Live Review: LISTEN: M83 'Wait' (Kygo Remix)
KYGO doesn’t cannonball headlong into the original, but the end result is capital: an uplifting, transcendent and genuinely hair-raising piece of sound.
Growing up in the bitter Scandinavian snows, Norwegian producer KYGO must have pined for the tropics. The beats he fashions are green and breezy, from the lush jungle-rave vibes of his ‘Sexual Healing’ remix to the STARDUST-y groove of his ‘Jolene’ edit.
To his credit, he’s all but mastered the craft: at a tender 22 years, he’s accrued almost a quarter of a million Facebook followers on the back of the 20 tracks he’s released via SoundCloud over the past 12 months alone (most of them remixes, some with multi-million plays, and all of them more than a little decent). In layman’s terms, the fella’s grabbing life by the stones.
The kind of tracks KYGO likes to get his paws on have a fairly typical aesthetic: for the most part, his remixes blossom out of soft, under-produced soundscapes on the backbone of high-end dreamy vocals (see THE XX, JAMES BLAKE or MATT CORBY). Electro-pop/shoegaze artist M83 (Anthony Gonzales) might seem a little synth-happy to fit the mould—but ‘Wait’ isn’t your typical M83 track. Brandishing little more than the unfamiliar acoustic guitar, this is as close as Gonzales comes to cordless, wireless, and completely unplugged.
It’s also one of his most exposed and vulnerable moments. ‘Wait’ has a sober, nostalgic vibe. It’s the kind of super lonely sound that could’ve played after Gandalf the Grey fell to his untimely demise, or when Simba found that Mufasa had shuffled off the mortal coil—in other words: utterly tragic. Impassioned, but heartbreaking. Enter KYGO.
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It takes more than a minute for this track to show any signs of a remix. KYGO doesn’t cannonball headlong into the original: his presence here is less about making a splash as it is slipping beneath the surface and, gradually, coming up for air. His pacific, chill-house textures roll in and rise over the top of Gonzales’ wailing chorus, turning it into a song not so desolate as vast, not lonely but tranquil. Not melancholy, just terminally chill. And the end result is capital: a blissed out, transcendent and genuinely hair-raising piece of sound. Like Simba running through the jungle, homeward bound; like skinny-dipping with whale sharks, presumably, although I couldn’t say for sure.
In any case, with beats as inspired and inspiring as these, it seems as though the sky’s the limit for young KYGO. This is the kind of soaring euphoria that wise old Gandalf was probably going on about in his final moments: Fly you fools. Life’s too short to wallow in melancholia, and everything's coming up chill-house.
Words by Gavin Butler
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