Élan Vital formed in 2015 in Dunedin’s None Gallery, an artist-run creative community in a former pharmaceutical factory near the city centre. Their sound takes contemporary European cold-wave synth-pop dance music layered on analogue drum machines, then blends in the warm psychedelic organ sounds of 1960s garage rock. Distorted, overdriven bass guitar adds a further element of chaos into the mix.
The expression Élan Vital describes the vital force or impulse of life. The music on “Shadow Self” represents that life impulse in an ambiguous zone between machine and human worlds. A dense claustrophobic swirl of dark dance-tempo synth-pop blooms from gloomy cold industrial dance music with vocoder vocals into uplifting melodic dream-pop catharsis about memory, longing, and obsession.
"Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is."
