Kavinsky

Rest in Peace

Imagine the feeling of driving at night in the hills above the San Fernando Valley and you will hear Nightcall by Kavinsky echoing in your mind’s ear. I think almost every musical artist in some way is trying to encapsulate an exact feeling with their music. We struggle to communicate feelings with words. With music, it is much easier. But the goal is not to convey some simple feeling. The goal is convey a complex tapestry of feelings that we don’t quite have a single word for.

Few artists artists are true “genre definers” and I believe that Kavinsky is one of them. I think anyone who made electronic music in the 2010s in some way was influenced by Kavinsky. One could say that this was because of the 2011 film Drive, but I would argue that the success of Drive was driven more by Kavinsky than the other way around.

I think there are a lot of things that I could talk about with electronic music and the impact of the Drive soundtrack on it, but all of this would be superfluous noise. I’ve built my whole artistic philosophy on a single phrase: The Integration of Communication. The whole point of this statement is that composite art is more communicative than its individual parts. If you want to understand Kavinsky’s artistic impact, you simply have to wait until the sun goes down and take a night drive with Nightcall playing in the background. Maybe it reminds you of Drive — Drive just captured a feeling that already existed, but that you couldn’t explain.

Rest in peace, Kavinsky. I can only hope to accomplish a fraction of your achievements with my own art.