The keen reader will remember an interview we did last summer for Pragma Enigma, Parisian avant-garde artist we triumphantly celebrated as “a committed and cathartic sonic explorer, keen on becoming the new star of the French electro-rock scene”. He’s well on his way towards that milestone, although it must be said that the project is not really a feature of popular and mainstream culture. Instead, Prama Enigma thrives in the shadows, in the gloomy, complex alternative landscape that’s constantly pushing the boundaries of what’s possible, both sonically and lyrically.
Recently, Pragma Enigma has returned with ‘Die For My Love’, a piece that embodies the young musician’s complete dedication to art and music. Written as a quasi-romantic cut, the song hides a deeper, more obsessive plane of existence, showcasing Pragma Enigma’s total commitment to artistic expression and philosophical abstraction. As we would expect from the French producer, the track includes a wealth of industrial tones and bold electro-rock grooves.
‘Die For My Love’ was originally written as a soundtrack for the HEART BREAK AW27 runway show by designer COUCOU BEBE, during Paris Fashion Week. It was also performed live during the aftershow at L’ArcParis.
Intrigued by Pragma Enigma and eager to know how things have evolved since last summer, we have caught up with him once again. Here’s what he had to say…
Hey Pragma Enigma, thanks for chatting with us again! We spoke last summer, just on the back of ‘Un Jour J’vais Die’, and we had the chance to uncover the extensive creative ethos behind your project fully. How have things been since then? Do you feel like your music has evolved in the last few months?
It’s always a pleasure to talk about music, thanks for the invitation! Since our last meeting, a lot has evolved musically and in the way I present my music. As usual, I have stepped outside my comfort zone to explore new musical and artistic dimensions by questioning myself not only as an artist but also as a man, because by becoming a better person, you become a better musician.
I experienced something like a surge toward the light through a cleansing with dirty water, trials in my personal life, so naturally that can be felt in my music, which is very different from my previous tracks, which were much darker and more tortured. This moment of self-reflection truly allowed me to evolve and to understand who I was deep within the abysses of myself, and to arrive at the new musical creations I now have in my hands, which are the result of several years of composition and psychological and metaphysical questioning.
Despite all that, working on instruments (piano, guitar, voice, synth and computer) remains the key element of my process. It is a daily and constant learning process and exchange with myself and with other musicians that allows me to question myself with every new artistic discovery or social encounter. In that sense, my music, my art, is in constant motion and constantly renewing itself.
If we think about it from a certain perspective, the universe we live in is an artwork that never stops creating. My musical process follows that same idea. It merges with nature, and nature is what creates. I am simply the filter that transmits and receives the information through the mind. In my opinion, the only total work of art, the only true film that exists, is the universe we live in, and we are all actors in it, whether we realise it or not.
‘Die For My Love’ marks a somewhat more wholesome and hypnotic era for Pragma Enigma. Are you still motivated by visual compositions and cymatics?
Exactly, you are absolutely right. As I said, this is a brighter period for me, and that naturally shows in my music. The visualisation of sound known as cymatics is and will remain the central core of my musical and philosophical process. Sometimes I like to keep that part intentionally hidden because it is also hidden in nature. Just like nature, I prefer to show the effect rather than the cause in my project. It is more magical that way. The scaffolding should remain hidden.
That being said, cymatics is obviously an obsession for me. I am currently preparing an exhibition at Galerie 18bis in Paris that will take place in June, July and August 2026, where I will present my music along with the organic visualisations generated from it, accompanied by the philosophy behind these musical materialisations.
In many ways, I feel closer to a magician or a scientist than to an artist/musician. I have always loved playing with scientific and musical phenomena as a way to express myself, and not the other way around. For me, science should remain dominated by art. If art becomes truly subordinate to technology and science, we enter a very dangerous period. It leads to a mechanisation of the body and the mind, where technology begins to dictate the spirit instead of serving it.
You have also collaborated with a few like-minded artists, for instance, Clemence Violence. It does feel as though there’s a certain fervour in the Parisian underground scene. Is there a scene that you would say you belong to?
I would not say I belong to a specific scene in Paris. Things are very categorised here, Techno on one side, Rap on another, and Pop or Rock on the other. Since I am trying to create a new kind of music that blends these genres that I particularly love, it requires me not to think of music as different styles, but rather as tempos and scales that can be distilled together, like in the process of enfleurage used in the creation of an elixir, a perfume, or a distilled spirit.
However, there is definitely a kind of emergence of a new sound, which has been a deliberate approach from me since the beginning. It aligns perfectly with certain artists I have met in Paris and with whom I am currently preparing future collaborations.
‘Die For My Love’ is your latest single, a highly nuanced and conceptual piece that pays tribute to art itself. Are you proud of how the track turned out? What does the record mean to you?
It is difficult for me to judge what I create because I experience great pleasure listening to what I compose, after many years of researching for it. That feeling of satisfaction did not come immediately. It is something I had been searching for since the beginning of my musical research. The reason I do this is precisely to hear in reality the music that constantly plays in an imaginary way inside my head, a music that no one has really made yet, except perhaps a few people who came close and for whom I have enormous respect, like Bach, Béla Bartók, Chopin, Karlheinz Stockhausen, my own father « IVA », Kraftwerk, Drexciya, John Coltrane, Steve Coleman, Magma, Slayer, Nirvana, The Strokes.
The track DIE FOR MY LOVE also happened to resonate with the Heartbreak AW27 Fashion Week Show at l’ARC Paris by designer coucou_bebe75018, in front of the Champs Élysées, though this was completely unplanned. I played my music composition ‘Heartbreak’, serving as the original soundtrack of the show, then followed by a showcase by the artist Tana, and finally my DJ set, where DIE FOR MY LOVE was premiered. Completely by coincidence, the track ended up creating a coherent artistic direction with @coucou_bebe75018’s show, even though it had never been planned. He had taken only a week to prepare the collection, so the connection between my new release and the show was perfectly in sync, without any planning or coordination between us, just naturally.
I place great importance on connecting classical and jazz music with profane or punk music. I create first and foremost for myself, based on what I hear obsessively in my head. If I share it, it is because I am in love with it rather than proud of it. There is a certain humility toward my own work and toward what I admire in general, because pride is always relative to others.
Personally, I do not really care about other people’s opinions on my work. If I had, I would have drowned in an ocean of DJs or rappers and singers who stubbornly keep making the same trendy sounds, either because of a lack of knowledge or simply for financial reasons. So pride feels a bit reductive to me. I would rather say that I managed to exceed my own expectations by devoting myself completely to music. From that point, I can flourish individually by becoming emotionally self-sufficient, and that is indeed satisfying. But I would not call it pride.
For me, self-work, knowledge, learning through curiosity and naivety, combined with wisdom: these are not achievements that suddenly appear after long meditation sessions. Sure, I’m proud, but that can’t be my goal, because I don’t want to stop growing or rest on my laurels, it is a daily humility until death toward what surpasses us, so we can learn to master our emotions and redirect them to the right places in society where they have the most potential and fertility, even if they are problematic. Often, the problem itself contains the solution.
We have been told that you spent some time alone in a forest to write ‘Die For My Love’. Where did the idea of isolating yourself come from? Would you do it again?
Sure, I’ll do it again & again, cause I need to eliminate all temporal distractions in order to reach the raw core of what I am searching for. I love timelessness. In my opinion, all music works on a timeless plane. Otherwise, it is reduced to a purely rhythmic mechanism, which, to me, has little meaning without a spirit guiding that mechanism.
That spirit lives and expresses itself more directly in a forest. The scents of the breeze and the dew on the leaves during autumn immerse me in such a depth, both sonically and visually, that from those sensations, all connected together, I compose without thinking. Everything flows naturally like a river. I do not try to build dams or restrain myself. On the contrary, I let the water flow.
I have always been fascinated by how we experience art at every moment of life. In everyday life, all our senses work together: sight, hearing, smell, touch and taste. The concrete pleasure of living comes from the fact that we can talk while eating, while observing people, while touching a fork and so on.
All our senses operate simultaneously, and it is precisely this combination that gives us the feeling of reality. At that point, the boundary between fiction and reality disappears. Everything becomes one. It is from this state of constant trance through music in everyday life that I am able to grow as a human being, both alone and with others, and to transcend my own Art by leaving societal comfort zones behind.
I have loved the brooding and nocturnal video for the new single. Was it inspired by something specific?
It was beautifully filmed by the cameraman @finesprod and @bandiniz99. When we were in Paris, thinking about where to shoot, I simply told him that I loved the aesthetic of Gotham with a timeless mood, and we knew some big blocks in Paris that could serve well to achieve that atmosphere, because they are almost deserted at night. Symbolically, it was perfect for what I was looking for. What inspired me for the editing I made and the feeling I wanted to create was the idea of a city frozen in time, as if I had managed to press pause on time with a magical clock and could wander through Paris without any humans, observing the city like a natural forest, out of time.
The idea was also to erase or distance myself from all the mentalities and human horrors that come with them so that nature could reclaim its power over these ephemeral human constructions and destructions.
There is also the idea of being on Earth on a mission, like the impulse of a hero who keeps trying even though he knows he is doomed to fail, overwhelmed by the events of humanity and left alone in the face of the immensity and violence it can generate on Earth, in space or in the mind.
When it comes to sound, images, smells and atmosphere, I know exactly what I want, and I do everything I can to translate it into my music, the camera shots, the editing and the symbolic artistic direction that accompanies it on social media and in my stories, where I express the philosophical discourse linked to the track. Solitude is not something that scares me. It is something I need in order to truly flourish in my Art, just as much as one might need Love. And that is precisely where the meaning of the lyrics can be found. It is in a certain solitude and creative devotion that I can truly begin to feel what we naïvely call Love.
Lastly, let’s talk about your upcoming album: when can we expect it to be released? Is it gonna have an overarching lyrical ethos or a common theme?
My next album, ‘Le Parfum’, is the result of many sonic distillations made to obtain the purest essence of my soul and my musical and human intention. That’s why I called it that. The idea is to materialise the very essence of our humanity and the meaning of life through a musical trance, which is ultimately about embracing the present, the only true present nature gives us, the here and now that we are freely offered to all, from which we cannot escape, yet which is the opposite of a prison.
All of this is contained within a sonic bottle that gathers the most elaborate fragrances of each musical style I love. It is a research process that is both deeply personal and completely objective. If it resonates with others, that is great, even though it is not my primary goal.
The more introspective work we do to understand ourselves, the more we realise that we are not truly individuals. We are part of a larger design, the universe, and we are its subjects, almost like puppets through the mechanisms of our unconscious.
Through this collective unconscious and through the geometries that connect us despite our different cultures and imaginary borders, we all carry within our DNA a timeless memory of geometric forms created by some unknown force naïvely called Frequencies. I try to materialise these forms in my music and my Art objects while attempting to answer the most difficult metaphysical question: why do we experience life the way we do as human beings?
Because it seems to be much more than simply wandering inside a biological shell. The body we call human is not really human. It is the continuation and the product of unimaginable dimensions and scales in space. If we could truly observe them as they are, they would plunge us into such fear and terror that humanity might prefer to fall into deep obscurantist religions rather than confront the terrifying reality of the universe and space that surpasses us in every way.
Many people have tried to reduce this universe to theoretical or religious systems of thought. But nothing is more real than living here on Earth with all our senses operating simultaneously (I personally think we have more than five). In my view, music is the supreme sense, the one that allows us to perceive all the others.
The release of ‘Le Parfum’ will be accompanied by an exhibition at Galerie 18bis in the 6th arrondissement of Paris, planned for June and July 2026. I will not say more than that…