Nightcall Goes Unanswered: Kavinsky Dies at 50
Vincent Belorgey, the French musician known as Kavinsky, was found dead in his Paris apartment on Tuesday evening. Prosecutors have opened an inquiry into the cause of death.
The opening of Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive spends almost no words on anything. A car moves through Los Angeles at night, Ryan Gosling says nothing behind the wheel, and a synthesiser line drifts over the image that sounds like it was recorded two decades before it actually was. The song is Nightcall. The man who made it signed his work Kavinsky.
Vincent Belorgey, to use his real name, was found dead on Tuesday evening, July 28, in his apartment in Paris. He was 50. The Paris prosecutor’s office has opened an inquiry into the cause of death, and the first responders who reached the scene found nothing suspicious there. No cause of death has been established.
The zombie who came with a synthesiser
He began working as Kavinsky in 2005, pushed into it by the musician Jackson Fourgeaud and the director Quentin Dupieux. The first records were the EPs Teddy Boy and 1986, made for a small audience that was then hunting for the sound of eighties film scores. Belorgey acted before he made music, which goes some way towards explaining why he treated Kavinsky as a part to play rather than a stage name.
The music arrived with a fictional biography attached. Kavinsky was a character, not an alias: a driver who died in a Ferrari crash and came back as a zombie to make records, with red eyes, blue skin and a varsity jacket carrying the letter K. That small private mythology is what separated him from the crowd of producers working at the same moment with the same synthesisers and the same reference points.
Why did Nightcall outgrow the film that carried it?
The Nightcall EP came out in 2010, and Belorgey built the title track with Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo of Daft Punk. A year later Refn placed it over the first minutes of Drive, in the sequence that introduces Gosling’s driver, and the song stopped belonging to its own subculture. What had been an in-joke for genre listeners became instantly recognisable to anyone who had sat through the film.
His debut album, OutRun, followed in 2013. The next one, Reborn, took until 2022. Nine years between albums is close to an entire life cycle for a trend in electronic music, so Belorgey returned at a point when the sound he had helped shape already had both heirs and imitators. He also worked with The Weeknd, the artist who carried that same eighties template into mainstream pop.
When a niche genre reaches a state ceremony
At the closing ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympics, Kavinsky performed Nightcall alongside the band Phoenix and the singer Angèle. That was the furthest the track ever travelled: out of late-night playlists and YouTube compilations and into the material France chooses when it presents itself to a global television audience. Few songs born inside a narrow internet genre end up there within 15 years.
As a performer he went further than his discography suggests. He toured with Daft Punk, Justice and The Rapture, names that defined French and New York electronic music in the 2000s. What he leaves behind is a short catalogue: two early EPs, the one that made him, and two albums. For twenty years of work that is not much, though every item on the list survived the year it appeared in, which is more than most productions from that period managed.
The inquiry into the cause of death is under way. And the character Belorgey invented had been dead from the start, a detail that worked for two decades as a joke about a genre living off nostalgia for somebody else’s eighties.
