M83

Before starting work on ambient pop act M83’s latest album, Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming, bandleader Anthony Gonzalez uprooted himself and moved from his native France to Los Angeles. The essence of his new surroundings seeped into the project, an ambitious two-CD set comprising 22 songs. “Sometimes you need to be driven by something new,” Gonzalez says. “I was surrounded by new people and new friends and  I was excited about my life in a different culture, very different from France and Europe. It was the first time I was somewhere by  myself.” And not just anywhere: Gonzalez had his reasons for choosing L.A. “The weather,” he says, “and that most of the movies I watched as a kid came from California—there’s something about California that’s always fascinated me. Somehow I feel I belong there.”

Film is a major influence on Gonzalez’s music; he thinks of himself less as a singer than a soundtrack writer scoring life as it happens around him. “All my idols are movie directors, not musicians,” he says. “When I’m making an album, I want to sound like Terrence Malick, David Lynch or Werner Herzog. When I’m composing music, I have pictures in my head, landscapes. I feel like my way of making music is very different from other artists.”

Landscapes were a particularly important part of his songwriting on Hurry Up. Gonzalez often loaded a couple of keyboards and a computer in his car and drove to unfamiliar locales to soak up new sights. “I needed to be inspired by different things, and wanted to feel that the songs were very different from each other yet somehow related,” says Gonzalez, who formed M83 a decade ago in Antibes, France. “Driving to different landscapes really  helped me achieve that.”

Gonzalez had long wanted to make a double album, which he viewed as a musical rite of passage. “I guess like every musician, I had this vision of the double album as necessary at some point in the career of an artist,” he says. “I couldn’t see myself not doing one.” With listeners increasingly migrating away from physical albums, Gonzalez decided he’d best not delay. “I was turning 30, felt ready and had a lot of material. It seemed like the right time,” he says. “If I waited another two or three years it would be too late for the music industry. It’s more about singles and iTunes, and not so much about albums anymore. It changes so fast.”

–Eric R. Danton