French Synthwave Producer Kavinsky Dead At 50
French DJ and electropop musician Kavinsky, best known from the score to Drive and his synthwave productions, was found dead in his home in Paris on Tuesday. Kavinsky was aged 50.
The Paris prosecutor’s office has opened an inquiry into Kavinsky’s cause of death, but noted in a statement that authorities found “no suspicious elements” at the scene.
French newspaper Le Figaro reports that Kavinsky was found dead in his home in the French capital Tuesday evening:
“A police source indicates that the musician had been complaining of headaches for several days. His neighbor, worried about not seeing the artist, alerted emergency services. A stroke is suspected.”
‘Kavinsky’ was a stage persona adopted by Vincent Belorgey. The backstory for the persona is that he crashed his Testarossa in 1986, died and was reborn as an electronic music producer.
“Kavinsky is a character I created because just putting my face on a record sleeve isn’t something that suits me. I’d much rather make music and tell a story, because for me music is linked to images. When I’m making music, I have images in my head of films and television shows I liked when I was little. So, I created this story that mixes all those memories together.”
Kavinsky began his musical career in 2005 following a pivot from acting, releasing a series of EPs over the following years that brought together retrofuturist sounds from synthwave, electropop and French house while drawing broader influence from sports cars, ‘80s action movies and classic video games.
These were followed by a debut album, OutRun, in 2013, and the 2022 follow-up Reborn.
Kavinsky’s most widely known release is the song Nightcall, produced with Daft Punk’s Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and featuring vocals from Lovefoxxx.
Released in 2010, Nightcall gained international recognition after the song was featured in the opening credits for Nicolas Winding Refn’s 2011 film Drive. “Nightcall changed my life,” Kavinsky told French newspaper Le Parisien in 2022.
Kavinsky memorably performed Nightcall alongside synth-pop band Phoenix and Belgian singer Angèle at the Paris 2024 Olympics closing ceremony, when the synth-driven anthem broke the record for the most Shazamed song in a single day, prompting almost 7 million people to use the music identification app to find out the song’s name.
In a 2013 interview with Vice, Kavinsky recalled how Nightcall made its way into Drive’s soundtrack. “Nicolas Winding Refn, the director of the film, contacted me because he was listening to the music in his car going down Sunset Boulevard, and after that I think he began listening to it a lot,” he said.
“And then he asked for it, and of course, me, I was really happy he chose my music for the opening credits. And I was a big fan of him particularly from the films the Pusher trilogy. So, for me it was, ‘Of course, you can use my music!’”
Kavinsky’s final public appearance was on July 10, when the artist performed as part of the opening act for The Weeknd’s After Hours Til Dawn tour at Paris’ Stade de France.
