Paul Armand-Delille of Polo & Pan drops the beat on Cyclorama, an album that happily relishes in its own light and shade.
Paul Armand-Delille has been amongst music for a great portion of his life, though he’s only recently struck a mainstream chord as one half of Polo & Pan (alongside Alexandre Grynszpan). From hosting packed, three-day techno parties to a collection of short-lived recording projects, he’s a character that seems to have willed himself into success.
Polo & Pan’s second album Cyclorama is fresh off the press, and the wealth of experience between its two creative directors is apparent. From bright, charting dance hits like Ana Kuni to more intricate numbers such as Peter Pan, the album is multi-faceted and bustling with unique ideas.
But the start of Armand-Delille’s music production journey was samples. After downloading his first DAW and a bunch of sample packs, he begun playing with arrangements, using blocks of pre-created music like LEGO.
“…it was just a fun and easy way to play around with music while I didn’t think I would do music professionally but I was still passionate about it.”
“It was fun to play around with music blocks, you build your music architecturally when you do that… So I was always good compared to other friends to finish the song, or to write the structure of a song. Maybe that comes from practicing so much with these music blocks.”
Though Armand-Delille has moved far beyond this, his humble-brags about his skill as an arranger are worthy. The tracklist of Cyclorama is an exercise in unexpected satisfaction, each new movement bringing a smile or a hip-swing to the listener.
Jiminy leaps from a syncopated beat, to a cheery verse about crickets, to an extended, atmospheric mid-section before jumping back into a cute beat. Though singles like Tunnel featuring Channel Tres and Ani Kuni flirt with more conventional structures, you’ll mostly learn to roll with the rhythms that Cyclorama delivers you, no matter how brilliantly wacky.
While the pair’s debut album Caravelle – which become popular enough for them to tour for three straight years – arrived fully-formed, Cyclorama still manages to add many new ingredients to the Polo & Pan crockpot.
“It is maybe a bit more balanced a record, a bit more mature in that sense. The first one was very solar, very full of sun and positive energy, but this one has a darker, moon songs, a bit more esoteric vibes like Oasis.”
After hearing Armand-Delille use the words ‘solar’, ‘sun’, ‘moon’, or ‘dark’ to describe a few of his songs, I asked if that was a French translation in practice – perhaps it was a common turn of phrase to describe art that way? It wasn’t.
Rather, they turned out to be descriptors that Armand-Delille himself uses to differentiate between lighter and darker songs. Cyclorama, he says, achieved a much better balance of the two.
“It’s just words I use, not a French thing. You’ve got a solar song like Ani Kuni, then you’ve got Tunnel which is a night song. It’s obvious that a song like Requiem is night and a song like Les jolies choses is sun.”
“And there’s more a balance of that, the first album wasn’t much songs that I could associate to that night visual, night environments.”
This knife-edge balance goes hand-in-hand with the driving visual style of Polo & Pan. Each video is more rambunctious than the last, all working to build a brilliantly-lit universe around the wonderful music Armand-Delille and Grynszpan are creating.
“The people who do the visuals are the second duo, they’ve always been with us in terms of doing the jackets, our animation videos. Noemi [Ferst] and Benjamin [Moreau], we used to DJ together and they’ve been with us since the beginning, so they’ve been there with us to develop the visual part.”
We have very ambitious visual ideas, but the production system for bands now… it’s not the ’90s, there’s not the same kind of production and budgets, it’s not on the same scale it used to be 30 years ago.”
“So we’re trying to slowly but surely bring our imprint and our visual style, and it’s easier to do with animation – the cartoons and stuff we love from the ’80s that we have as references are easier to reproduce than the movies that we love.”
Cyclorama is a levelling up of Polo & Pan in many ways, a more sophisticated offering of the spirited brand of dance music the world fell in love with them for. Paul Armand-Delille has indeed come a long way since he was building “musical bricks”. Nowadays, he’s a fully-fledged musical architect, creating extended worlds with more diverse building blocks than ever.
We already can’t wait to imagine what they’ll construct next.
Cyclorama is out now via Virgin Music France / Virgin Music Australia. Stream or buy your copy here.
