Hailing from Lille, a charming post-industrial city in Northern France, electronic producer Panteros666 started playing music as a teenage drummer for some local indie bands. Out of that nascent music scene grew a musical collective, raised on internet culture, electronic music and Tumblr, that came to be known as Club Cheval.Two and a half years ago, Panteros666 abandoned his drumkit to start making MP3s in his bedroom. With one eye trained on his cheap Boss Dr Groove drumbox and the other on the infinite stream of his Tumblr feed, he began producing emoticon-filled-mutant-seapunk-trancey-house tracks that drove both club kids and frenetic Youtube commenters mad.
On the strength of his rapidly accumulating “likes” and “reblogs,” our self-proclaimed “Indiana Jones of electronic music” went deeper still on his digital archaeological adventure by digging into endless streams of GIFs and getting lost in the infinite scroll of Tumblr. He started expanding his skillset, too—becoming something of an internet philosopher, with scores of meta-sociological analyses of internet culture on his website Panteros.biz, to the production of modem-enhanced music videos for his friends. Like a meme that won’t go away, Panteros666 made his mark on the internet and fed off its energy to grow stronger with every day.Most recently, he teamed up with visual artist Alexandre le Guillou and art director Ines Marzat to create a novel real-time generated audiovisual spectacle for his live shows. It’s as if someone cracked open Panteros666’s hyperactive mind and let the neon and pastel GIF-colored contents spill out before the audience. The experience also invites crowds to become a part of the visual experience by capturing the motion of the audience through a Kinect and using that to produce the visuals they see."When I produce my tracks I always have plenty of images in mind […] and I quickly became obsessed with integrating myself and other people in my own virtual world," says Panteros666 in the video documentary above. He will be taking his seapunk-ish live show on the road to Japan from March 15th, after the release of his new EP “Hyper Reality” on Bromance Records, on March 4th.