French electronic music celebrity Franck Vigroux will perform in Vilnius: New Audiovisual work of extraordinary intensity

French electronic music master Franck Vigroux, who has been surprising the Lithuanian audience with his original audiovisual performances, will give a concert in Vilnius. Together with his creative collaborator, video artist Antoine Schmitt, he will present an intense audiovisual performance "ATOTAL". This artistic project seeks to reconstruct the methods totalitarian regimes use to suppress critical thinking and willpower - bombarding them with repetitive sounds and sending subliminal messages, before finally subverting their own system and offering a salutary escape. The spectacular performance takes place on 26 October at the contemporary culture space Hook+Kultūra.

Franck Vigroux is an electronic music and experimental audiovisual artist and performer, who began his career in 2002. The French musician is a versatile artist whose work combines electroacoustic, experimental electronic music, improvisation, avant-garde rock, compositions for contemporary music ensembles, radio works, music for theatre and other genres. Vigroux's mastery of electronics is not the only thing he has mastered - he started his musical career as a guitarist.

However, the artist has gradually moved away from the guitar and has immersed himself in the creation of live electronica and electroacoustic works. Vigroux creates concept albums that fuse music with historical and philosophical references. His music is characterised by tectonic tensions, rhythms, electronic textures and a highly distinctive approach to sonic exploration. It is acknowledged that Vigroux's uniqueness lies largely in his way of working, integrating new media and performing arts. "I come from a working-class family and worked as a builder in my youth. When I started working in the performing arts, with theatre directors and choreographers, I immediately saw that my music could merge with these different mediums. I never considered myself a talented musician, by the way - but talented enough to create a track that fits in with other art forms," Vigroux told the arts magazine STIRworld.

He now produces outstanding interdisciplinary performances and audiovisual concerts, and has collaborated with visual artists such as Antoine Schmitt and Kurt d'Haeseleer. He is a prolific performer both solo and in collaborative projects with Mika Vainio, Elliott Sharp, Zeena Parkins, Reinhold Friedl and his new music ensemble Zeitkratzer, the contemporary music ensemble Ars Nova and many others. Vigroux's recordings have been released by DAC Records, Leaf, Cosmo Rhythmatic, Monotype, Radio France, Erototox and Aesthetical. He has appeared at festivals such as Mutek, CTM, Gray Area, Cervantino, Common Ground, Cascades, the Berghain in Berlin, the Paris Philharmonic, the Centre Pompidou, etc.

In addition to electronica, a particularly important area of his work is theatre. He not only composes music for plays, but also stages them himself. As a theatre maker, he is already well known to Lithuanian audiences - his play Flesh was performed at the 2021 Sirenos International Theatre Festival. Vigroux's work perfectly reflects his interdisciplinary inclinations: Flesh was a balancing act between electronic opera and audiovisual art, and at the same time it was a dance and movement performance-moving painting. In total, the artist has created 9 performances, which have toured all over the world. The Lithuanian public was first introduced to Vigroux's work at the 2019 Gaida International Festival of Contemporary Music, when his original audiovisual performance Chronostasis received an enthusiastic response and excellent reviews from the audience.

F. Vigroux works very often with visual installation artist Antoine Schmitt, who taught himself to code at the age of 16 and, after graduating, went on to study artificial intelligence, human-machine interactions and worked for a time in Silicon Valley with Apple's famous founder Steve Jobs. It is therefore not surprising that Schmitt's artistic work also places software at the heart of his artistic work, as a contemporary art material that, in his view, is capable of actively exploring the dynamic interactions between the nature of human nature and the nature of reality.