All it took was a phone call from a friend asking him to compose a track to accompany a surfing trip to the Mentawai Islands, a paradise of turquoise waves, for Jérôme Plasseraud, film and television producer, multi-instrumentalist and arranger, who had been part of the Paris pop scene in the 2000s, to become Alaaska. With trendy synthesizers and reverb-laden guitar, he sketched out the first melodic lines of “Bangkok” on a worn-out drum machine, round and warm like a setting sun. This inaugural track sets the tone for everything that is to come, a distant mental journey to these fantasised Indonesian islands, and more broadly to Asia, like a pastel postcard.

‘I played the demo of “Bangkok” to Mark Daumail (Cocoon), and he promised to sign me to his label, Yum Yum Records, if I continued in this direction.’

He kept his promise. Alaaska locked himself away in his home studio in Bordeaux, strumming his son’s nylon guitar, tinkering with melodies on koto samples, dreaming up the soundtrack to an imaginary film, somewhere between Sofia Coppola’s meditative Lost in Translation and Sergio Leone’s westerns. His knowledge of arrangements pushed him towards greater minimalism, refinement, keeping only the essentials, leaving room for approximation, not settling too comfortably into the codes of pop music, which was nevertheless his foundation. The result is this first album, Monoï, a tasty and spicy cocktail of psychedelic soul, instrumental pop and lounge music, to be enjoyed by the pool or on the plunging cliffs of the Basque Coast, a place of pilgrimage where Alaaska often goes to draw inspiration.

“I’m not a great surfer, far from it, but I find everything about this culture sublime. I think of the Beach Boys, the beauty of their melodies, I can smell the wax on the boards, its intoxicating scent. Everything is synonymous with escape, sharing and passion. I try to convey these feelings in my music. I wait for inspiration, like a wave, in fact.”

His first album, Monoï, with cover art by Dutch duo We are out of office, is a gentle odyssey for the ears. Between the notes, we hear references to Alaaska. Originally from Versailles, where he rubbed shoulders with the French touch scene, from Air to Phoenix, the composer, like his bands, loves ethereal chords, preferring fullness to rough tension, analogue keyboards to cold plugins. Here and there, in the warmth of the timbres, mellow basses on rhythmic cushions, reminiscences of Shuggie Otis, one of his obvious references, or the more contemporary Khruangbin, with whom he shares the echoing sparkle of electric guitar, are revealed. ‘We got all the time,’ sings Cocoon on the languid ballad ‘Don’t rush.’ . So be it.

‘When I was a teenager, I used to take the bus to school, walking up Avenue de Versailles in the early morning, with the château behind me. On my Walkman, I listened to video game music that I had hastily recorded from my television.’

Pixel music is also featured here. For example, “Wellspring”, with its vintage synth theme, seems straight out of a Megadrive console. Its music video, to be released in January and directed by himself, attests to this, with images from the legendary game California Games.