::: Dialectics of Humanity’s Future Beneath the Wall of Electronic Music— Rone / Room With A View
When it comes to the French electronic music producer and composer Rone, there is much to unpack. Constantly pushing the boundaries of his sound and creative expression, Rone is widely recognized as a bold experimenter and a visionary artist. Originally, he intended to derive his stage name “R.one” from a variation of the pronunciation of his given name, Erwan. However, when the graphic designer creating his performance poster accidentally omitted the dot, he decided to embrace the oversight—and the name stuck, becoming the one by which he is now widely known. While studying film production, he also chose to pursue his passion for music, eventually catching the attention of the French record label InFiné. In 2008, he released his debut EP, Bora, which quickly gained acclaim and drew the attention of both the media and the wider music community—a success that solidified his decision to fully dedicate himself to a career in music.
French electronic music producer and composer Rone
Rone’s debut album, Spanish Breakfast, is infused with subtly unfolding rhythmic undulations, its tempos drifting gracefully across the record as a whole. With synthesizers and dreamy electronic textures, he fills the soundscape, letting notes bounce and intertwine through every pocket of space, enveloping the listener as if bathed in the hazy sunlight of a spring afternoon. He then spent several years crafting his follow-up, Tohu Bohu, during which he expanded his sonic vocabulary and explored new stylistic possibilities beyond the bounds of France’s musical traditions. His sound grew increasingly fluid and unpredictable, drawing fresh inspiration from recording sessions in Berlin. To this day, he continues to release albums while touring worldwide.
Rone has also shown a remarkable ability to merge music with other art forms. He has collaborated with writer Alain Damasio, partnered with photographer Stéphane Couturier, and composed original scores for several film directors. In 2021, he received wide acclaim when his score for Night Ride earned him the César Award for Best Original Music. Another dimension of Rone’s artistry lies in his engagement with social consciousness. Through his music, he seeks to raise awareness of climate change and humanity’s future. His album Room with a View addresses these issues, using delicately emotive compositions and choreography by (LA)HORDE to shape emotions, energy, memories, and even those vague yet unforgettable abstract dreams.
Room With a View can be considered Rone’s most complete and dazzling album to date, filled with hopeful, liberating melodies and a refined, fluid elegance. The work conveys a strong sense of collective vision, calling on humanity to unite, share resources, and collaborate in imaginative, constructive ways to create a better world. This ethos was also embodied in the album’s colorful cover art—a tapestry of images evoking building, supporting, assisting, expanding, pursuing, and safeguarding. Created in collaboration with the collective (LA)HORDE and the Ballet national de Marseille, the project explores how, in extreme situations, crowds can shift collectively—at the pull of a single beat or impulse—from light into darkness, or the other way around.
Twenty dancers often cluster together, twisting and surging beneath the walls of Rone’s electronic sound. The sonic landscape shifts between soaring ethereality and driving rhythms, while the backdrop streams fragments of global news headlines and social media feeds. Fists are raised as people shout in anger at someone—or something. These rebels snarl, flip off the audience, roar, scowl, and shove one another. At moments, pure dance breaks through the chaos: dancers dive, tumble, and crash hard onto the floor, leaving bruises and swelling behind. Yet despite the intensity, they perform these high-impact, repetitive movements with effortless composure, delivering a performance as breathtaking as it is visually powerful.
“Lucid Dream” sets the tone as the album’s opening track. To capture the sensation of lucid dreaming, Rone creates a floating, suspended state between dream and reality—where you feel yourself drifting toward sleep yet retain the uncanny ability to steer the dream and carry yourself wherever you wish. “La Marbrerie” then establishes the mood for the entire record with its delicate, airy soundscape. The title translates to “The Marble Workshop,” echoing the performance setting staged in a marble quarry. Here, marble becomes a metaphor for humanity’s impact on nature: a single block can be sculpted into a timeless masterpiece—or reduced to an uninspired bathroom fixture. It serves as an amplifier of natural resources, but whether that potential flourishes or diminishes depends entirely on the choices we make.
“Nouveau Monde” was the first track Rone composed for this album and remains one of the few pieces imbued with a subtle techno atmosphere. Listeners are gradually drawn into a trance-like state, accompanied by a lecture from writer Alain Damasio and astrophysicist-philosopher Aurélien Barrau. The track functions as a conceptual key to the album’s central themes: ecological crisis, global warming, and social collapse, while also envisioning a new world no longer governed by economic growth and overconsumption. One possible way forward, the album suggests, is to invent new myths and construct fresh symbols of collective imagination. “Human” serves as a hymn to humanity in all its contradictions—powerful yet fragile, beautiful yet brutal, capable of both kindness and evil. According to Rone, the piece began as a simple electronic loop but evolved into something monumental when he invited dancers to improvise a group chorus during the recording session, transforming it into a sweeping, almost epic composition.
These tracks, intertwined with the choreography, embody an anxious state born of drastic environmental change—the feeling of watching the place you grew up in slowly fall apart while being powerless to stop it. Yet the work also carries a sense of quiet solace: in this moment, what we yearn for most is connection. In striving toward something more sublime, we find joy in the act of collective creation. Rone closes the work with a delicate, almost tender touch, leaving it to listeners and viewers to decide: is this a vision of a bright, hopeful future, or an inevitable, futile tragedy?
