M83: from minivans to the main stage

Slender and compact at not much over five and a half feet tall, 35-year-old Gonzalez may not take up a lot of space, but he has a definite presence. Dressed in dark jeans and a dark, close-fitting T-shirt that reveals several tattoos, he seems most at home in his carefully assembled studio space. Having spent six months meticulously building it, he beams as he moves his pre-amps so there’s room to roam in the comfortably sized tracking area. We spot a Neve 80 series recording console, ATC Monitors and a Roland JC120 speaker. Fender Deluxe amps and numerous Roland keyboards line the room along with his 10 guitars and five bass guitars.

Following the long tour cycle for ‘Hurry Up...’, Gonzalez found himself “tired and burned out” from the two-year period. A long-time admirer of Ennio Morricone and Angelo Badalamenti, Gonzalez began scoring films like the Tom Cruise sci fi adventure Oblivion and, on a more independent, personal level, his brother Yann’s You And The Night. Gonzalez would noodle around on his Wurlitzer electric piano and Fenders playing covers, but wasn’t ready to fully commit back to M83. Moving to Silver Lake, building his home studio and rupturing his Achilles tendon while playing on his Hollywood rec league basketball team didn’t help matters. “For three or four months, my life wasn’t really fun,” he says. “I couldn’t go anywhere and couldn’t do anything.”

But once he was settled and healthy, Gonzalez once again joined forces with Meldal-Johnsen to create the cinematic new album JUNK. Enlisting the likes of Beck (“I admire his career so much”) and guitar virtuoso Steve Vai (“he has the guitar sound of the future”), the album confidently builds on the foundation of the previous one.

“You think that people expect another ‘Midnight City,’ he says. “That’s the hard thing about coming out of a big successful album. In the meantime, this is my seventh album and I’ll always have the freedom to make the albums I want to make. I’ve always done what I’ve wanted to do and I don’t really listen to what anyone has to say.”

As he opens the front door, Gonzalez points at a faded mezuzah hanging there, a scroll printed with verses from the Torah that’s a traditional good luck symbol in many Jewish homes. It’s a remnant from the house’s previous owners; Gonzalez isn’t Jewish, but keeps it there, he says, in order to please the good spirits of the house.

“The last five or six years have been amazing,” Gonzalez says as he bids us goodbye, the sun setting slowing in the west, where the city of LA lies, “but before that it was really tough.” You get the feeling he’s not going to take any chances.

‘Junk’ is out now on Naïve