Additional Information
During his visit to Club S.A.T., Amselysen presents on stage the culmination of a project that has been a long time in the making: American Vulgarities, You’re My Lucky Star. He refines a more embodied, more direct approach. In this interview, he looks back on the evolution of his live performances, the influences of his years in a band, and the conceptual dimension of the album, where political fiction, irony, and marketing strategy intersect as an artistic gesture.
Performance as an outcome
Amselysen: It’s going to be the culmination of the material from American Vulgarities, You’re My Lucky Star. The album is in its final stages and quietly preparing for release.
I had the opportunity to tour Europe, which allowed me to refine some of the material. The prototype was first presented on May 31, 2025. After that, I went on tour with the album and composed a few new songs.
J’ai pu raffiner tout le processus. À Club S.A.T., ça va être l’aboutissement final de cette tournée-là. C’était un privilège de pouvoir vivre cet album en live avant sa sortie, une chance que je n’ai pas toujours eue avec mes anciennes parutions.
PAN M 360: How has the tour changed your approach to the project?
Amselysen: The first time I performed live, I realized that what interests me and what interests people is when I pick up the microphone. That was the first step toward returning to a more embodied dynamic. Then I thought to myself that now that everything was back on the table and I no longer had to adhere to a self-imposed technical standard, it was time to bring the bass guitar back into my music.
I used to have a band, largely inspired by the Californian duo The Garden, who gave me the courage to release music. It was a pastiche of their lineup: guitar, bass, vocals, and drums.
I brought back the bass as a lead instrument, very prominent on certain tracks. There are also live percussion and mini beatboxing samples added to give a little flavor to the very electronic drums, which were composed using oscillators rather than samples.
I tried to breathe new life into the whole thing. Lots of vocal improvisation, a few slightly ridiculous interludes. At times, it almost becomes a comedy sketch.
PAN M 360: How do your years in bands influence your current practice?
Amselysen: It’s years of living live music 100%, and also messing up. It’s happened to me a lot, an absolute disaster on stage. It sounds like a LinkedIn post, but it teaches you stress management, how to deal with failure, moderate your expectations, and recover from accidents in live situations.
Amselysen is conceived as a concert project, structured in terms of songs, even for the instrumentals, rather than according to logic more strictly linked to dance music such as techno.
PAN M 360: An even more LinkedIn-like version?
Amselysen: Screwing up on stage eight times taught me a lot: B2B interactions with the audience, managing demographics and audience size, public relations, PR, and dealing with failure in a professional environment.
An album between fiction and reality
PAN M 360: What does the title American Vulgarities, You’re My Lucky Star represent?
Amselysen: The name was decided before the current political dynamics in the United States. I wanted to construct a form of docu-fiction through the track names, imagining a potentially terrible political reality.
But as time goes by, reality is surpassing my fiction, which was already quite dystopian. I felt the need to emphasize the slightly cruder, more vulgar side of the project in the process.
PAN M 360: Do you have a release date?
Amselysen: Until everything is finalized, I don’t want to spill the beans. I’m in talks with a record label.
I am also developing the marketing campaign, which plays a central role in the album. It has been designed with a visual dimension, not audiovisual, but conceptual, inspired by Theodor Adorno’s theory of the fetishization of music, Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle and Georges Bataille’s The Accursed Share.
There is a reflection on the objectification, commodification, and fetishization of the product. The idea is to turn it into something akin to a fashion item, an object intriguing enough to attract an audience that would not naturally be interested or that would be very new to the field.
I am in the process of producing this material.
PAN M 360: So marketing is also becoming an artistic endeavor?
Amselysen: Listen, there’s nothing more American than turning marketing into a form of self-expression. Thematically, it fits perfectly with the concept of the album.
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