavien Berger, his label, the very unique and underground Pan European Recording (Poni Hoax, Arielle Dombasle, Koudlam…) defines it as a "water attraction in a funfair." That sets the scene. The musician will take us on a journey over 10 tracks to unknown realms, blending psychedelia, electro, and poetic pop.

It sounds vague like that, but it's important to put into words the Flavien Berger experience, a complete artist both in his lyrics and his music, a patchwork of genres that's hard to define.

Self-taught, he didn't learn music at school but studied industrial design, completing a final project that involved creating a music machine. As a child, his time at the Conservatory was brief. Flavien Berger truly began making music with a PlayStation 2 video game console and a cassette recorder when he was 13, and later with GarageBand software provided on his computer while he was a student. It's software he still uses today. His parents came from the world of imagery, with a father who was a television director and a mother who was an editor. "I long believed I would make films to tell stories. I realized that I could tell them through music," he explains, not wanting to mention any major musical influences but admitting to having listened a lot to black music, jazz, soul, American rap, and house.

There’s a certain cinematography in the music of this young prodigy, and Léviathan is designed as a collection of stories or a series of short films, where coherence isn’t necessarily a criterion for listening.

The journey begins with the very electro "8888888," as if entering a club only to immediately leave and set sail in the waters of "Abyssinia." We stop at a "Fête Noire," almost rockabilly funfair that vaguely reminds us of Bruce Springsteen's "Statetrooper." Each track breaks the rhythm of the previous one to better disorient the listener, placing them in a blurred state, a sort of auditory intoxication that will lead them into the reverie of this "water attraction."

Léviathan because it's a shapeshifting monster with many faces, which will leave no one indifferent and will make Flavien one of the most promising artists on the French indie scene. We'll leave you with this catchy and ultimately realistic gimmick, Flavien Berger is right: "the most beautiful journey is the funfair!"

Marie-Laure Sitbon