Imagine a style of electronic music that’s perfect for dancing in a dark club or lazing on a sunny beach, and you have imagined Birrd’s debut album, with its cosmic harmonies and reconstructed real-world sounds that combine to form a highly personal and deeply melodic version of machine music.
Curiosity—a distinct approach to life—gives birth to new forms of expression, which in turn create new desires. In the case of 30-year-old Stefan Vogel, alias Birrd (the Anglicized version of his German surname), curiosity has fostered soaring discovery. With the covid lockdowns came the ideal opportunity to devote himself to his passion: melodic electronic music that is at once laid back and dreamy, but with swing, evoking such disparate scenes as the Corsican coast and the New York skyline, which are among the numerous inspirations for this Franco-Italian-American artist.
Birrd has travel coursing through his veins, hence his ongoing desire to seek out new horizons. Nothing, however, predestined him to be a composer of emotional, energetic techno. His childhood beginnings on piano and recorder evolved into an adolescent infatuation with guitar and keyboard blues and playing in a band. When the band split up he turned to composing with machines, starting from simple motifs to create beautiful sounds. Having shed his initial belief that electronic music necessarily had to be brutal and loud, he incorporated the influences that have colored his music ever since, including Pink Floyd’s guitars, Worakls, NTO, Joris Delacroix, Rodriguez Jr.’s synthesizers, and Stephan Bodzin’s melancholy.
Four years spent in Munich exposed him to the local techno scene and confirmed his true love: melodies, harmonic progressions, the combination of the epic and the sensitive, where the urge to dance is just one of several possible reactions.
Birrd is a paradoxical personality, a traveler tethered to his base in Rouen, a composer of electronic music that is just as much at ease in a grand hall as in one’s living room, flirting with techno but without the bleakness, more synth than turntables. When not producing music for commercial advertisements or meditation apps, he is hard at work blending various facets of a previously distant culture. He codes his MIDI controller, staying clear of factory presets and nurturing his own sonorities comprising everything from the surf on a beach to a bicycle shifting gears. Through harmonic loops, from clear techno roots to inspiring melodies, Birrd eloquently conveys his passion.
