For nearly twenty years, David Letellier, known as Kangding Ray, has pursued one of the most distinctive and recognisable trajectories in contemporary electronic music, building a language in which techno, ambient, and avant-garde converge into hypnotic, dark, and deeply futuristic sonic architectures.
A French artist based in Berlin, he has moved with ease between the dancefloors of some of the world’s most iconic clubs and the exhibition spaces of galleries and museums, where his work also takes the form of immersive sound installations of strong visual and sensory impact.
His dense and layered discography was further expanded in 2025 with the soundtrack for SIRAT, a film awarded the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, further consolidating his international profile.
Between cinematic tension, rhythmic precision, and radical timbral research, Kangding Ray stands today as one of the most authoritative, visionary, and innovative figures on the global electronic music scene. At Ultra Club, following its premiere at Nuits Sonores in Lyon, he presents his new A/V live set Superfluid.
David Letellier, better known under the alias Kangding Ray, is a musician, producer, and DJ who has built a unique sonic universe in which experimentation and club music merge into constantly evolving forms. For nearly twenty years, he has pursued a singular path at the forefront of electronic music, continually reinventing himself with each release. Moving from the subtle ambient tones of his early albums, he is now widely recognised as one of the most innovative producers in the contemporary electronic scene, thanks to a distinctive sonic language made of hypnotic textures and futuristic rhythms sculpted for visceral impact. A constant presence on the international live and DJ circuit, Kangding Ray extends his research far beyond the dancefloor, crossing into museum installations and film soundtracks, such as the recent score for SIR?T by Spanish director Oliver Laxe, winner of the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, for which he received the Cannes Soundtrack Award. His artistic trajectory reflects a continuous interest in designing possible futures. His debut album Stabil (2006), released on the legendary experimental label Raster-Noton, has become a classic of glitch-inflected ambient minimalism. With the EP Pruitt Igoe (2010), he began shaping broken beat structures more oriented toward the dancefloor, while the album OR (2011) masterfully fused club rhythms with post-industrial atmospheres. His subsequent works, Solens Arc (2014), dark and epic, and the oblique Hyper Opal Mantis (2017), received wide critical acclaim and are now considered landmark records of their time in techno. In 2022, Kangding Ray released the flamboyant and hallucinatory Ultrachroma. As Andrew Ryce wrote on Resident Advisor: “With each new record, Letellier finds an even shinier surface or a stranger rhythm, approaching techno as a three-dimensional sculpture. In Ultrachroma he finally sheds expectations to create something that truly sounds like the future — new forms we have not yet fully learned to understand.” ZERO, released two years later, is a more dancefloor-oriented work that explores the functionality of techno through the lens of its experimental roots: “When an audio signal crosses the X axis, there is an infinitesimal moment of silence. I was inspired by that quiet instant — a turning point where vibrations die and are reborn at the same time.” His most recent works, the Polar EP and the conceptual diptych Helios Rave Draft and Superfluid, continue his ongoing research into sound design and emotional response.
