Hologram Teen - Day-Glo Chaos (2022)

LA-based Hologram Teen (aka Morgane Lhote) returns to Ransom Note Records with her third album entitled “Day-Glo Chaos”, an unabashedly nostalgic musical love letter to the 1980s. Offering a mixture of cinematic strings, 80s French pop, video game soundtracks, a dash of Drum and Bass and vocoder vocals, this album feels like living in a vintage arcade.

Hologram Teen talks of having drawn inspiration behind the album from driving around Los Angeles at night, the videogame Out Run, coffee-fuelled musical experimentation, Baroque keyboard parts, Neil Young’s “Trans”, 1980s French pop culture, Air’s string parts and her teenage years in Paris - all elements that contributed to the creation of ‘Day-Glo Chaos’, but that’s not all.

The basis of the album was a synth sound that she created for the song “Dalston Wizardzz” on her previous R$N outing “Pizza Conspiracy”. Morgane liked its airiness and soundtrack-like vibe and wanted to build a collection of songs around it, with those string pads as the starting point and backbone for all the new tracks in ‘Day-Glo Chaos’. What started as more cinematic tracks quickly evolved into kinetic and upbeat 80s pop songs. Her love for driving around LA at night listening to electronic music conjured up those new songs as little vignettes that would work as musical companions for her late-night excursions.


On the production side of things, Morgane wanted to keep it simple and cohesive by having a limited palette of sounds and only using a handful of instruments at most. She used a TR-707 for the drum parts, an Analog synth bass, the glassy sounding orchestral strings melodies she created on Ableton Live and a couple of extra synths like a DX7.


‘Day-Glo Chaos’ transmits hilarious happiness in a contagious way. The ideal album to stream this Summer for guaranteed feel-good vibrations.