KID FRANCESCOLI

BIOGRAPHY

March 2020, Mathieu Hocine (aka Kid Francescoli) has just released his 5th LP, Lovers. His two previous albums, With Julia (2014) and Play Me Again (2017), made him one of the French electro-pop masters. His hit song Moon (And It Went Like) continues to blow up TikTok charts. The associated hashtag is getting closer to a billion every day. He has already played the first two dates of a tour that would take him around the world when -the world, precisely- will suddenly stop breathing.

What initially felt to him like a never-ending frustration (the tour getting canceled due to the pandemic) turned out as a fantastic opportunity. The director Matthieu Rozé would call and entrust him to compose his first long-feature soundtrack for Azuro, a feature film freely inspired by Marguerite Duras’s novel, The Little Horses of Tarquinia. Kid Francescoli will then paint a group of friends’ vacation in music. In the beautiful (and very familiar to Kid) scenery of the Mediterranean Sea in the summer, where the heat is overwhelming and the weather is out of whack, the film explores the themes of relationships, desire, and boredom.

“It was a dream come true. I was putting a lot of pressure on myself. For some reason, a long feature soundtrack sounded unreachable to me, but it went pretty easily, in a very smooth way. Matthieu validated almost everything I sent him before the shooting. I enjoyed it a lot. It took me out of my usual creative path.”

Kid Francescoli is a multi-instrumentalist, producer, and composer from Marseille. He built his solar musical signature between the south of France and the United States, where he often stayed when younger. His music evokes magic memories of summer vacations and endless night walks. Among his influences are the Brit rock and pop that he worships, the French touch (of course), the US rap, the soundtracks from composers such as François De Roubaix or Ennio Morricone, and “at the top of it, Serge Gainsbourg.”. His studio, which is located at the very heart of Marseille, is flanked by a fresco of palm trees at sunset as a nod to Scarface and Brian De Palma’s cinema. He wants it, above all, as a space for life and collaboration. When asked about his cinema references, he starts with John Cassavetes, Claude Sautet, Samuel Kechiche, or Maurice Pialat “for the realism and emotions they convey.”. Next, he picked up Kubrick, “at least for Barry Lyndon, which is likely (his) favorite film.”. Then comes Clint Eastwood, Carpenter, De Palma (“hyper-cinema“), or the likes of Scorsese, Tarantino, Bong Joon Ho, Sergio Leone, Melville, and Alexander Payne, among others. He believes Under The Skin is one of the best music+film symbiosis he has ever witnessed. “The combination of the two puts you in a parallel, kind of organic universe. You feel like you can physically feel the film.”