Review
Genre and Mood
Koudlam made See You All for an album that its own label presented as his first epic record, massive and celebratory, and that the Portuguese magazine Altamont heard as symphonic in its composition. Discogs files Goodbye under experimental and ambient as well as indie rock; Bandcamp adds electronic and alternative pop. The title is a farewell, and the album around it is called Goodbye: haunting and melancholic by name, yet framed by the label as a last dance, which is where the euphoria comes in.
Song Summary
See You All is the fourth of twelve tracks on Goodbye, five minutes and ten seconds long, composed and produced by Koudlam himself; Altamont notes that he wrote and played the album alone, with synthesizers, percussion and dense bass at the heart of its compositions. The label’s text pictures the album amid ruins, asking whether you are ready for a last dance before the prophecy is fulfilled. The detail that makes See You All memorable, though, lies outside the record: the images it was first heard with.
Musical Breakdown
Album Version
The version embedded here is the album recording, posted by Koudlam’s own channel as the official audio: the five-minute-ten form that Goodbye fixed in 2009.
Other Versions
The track already existed before the album, on the 2008 EP Live at Teotihuacan. A long version was heard in Jacques Audiard’s film Un prophète, and in 2011 a single added a radio edit.
Concepts in Focus
See You All began as a soundtrack. In 2007 Koudlam met the artist Cyprien Gaillard and composed the music for his film Desniansky Raion, a thirty-minute performance shown in museums including MoMA, Tate Modern and the Centre Pompidou; Koudlam’s channel posted the track in 2008 as an excerpt from it, and Altamont describes the images that go with the song as a brutal clash between two groups of Russian hooligans. Music written for images can survive without them, and this one did.
It also shows how one track lives in several forms. An alternate version is a second finished recording by the same artist, and See You All has at least two: the album version and the long version that French Wikipedia connects to Live at Teotihuacan and to Un prophète. The 2011 single then added a radio edit, a shortened version for radio. Comparing them shows how much of a track’s effect depends on its length.
Artistic Context
Koudlam, born Gwenael Navarro in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, in 1979, grew up between Mexico, Africa and France and works across music, video, painting and writing; he has described his music as “Heroic World Music”. After a self-released album, Nowhere, in 2006, he signed in 2008 to Pan European Recording, the label founded by Arthur Peschaud in 2007. Goodbye followed in November 2009, its CD with a booklet by Gaillard.
Impact and Reception
Goodbye was well received by critics and followed by a world tour, and See You All became Koudlam’s best-known piece. Besides Un prophète (2009), it was used in Territoires (2010), and it appears on the soundtrack album of 11.6 (2013). Listen to the album version first, then watch the excerpt from Desniansky Raion.
