Growing up in the Parisian underground, synthwave innovator and smoking enthusiast Perturbator has gone on to pioneer an entire electronic movement. On the eve of new album Age Of Aquarius, we head across The Channel to meet the man behind the machine, and discover how the usually reserved James Kent found his true self in the shadows…
Is this the Age Of Aquarius? The long-prophesied time of great change that heralds the dawning of a wonderful new era for humankind, when enlightenment and understanding bring everyone into closer harmony with the universe and one another?
Probably not. Indeed, the day after Kerrang! is given a tour of Paris by one-man French synthwave entity Perturbator, the capital becomes host to scenes most unAquarian. In protest at the Bayrou government’s proposals to slash public spending and introduce austerity measures, a day of action called by the Bloquons tout (‘Block everything’) movement sees a general strike bring the city to a standstill. Plenty of people receive physical warnings from police, decked out in riot gear, for their troubles.
It’s a scene that’s become almost mundane in its commonness across the world. State violence, war, overbearing governments, surveillance, a complete disregard for responsibility. A time of great change? Yes. But probably heading in the opposite direction, as ever we have.
“It’s about conflict, about war,” our host says of new album Age Of Aquarius, his sixth. “Not just the current state of war and the world today, but all wars. It’s pretty much an album about conflict as a whole, and the way humanity cannot just get along. We always have to kill each other.”
This is all set to music that’s can be as cold and unforgiving as any field of conflict you might care to name: computerised, dark, insistent, explosive, with a darkness that comes from a love of underground metal. Leaning far more into his usual electronics and beats than its predecessor, 2021’s more post-punk Lustful Sacraments, it’s a sodium-haze of robotic beats and thick bass, where guitars lash as if being processed through a futuristic nightmare, and a sinister, streetlight atmosphere gives a powerful sense of dread. Even on the less intense, Depeche Mode-ish Apocalypse Now, there’s a sardonic sense of irony, as Ulver man Kristoffer Rygg sardonically speaks of ‘The war to end all wars’.
“It’s kind of nihilistic, you know? It’s not a message of, ‘Oh, war is bad.’ It’s more saying that war is inevitable, and it’s kind of futile. We’ve been doing it since ancient times. We’ve always been at war.”
As he says this, you’re struck by how un-war-like the man behind Perturbator actually is. Tracksuit bottoms, black T-shirt, a mop of long hair tucked into a baseball cap, this French Reznor, James Kent, is a man in possession of a languid, friendly cool that’s as immediate as it is unassuming. As he talks through his journey, from experimenting with synths in his bedroom and uploading to Bandcamp, to where he is now, there’s the passion of the natural artist, coupled with the natural artist’s equal tendency not to have a grand plan.
“I never had aspirations to become huge... I like the cult status”
As he puffs through his thousandth acrid French cigarette, he’ll tell you that he obsesses over 30-second elements of songs until he loses his mind, noting that some tracks take three months, but then will also give a Gallic shrug and say that the balance of that is spending a week in bed doing literally nothing. More than once, he refers to himself as “a slacker”, with a tendency toward being “kind of lazy”.
He is, though, phenomenally successful. Two years ago, he headlined a stage at Download, while the first throw of touring for Age Of Aquarius has Perturbator headlining venues like London’s O2 Kentish Town Forum, Berlin’s 3,000-capacity Huxleys Neu Welt, and culminating with two nights at Paris’ Bataclan. Lazy? Just naturally gifted.
“I never had aspirations to become huge, or thought about trying to please everybody, or become super-mainstream,” James ponders. “I like the cult status. I always liked how black metal bands were seen like that.
“All of this stuff, it’s often an accident,” he smiles. “Or, at least, I don’t plan anything. I just make music and play shows.”
It was almost by accident that Perturbator got started at all. As he shows us around Studio Saint Marthe, a place where he’s often worked, and where the “real” instruments and contributions from fellow Frenchmen Alcest were recorded for Age Of Aquarius, James recalls quite how far from this one-stop shop full of amps and gear his earliest endeavours were.
“I was just me in my room with my computer, my software and a keyboard, my guitars, and a sound card,” he laughs, sinking into a sofa with a beer. “I was still learning how to do everything. I was basically just doing it because I wanted to do something that sounded like a John Carpenter movie soundtrack.”
James had already been playing in bands around Paris, though “more of a guitarist for hire – some progressive metal, some black metal”. Before that, his interest had been piqued by his parents. The son of two music journalists – his father is legendary British writer Nick Kent, one of the finest ever to pick up a pen, and a man with the near-unbeatable war story of being attacked with a bike chain by Sid Vicious – cool sounds were always around. It was while investigating a stack of records belonging to his mother that young James discovered Slayer’s Reign In Blood. Reading the lyrics as he listened, he realised he’d arrived somewhere.
“It was exhilarating. I felt like I was doing something so fucking bad and evil. My mum also used to play Depeche Mode and stuff like that while she was doing her workout. So I grew up listening to Slayer and Depeche Mode – that’s the two halves, right there.”
“I grew up listening to Slayer and Depeche Mode – that’s the two halves, right there”
The third (with somewhat wonky maths), and where the inspiration struck for Perturbator, came from soundtracks.
“I was a slacker in school. I’d skip school a lot to go to the cinema. I was also watching a lot of John Carpenter movies, a lot of horror movies from the ’80s and stuff. I was listening to soundtracks and went, ‘I gotta make something like that.’ It was a kind of on-the-spot inspiration.”
The first fruits came in 2012, when he uploaded his first EP, Night Driving Avenger, to Bandcamp. This was quickly followed by a second, Nocturne City, and his debut full-length, Terror 404, all within 10 months. This was something new, as James says, pitting the hard aggression and darkness of Slayer and black metal with a grubby, electronic, ’80s club pulse, a dab of French artists like Justice, Daft Punk or Air, and the futurism of the soundtracks to Blade Runner or Akira.
“If you’d like to hear what Watain would sound like if they tried to do some Justice songs… That’s what I was thinking, really.
“My metal friends were kind of baffled,” he laughs, when asked about initial reactions from his black metal mates. “Back then the ’80s zeitgeist and the nostalgia was not really there as it is now, there was no Stranger Things. So, yeah, my friends were baffled, but also supportive.”
Soon, though, it became clear that this could be more than just playing with himself in his bedroom. After the ’80s-themed video game Hotline Miami used his music, in a quest by the developers to feel more like a film soundtrack, James quickly found Perturbator becoming his livelihood.
“I was suddenly getting a lot of notifications on the phone. People were putting stupid amounts of money into the albums that are up there for free, or making donations for, like, $666 just to make a joke. Then I got my first royalty cheque for the music in the game, and I was like, ‘Fuck, this is a job!’”
By the time James came to take Perturbator to the stage at Paris’ Glazart club, interest was sufficient to sell it out. Going on early tours was simple enough – “It was just me and my manager in a car” – but he still had to get his head around doing it all live.
“It was really daunting at first, because when you play guitar in a band, if you fuck up then it’s okay, nobody’s gonna really notice, especially when you play, like, punk or metal. But electronic music, you have no margin for mistakes. The first set-up was really simple. It was just a controller and samples and shit like that. And then I put on the keyboard, and now I’ve added the drummer, and so it’s just step by step to what it is now.”
To write Age Of Aquarius, the set-up may have been more sophisticated than back in those days, but James still works the same as he ever has, by “being a nerd”. Though heading to Saint Marthe when needed, much of the time was spent alone in his own space, disappearing into the night.
“I have very opaque curtains. Sometimes I don’t even know what time of the day it is. It’s like Las Vegas – there’s no windows, there’s no nothing. You don’t know what time it is, so you get lost and you’re in the zone.”
And James gets far into the zone. When Perturbator grew legs, he went on courses to learn about studios, about mixing and mastering (“It’s great, because now I don’t have to pay for that!”). If an idea can be picked at, he has the tools to really pick at it.
“I can spend days, weeks, doing something. It drives me mad. But I’ll tell myself, if I can spend so much time trying to perfect this one thing in this little part in a seven-minute-long track, it means that the track is worth it. Otherwise I would have thrown it in the bin.”
In all this, even as it’s got bigger and expanded onstage, James has kept Perturbator as a creative entity his own solitary thing. He’s a delight to be around, funny, too, friends with seemingly everyone we encounter around town, but you also completely get that he’s a man for whom working with others “is such a fucking hassle”.
“I kind of hated working with other people,” he admits. “I’m very bad at working with other people. So going into a rehearsal place and trying to compose with other people, even though I love them and they’re my friends and shit like that? No. If I have all these musical ideas, I just have to make them myself, without any fucking band members being like, ‘Oh no, that’s shit.’ ‘Here’s my riff.’
“I’m better to hang out with at the bar…”
This is very true. Our next stop is Parisian metal drinking hole Doktor Feelgood, where James’ arrival is met like that of a returning hero as he racks up shots of what he’s Christened ‘Jimmy’s Revenge’ – a surprisingly palatable mix of vodka and peach iced tea.
This is a very Perturbator spot. He is one of the men teaching metal fans to dance, an artist whose vibe and outlook chimes with an underground of people on the same page.
“I’ll play at very cult black metal festivals and be the only guy playing this kind of music, surrounded legends of black metal. They’ll approach me and be like, ‘Oh, you’re that Perturbator guy!’ Like, Mayhem are there saying they like my music – I’m just supposed to be the nerd guy! And now those bands that I listen to, and who I’m trying not to fanboy around, say they like my music too?! That’s fucking awesome!”
Though to outside ears, there’s world of common ground between him and countrymen like Daft Punk, he says that the crossover hasn’t happened the other way (“Maybe they like music on loop, not too complicated. I don’t think they like it when it changes…”).
He is, though, credited as one of the architects of synthwave – arriving before Carpenter Brut, even – something he keeps somewhat at arm’s length when it crops up.
“I wouldn’t say I invented anything, because I didn’t. I can see how this kind of shit might be new to somebody, but to me it’s just dark electronic music. I don’t even know what to call it myself.
“I didn’t see it as an act of rebellion, and I certainly didn’t think that I was creating something new. I can name, like, two or three big influences on my music that I think are very close to what I do. I really don’t claim to have invented anything, but maybe I gave my own twist on something that already existed. But I didn’t do it as a statement, it’s just a melting pot of everything that I love, between metal and new wave and shit.”
Modest, but James Kent is also an increasingly rare artist, one for whom a masterplan and being a social media manager and a businessman aren’t really considerations at all. He says he’d like to do a film soundtrack – “That’d be cool, but Trent Reznor is taking all the work!” – but it’s a desire as a fun thing to do, rather than a solid career plan (much like the NIN man’s own journey into Hollywood).
“I take my music very seriously, but it lets me be who I want”
Perturbator’s rise and success has come, as James hoped, as a cult thing. Age Of Aquarius may be doing good business on pre-order before it’s even out, and he’s about to head out on his biggest headline tour to date, but his work has sold itself – all he’s done is stay up all night making it ’til he likes it.
That’s what Kerrang! sees today at Studio Saint Marthe. As he gets more drinks in at the bar, you get the cool guy who just wants to hang out and talk about music. In a city famed for its artists, James Kent fits in very well indeed.
“I love to separate the Perturbator persona from me,” he says. “How do I qualify Perturbator? Enigmatic and mysterious. I’m not putting myself out front. Even live shows, I have my hair on my face, pretty much as a silhouette, with the light show doing all the work.”
And as James Kent?
“I’m still kind of a kid getting drunk and having fun partying with people,” he laughs, raising a glass. “I’m just a big kid. I take my music very seriously, but it lets me be who I want. That’s fucking important.”
Is that art?
“Yeah, man,” he toasts. “That’s fucking art.”
Age Of Aquarius is due out on October 10 via Nuclear Blast.
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