The Director Who Became the Show

There’s something almost too on-the-nose about Yoann Lemoine performing in front of the Eiffel Tower. He’s French, his music is cinematic almost to a fault, and the monument behind him is the most photogenic piece of iron in the world. And yet it works—because Lemoine, who records and performs as Woodkid, earned it. His debut EP Iron had already been the kind of record that made people stop and rewind, just to confirm they’d heard what they thought they heard.

The music sits somewhere between a film score that lost its film and a war movie scored for a single haunted voice. Huge orchestration, martial snare drums, brass announcing something irreversible. His video for "Iron"—which he directed himself, because of course he did; the man is a visual director first—circulated widely in 2011. Black and white, slow motion, boys running toward some unnamed catastrophe. Hard to watch without feeling implicated in something.

The Eiffel Tower concert, streamed live via Noisey, was technically a branded event—Dell and Intel money behind it, interactive fan voting on setlists and staging. The machinery behind it didn’t matter much once the performance started. What mattered was the architecture of it: that particular combination of location and music that made it feel, for a few minutes, like Lemoine had claimed the entire city as his backdrop. The tower lit up behind him like punctuation.