2026-09-15· Article· Mekaret · Read in FR

Artists who give us a world to inhabit

Dear Watchers,

Catherine Ringer has left us. She has joined her Fred. When I heard, I was stunned. Two days earlier I was still sharing one of their songs, simply because it did me good, the way it has for years. And then, suddenly, she was gone!

I thought of Fred Chichin at once. Of course I did. Less the “legendary duo” of the magazines than what they had made together, under that slightly impossible name: Les Rita Mitsouko.

I keep coming back to the voice, Fred’s guitars, the colours, the bodies, the comic glued to the grave without asking permission. A song where anything could happen, and still held. People say “eccentrics.” That is a comfort phrase, like saying the violin “makes you cry.” Too short. With them, the sound, the image, the clothes, the gesture came from the same place. You put on Marcia Baïla and you stayed stuck in that climate for hours.

Les Rita Mitsouko, Marcia Baïla (video by Philippe Gautier)

Catherine went on after Fred: she had her life, away from the duo. Tonight I mainly want to salute the world they brought into being together, and managed to pass on. Because thinking of them, I find the thread of almost all my tastes. I love people who build a universe until you can walk into it. After the last note, I still want to go back.

And then Mylène, and the others

Mylène Farmer has done this to me for a long time. Childhood, desire, death, solitude, the difficulty of being oneself: those questions move from a song to a show, from a silence to an image. You can be touched without knowing what you understood. She leaves enough empty space for that to happen.

Laurent Boutonnat composes and directs; with Farmer, he really holds the other half of the thing. Désenchantée, 1991: a disused factory near Budapest, about ten minutes, snow, a revolt that does not end cleanly. You come out of it as if you had watched a short film. Their meeting gave a form to a sensibility, and it still holds. I go back often, the way you put on a film you know by heart and it still puts a hole in your chest.

Laurent Boutonnat, Désenchantée (1991)

These worlds talk to each other, sometimes very concretely. The statue on the Mylenium Tour, in Guy-Claude François’s set, comes from a H. R. Giger work. Mylène went to see him in Gruyères, twice. An image changes music, changes stage, and stays itself. I like that.

With Giger, flesh and machine grew together. His work on Alien: a creature, a corridor, and you sense laws you will almost never know. It is frightening, and it still holds. You stay, even when you dislike what you see.

I find that care for the whole in Allie X. Voice, textures, silhouettes, masks, characters speak the same language. Girl With No Face sticks identity to me like a place you get lost in, masks and all. She says it without hedging: music and visual choices, the same search. The image carries a share of what the song cannot say alone. That is precisely what interests me.

Allie X, Weird World (official video, album Girl With No Face)

With Tuomas Holopainen and Nightwish, it starts in the ear. Childhood, tales, nature, the vertigo of time, our place among the living: all of that lives in the compositions, with distances, lights. Imaginaerum feels especially right there. The marvellous takes a musical shape, and each listener puts their own story in. Good. I do not need it narrated to me.

Nightwish, Storytime (Imaginaerum)

Tobias Forge pushes differently. Ghost is Papa, the ghouls, the ceremonial, and the songs glued to all of it. Humour does not cancel the rite. It lets you love it and smile at it in the same motion. You think you are following a chorus, and you find yourself in a mythology. Yes, I like that.

Falling In Reverse I already told you about through the strings: the Reimagined versions, the nerve under the gain, in A voice in the chest. Here I want to talk about the videos.

Ronnie Radke has a voice too large for a verse. The videos give him laws: a costume, a transformation, a city on fire, a hell nobody explains. Jensen Noen holds, in that pair, the role Boutonnat holds with Farmer. He says so himself: they build a visual universe, clip after clip. Popular Monster gives the monster a shape. Watch the World Burn and Ronald answer each other: the same thread, ambulance, costumes, you pick up on the next shot. Prequel digs further. Middle-earth, I am getting there. Here first, a dream too sharp, too loud, too built to be only promo. Ronnie’s life feeds the fiction, and the fiction gives him a silhouette larger than the news.

Falling In Reverse, Watch the World Burn (Jensen Noen)

You saw me coming

I dropped Middle-earth in the paragraph above, and here is Tolkien walking in. Fine: for once the reflex is the right one. He invented languages, peoples, stories older than the characters. Middle-earth has a memory. Characters walk through places that already lived without them. That changes the reading. You move with the sense of seeing only a share, and of accepting not to see everything.

Akira Toriyama, almost the inverse. In Dragon Ball, capsules, dinosaurs, vehicles, martial arts and gods share a house without a dossier. The drawing binds them. A joke in the middle of a gigantic stake. Even when it grows huge, it stays playful. This world has not forgotten it was invented. Thank you for that. I needed it as a child. I still do.

Hayao Miyazaki. The dragon on a poster does very little for me. What holds me is the ordinary gesture in the middle of the marvellous: cooking a meal, waiting, watching the wind, taking care of someone. Machines can be magnificent and ugly with unease. Nature, welcoming and dangerous. His films force me to look at what lives around the characters, not only what falls on them. Each film opens a different world. The sensibility, though, you recognize from title to title, like a voice.

Acting inside

Video games add a right that books and clips do not have: to act in the world you are discovering. Yes, I remain a geek, a gamer, a music listener, all three at once, and I will not apologize.

Warcraft. Chris Metzen is among those who gave depth to the places you walk. You come back to a city where you hung around, talked to people, did something stupid one night. The official story is still there. Yours stuck on top of it.

Diablo. David Brevik, Erich and Max Schaefer, and their teams. The first one, especially. I remember the fear I had walking through a door. It hit me in the guts. The village, the dark behind the jamb, the sound, and the body knowing before I did that I should not have pushed. The world existed there, in that reaction, before I even understood the story.

All these names are also encounters: composers, performers, draughtsmen, technicians. I like the word “genius” for the wonder. With Catherine and Fred, it held as a pair. With Tolkien, it held alone, from invented languages down to the hills. I have no rule about that.

What holds me: someone finds a form for what they carry, and others recognize a fear or a desire they had never known how to say that way. The work becomes a meeting point. You can return years later, with another gaze. It does not wear out like news.

Dear Watcher, that is what I think of, thinking of Catherine and Fred. Their freedom, now songs, images, gestures that others can still discover.

Thank you, both of you. Thank you for sharing your universe!

Sources

1. franceinfo: death of Catherine Ringer. Night of 14 September 2026; family statement; age 68.
2. Le Monde: Catherine Ringer. Death announced 15 September 2026.
3. Les Rita Mitsouko, Marcia Baïla (official video). Directed by Philippe Gautier, 1984.
4. BnF: Laurent Boutonnat. Composer and director; Mylène Farmer videos.
5. Désenchantée, Laurent Boutonnat video (1991). HQ copy of the original film (Budapest); the official channel mostly hosts lives.
6. mylene.net: Giger and the Mylenium Tour. Statue from a H. R. Giger work; set by Guy-Claude François; meeting in Gruyères.
7. Wired: H. R. Giger and Alien. Flesh and machine; a creature as the law of a world.
8. Vestal Mag: Allie X. Music and visual choices as one search.
9. Allie X, Weird World (official video). Album Girl With No Face; Allie X channel.
10. Nightwish, Storytime (official video). Nuclear Blast; album Imaginaerum.
11. The New Yorker: Ghost / Tobias Forge. Portable fiction, Papa figures.
12. MatthewHoobin: Ghost at Yuengling Center, 2022. Photo CC BY-SA 4.0.
13. MasterShot: Jensen Noen on Ronald. “A whole visual universe for his videos,” built with Ronnie Radke.
14. Wikipedia: Ronnie Radke. Voice, Falling In Reverse.
15. Wikipedia: Ronald (song). Noen video; narrative sequel to Watch the World Burn.
16. Falling In Reverse, Watch the World Burn. Epitaph Records; directed by Jensen Noen.
17. Tolkien Estate. Middle-earth, memory of places.
18. Joe Ross: Bag End, Hobbiton Movie Set. Photo CC BY-SA 2.0.
19. Mayimbú: Dragon Ball mural, Lima. Photo CC BY-SA 4.0; tribute to Toriyama.
20. Muramasa: Satsuki and Mei’s House. Expo 2005 park, Nagakute; CC BY-SA 3.0.
21. Blizzard: message from Chris Metzen. Warcraft, places inhabited by players.
22. PC Gamer: original Diablo creators. David Brevik, Erich and Max Schaefer.

• musique
• images