Who said that guitars were mandatory to play at Hellfest? Probably not the French producer and synthwave DJ Perturbator who will present his new album Lustful Sacraments on the Valley stage.

The eminent horror film director and composer John Carpenter once said that the most powerful human emotion is fear. James Kent, better known as Perturbator, has learned this lesson well.

At first, he played black metal as a guitarist, but the Parisian quickly realized that it’s with a synthesizer at his fingertips that he would be the most able to create the dark sound universes that make his singularity. Drawing his inspiration from cyberpunk aesthetics and Satanism, it is with sinister synth layers and relentless drum beats that Kent has gradually taken the synthwave movement into abysses that it had never known before.

After five albums and a handful of EPs, he’s back in 2021 with Lust Sacrements, his latest album released by Blood Music. An album that sees the producer with the luxuriant hair enriching his sound palette with ethereal and disturbing ambiences that Dead Can Dance would not have disowned.

We knew that the Hellfest audience was quick to headbang, but with Perturbator we discovered that it could also tap its feet.