Stream Bon Voyage's high concept new EP, 'Xingye'

What if Blade Runner wasn’t set in Los Angeles but in Lagos? That's the question Bon Voyage ask on their new EP.

Bon Voyage is the work of Paris producer Adrien Durand.

Durand was first spotted by Jamal Moss (perhaps better known as hardware jammer Hieroglyphic Being) back in 2009. Durand ended up putting out an EP under the name Les Aéroplanes through Moss's Mathematics Recordings label – a record which made sense as belonging on the housier end of the nu disco boom emerging at the time.

Since then, Durand has been releasing cosmic dance tracks under the name of Bon Voyage, with the idea of creating disco tracks using the studio techniques and musicianship that you'd find on '70s recordings, but using a 2010s approach towards sound and budget. The group has swelled to include a guitarist, flautist, and vocalists including Chinese singer LiLijuan, while the records were engineered by Florian Lagatta, who gives the whole thing a remarkable sense of gloss (no surprises here – Lagatta has worked with Beck and Daft Punk before).

Bon Voyage's new EP 'Xingye' is quite a high concept thing. Taking the industrial expansion of China into Africa as its starting point, it imagines how the East rather than the West might influence African culture in the future. At the same time, all this is seen through Western eyes, which actually makes it feel more like the soundtrack to a Hollywood sci-fi film about the East's expansion into Africa. "I had the following thought and pretty much based the record on it: 'What if Blade Runner wasn’t set in Los Angeles but in Lagos?'", Durand asks.