“Success doesn’t mean anything if you don’t share it with people.” That’s how the multi-talented Parisian musician and video director Yoann Lemoine describes his idea of audience engagement: out from behind the laptop, and on to the stage is where he’s taking his Woodkid persona.
“I love the energy in Berlin,” he says when we meet him before his October performance at Neukölln’s Heimat-hafen. The energy is handy, given that he had just one hour’s sleep the previous night. Not that Lemoine looked unkempt: he was dressed in Dior Homme, who outfitted him for his entire tour (the house were also inspired by his 2011 track “Iron”, and used it as the soundtrack to their AW 2012 “A Soldier On My Own” collection.) Of course, he’s well-connected in the way that young Parisians tend to be, having worked with figures including Sofia Coppola, Katy Perry and his muse Lana Del Rey. Agyness Deyn and Willy Cartier also starred in the “Iron” video.
His productions often present whole new worlds to become lost in. “I have these visions which are almost dreams,” he says. “I look for emotions and feelings, things I have to say, and then translate them into visuals.”
These abstract, often slow-motion fantasies of spaceships, islands, conflicts, warriors, slobbering dogs and so on are based on the process he calls “translation”, in which, he says, he listens to chorus sequences and textures of sound, and tries to find an equivalent image. “In the end it’s like reading the dialogue between sounds and visuals.”
Another way of read-ing these sci-fi forms is that they are all about the transition from childhood to adulthood, seen through the eyes of the “kid” in Woodkid. For Lemoine, fashion is a channel for the changes that take place after childhood. “Fashion is an important code for how you become an adult and have a view with clothing.”
So is the soul. He claims to be a “very spiritual” person, and was brought up in a strict Catholic school but says, “at the end of the day, I grew up exploring my own sexuality and sense of the world: I realised that it didn’t make any sense to me.” Now, he adds, the visions he creates are about something new: “I guess I’m trying to create my own religion in terms of music, to have a whole world to define my beliefs and identity. I think everybody should have their own distant way of believing in something higher.”
In one sense, it’s possible to see his entire output as a process of self-analysis – but one that just happens to be fascinating to watch, as he puts his own multifaceted growth curve on public display. “I don’t have one aesthetic,” he says. “I just want to tell different stories”.
www.woodkid.com
www.yoannlemoine.com/woodkid
Text by Finja Rosenbaum