Since the beginning of his career as
Vitalic,
Pascal Arbez's music has been a mainstay of television and film; his 2012 album
Flashmob even served as the soundtrack to the movie La leggenda di Kaspar Hauser. There's a similar blurring of boundaries on his Lumières Award-winning music for Giacomo Abbruzzese's
Disco Boy, which borrows "Winter Is Coming," the eerie finale to his ambitious two-part work
Dissidænce: Episodes 1-2. Like that album,
Vitalic's first officially released score spans his music's wide-ranging moods as it illustrates the interconnected stories of a French Foreign Legion member and a guerrilla fighter holding French hostages in the Niger Delta. While a few of
Arbez's pieces are seemingly straightforward, like the surging, glowstick-ready "Vladimir 92" or the brooding "Lost Times,"
Disco Boy's most satisfying moments dissolve the boundaries between the dancefloor and the battlefield. The swelling physicality of "The Rising"'s stratospheric chords and relentless disco-house beat evokes a chase scene as much as a club track's build and drop; on "La Guerre," flares of plaintive melody shoot up over a rhythm that crunches like marching soldiers.
Arbez's tight palette harnesses the score's complex and constantly changing moods ably -- the same murky synth bass lends stalking menace to "The Swamps" and an industrial stomp to "Helicopter" -- and makes any flourishes, like the hand drums on "C¿ur des ténèbres," that much more distinctive. While
Disco Boy's dizzying tonal shifts are probably easier to follow within the film's context, it's unquestionably an engaging work from an artist whose music never stays in the same place for long. ~ Heather Phares
