More than simply the soundtrack to the eponymous ballet by Damien Jalet and Kohei Nawa, Mirage is a captivating musical ecosystem, openly influenced by Iannis Xenakis.
Sixteen silhouettes glide, bathed in a cloud of red. Through tableaux of beauty that are sometimes dazzling, they recount their metamorphoses to the rhythm of landscapes they must apprehend, or even tame. Created at the Grand Théâtre de Genève in 2025, Mirage is the latest fruit of the imagination of the highly sought-after French choreographer Damien Jalet and the scenographer and Japanese visual artist Kohei Nawa.
The body serves aesthetics and the message, embedded in work that, for many years, has carved a path through phenomena that are half Kafkaesque, half Darwinian. With Mirage, they explore atmospheric movement and the permeability between bodies and elements – plants or animals, when it comes to insects. More than a mere accompaniment, the music of Thomas Bangalter is a protean entity, intriguing, exhilarating or unsettling, hypnotic always.
Far from Daft Punk’s groovy flamboyance
Now published on disc, it shines with its synthetic textures and tribal percussion, minimal at the opening, building to a crescendo on Part II. Contemplative despite the dancers’ movements, Mirage becomes a vast musical piece alternating between restraint and cinematic grandiloquence… Far from the groovy flamboyance of Daft Punk or even the first orchestral foray, often lyrical, that Thomas Bangalter delivered for Angelin Preljocaj’s Mythologies, in 2023.
By the multitude of instruments it draws on, Thomas Bangalter embodies, therefore, a wandering commune traversing a physical as well as mental desert, where reality and illusion continually dialogue when they do not clash. Thus, Mirage transports us to a strange dimension, ambient but not only, repetitive and yet inhabited by beings who, without having entirely lost themselves, no longer quite know where they stand. Experimental and empirical, Part IV testifies to a structure unfolding in layers. Motifs overlap, fade and reappear in another form, governed by physical laws as pragmatic as evanescent. And it is here that the influence of composer and architect Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001), of Greek origin, born in Romania and naturalized French, asserts itself. In 1954, he blasted avant-garde music with Metastasis, as inspired by Edgard Varèse as Le Corbusier, his arithmetic proposals blending a certain abstraction with undeniable sensory power.
With Bangalter, the grainy breaths of Part VII echo and his way of treating sound as a material—indeed moldable, but subject to a contingent framework. As for the final shamanic seconds of Mirage, massively pulsing, they pick up the thread of the opening. More than closing the loop, these nearly three minutes move us with an evocative power accessible to those who have not seen Jalet and Nawa’s ballet. The record thus becomes an extension of it, like an additional landscape. For, as Xenakis wrote in Musiques formelles (1963), “art (and especially music) indeed has a fundamental function that is to catalyze the sublimation it can bring through all means of expression. It must aim to carry by anchor-points toward total exaltation in which the individual merges, losing consciousness, with an immediate, rare, immense and perfect truth. … This is why art can lead to the regions that still for some lie within religion.”
Mirage – Ballet for 16 Dancers (Erato/Warner Classics). Out on June 5.
