Vincent Belorgey, the producer who recorded as Kavinsky, was found dead at his home in Paris on 28 July. He was 50. Investigators said there was nothing suspicious about the circumstances. He arrived in the last wave of what the world outside France still calls the French touch, and he did something with it that none of the others did.
Nightcall, released in 2010, opens Drive, and for a large part of its audience that is where the song and the film became the same object. The track is built on a slow, cold synth figure and a vocoded voice, and it works because it refuses to resolve into the euphoria that French dance music had trained people to expect. It sold the film's mood before a line of dialogue.
What followed made him central to synthwave rather than to house. The 1980s reference points, the invented persona of a man who died in a car and came back as a producer, the deliberate cheapness of certain sounds: it was a complete world, and it was consistent enough that a generation of producers working in the same register are still measured against it.
The French establishment came round eventually, as it does. He performed a new version of Nightcall alongside Phoenix and Angele at the closing ceremony of the Paris Olympics in 2024, in front of an audience that had mostly met the song through a film. That is a strange kind of canonisation for a track written to sound like the end of the night.