Just hours before New York City rings in 2014, the frenchman born Mike Lévy is not in celebratory mode. He shuffles around his room in Manhattan’s trendy Standard Hotel, groggy and moody, wearing transition lenses that have tinted slightly despite the relatively dark lighting. He is almost cartoonishly French, sporting tailored trousers, an expensive-looking grey sweater, and a dark mop of perfectly disheveled hair.

When he reluctantly sits down to talk, he alternates his focus between a pile of cold room-service French fries and a Marlboro Light. (He smokes like a chimney, especially during his live sets, and there’s a stack of fresh packs on the table sitting next to a bottle of Comme des Garçons’ Odeur 53.) It doesn’t really make a difference to him that he has to work on a holiday when most people will be enjoying themselves. He wouldn’t have had much fun, anyway: “In Paris, it’s the worst night of the year,” he explains. “All the parties are shit, you know.” He appears disgusted at the mention of any sort of pedestrian activity.

It’s probably this kind of strong will and distaste for the everyman that helped Lévy craft a debut record as bold and chic as Aleph, released last fall under the artistic moniker Gesaffelstein (he combined the German word Gesamtkunstwerk—very loosely translated as “aesthetics”—and Einstein). The record pushes beyond the boundaries of industrial electronic music and traditional techno to evoke a propulsively minimalist underworld characterized by violence, addiction, paranoia, and rage. His music is intense and direct enough in its vision that Kanye West came calling during the creation of Yeezus and asked Lévy to join the collaborative vortex of his now-fabled studio in Paris. Lévy’s work landed on the final record on both “Black Skinhead” and the pulverizing drill anthem “Send It Up”. (A mutation of the latter appears on Aleph in a song called “Hellifornia”, a dark twist on a traditional hyphy sound.)

After just a few minutes speaking with him, it was easy to understand why West and Lévy made successful collaborators: the two share a particular hunger for ideological purity and artistic boundary-pushing that can easily be construed as delusional snobbery or arrogance. Still, Lévy is not so standoffish that he can’t be pressed to talk about his values and his art, both of which he’s plainly passionate about.

"Look at cinema—let’s say, The Wolf of Wall Street*. When you meet Leonardo DiCaprio, he's not like Jordan Belfort. It's just a game he's playing. He's acting. For me, music is exactly the same."*