KAS:ST The Emotional Alchemy of ADORE Beyond Techno: KAS:ST’s Hybrid Vision on Adore
KAS:ST (Manuel Sene) doesn’t deal in half-measures. His productions have always carried a cinematic scale, music designed to outgrow the booth and exist in a bigger narrative. With “ADORE”, his new album, KAS:ST delivers his most uncompromising statement to date. Trance peaks, broken beats, African roots, and raw techno collide in a record that refuses to be reduced to one sound.
This is also his first full-length project since taking KAS:ST forward as a solo act. Life outside the studio has shifted the balance: marriage, fatherhood, and a deeper sense of responsibility echo throughout the record. Vulnerability becomes part of the language, sitting alongside the power and intensity that have defined his work until now.
ADORE is not a formula; it is a manifesto. A body of work that insists techno can be more than functional, that it can hold emotion, storytelling, and risk without losing coherence. In a scene often addicted to repetition, KAS:ST is showing a different path, one that feels raw, personal, and necessary.
With ADORE, KAS:ST is staking his claim as one of the few artists willing to stretch techno beyond its own cage. The record pulls from broken beats, trance peaks, African rhythms, and even pop references, yet it never loses coherence. Instead, it feels like one continuous statement. This is not a playlist of club weapons; it is an album that insists on honesty and on showing every side of an artist who refuses to stay in one lane.
That refusal is not just an aesthetic choice; it is a philosophy.
“From the start, I didn’t have a fixed blueprint. My goal was simply to create a record that reflects every side of my universe and the life I’m living today. I let each influence come in naturally: my African roots, trance, broken beats, raw techno, even pop, until the puzzle fit together by itself. The point was never to stick to one single color, but to show that my identity is hybrid and multifaceted. Having that freedom as an artist, not letting myself get locked into one specific style, has always been essential for me.”
This is a statement many techno producers are afraid to make out loud. Most still cling to the safety of uniformity, delivering twelve versions of the same track to keep their slots on festival lineups. Manu does the opposite. He opens the door to all of his influences and lets them bleed into each other, betting on personality rather than predictability.
The decision to expand his palette came with a deeper shift in his own life.
“I’ve been on my own with KAS:ST for almost two years now, so it was important for me to fully express my personal artistic identity. I’m very proud of what Carol and I achieved together in the past, but being alone naturally awakened different desires, emotions, and horizons. My personal life has also played a huge role. I got married last year, I have a beautiful little daughter, and the love I feel for them inspires me and gives me strength every single day. My music inevitably reflects that.”
This is not just a personal detail thrown in for sympathy. You can actually hear it in the record. The vulnerability is not ornamental; it’s structural. Where previous releases often leaned on impact, ADORE allows room for fragility, for emotion to guide the tension as much as the kick. It is the sound of an artist unafraid to let his private life bleed into the booth.
“I’m often categorized as a DJ or club artist, but that doesn’t fully define me. I listen to so many different styles of music on a daily basis, and those influences constantly shape the way I create. Finally, the album format gave me the freedom to experiment. I didn’t want to deliver just a compilation of tracks that sound the same. That’s not what I want to share with my fans. I wanted to surprise them, to take them on a real journey through my world.”
That last point matters. In 2025, when streaming dominates and EPs are often built for algorithmic rotation, committing to a full album that refuses to sound homogeneous is both risky and rare. It positions ADORE as something closer to a cinematic score than a set of functional tools.
“For me, Adore isn’t just about love in the romantic sense. It’s a word that embodies the intensity of my emotions: my attachment to my loved ones, to my music, to my audience. It carries passion, sometimes obsession, but also gratitude. It’s a simple word that condenses everything I wanted to express with this record. The opening words of the album capture this feeling perfectly.”
KAS:ST plants his flag in a word that is emotional, open, even exposed. That choice alone signals where this album stands in the larger landscape: not afraid of sincerity, not afraid to risk being understood too deeply.
If ADORE sounds cinematic, it is because KAS:ST has always built music with one eye on the screen. His records unfold carrying the kind of visual weight that makes them feel bigger than the club.
“Music and visuals are inseparable for me. My videos are natural extensions of the tracks. They give a body and a face to the emotions I try to translate into sound. With LEGACY and The Tribe, the stories are closely tied to my own background. As the grandson of Senegalese, Italian, and Spanish immigrants, I carry that heritage inside me, and it adds both weight and coherence to the project.”
That honesty is rare in a scene where visuals often feel like branding, a backdrop to the music rather than a vital part of it. KAS:ST approaches them differently. His videos are not accessories; they are stories of exile, survival, and belonging. In doing so, he blurs the line between techno and cinema, refusing to let the music exist as something abstract or faceless.
One of the most striking things about ADORE is the number of voices inhabiting it. The record feels almost like a film script, with different characters entering and shaping the emotional landscape. For KAS:ST, each collaboration is not decoration but narrative, a way to channel emotions through textures that his own sound cannot carry alone.
“Every voice on the album plays a specific role, almost like characters in a movie. Be No Rain brings this unique melancholy, Neav embodies a fragile softness, and with Next To U, I wanted to take a personal step forward. Singing was a challenge, but also a necessity. I couldn’t let anyone else carry those words; they had to come from me.”
In a culture where vocal features often get reduced to hooks for playlists, KAS:ST treats them with intention. His own decision to step behind the mic signals something deeper: a refusal to outsource his most personal statement. By putting his own voice at the heart of the record, he collapses the distance between artist and alias, leaving no doubt that ADORE is not just a project but a confession.
Techno often builds its reputation on rigidity, on staying inside a formula that guarantees impact on the floor. With ADORE, KAS:ST deliberately bends that frame. Tracks like Echoes of Us flirt with pop, while Next To U slips into breakbeat territory, proof that his vision is not afraid to risk disorienting an audience.
“As I said earlier, I never tried to fit into a box. Techno has always been one of my foundations, but I wanted to show that it can interact with other styles without losing its soul. Tracks like Echoes of Us or Next To U are experiments that prove you can step outside the club framework and still keep the whole record coherent. For me, the only thing that really matters is being sincere and the love I receive from my fans. Of course, not everyone will embrace that approach, but honestly, I’ve never made music to please people or meet their expectations. The moment you start thinking like that, creativity dies, because fear becomes your guide.”
This is the essence of ADORE: an album that rejects safety in a landscape where many producers design tracks to slot neatly into the Beatport charts or algorithmic playlists.
KAS:ST gambles on sincerity. The result is a record that stretches techno’s vocabulary without losing its core, carving out space for experimentation in a genre often obsessed with uniformity. If ADORE expands techno’s vocabulary, its deepest register comes from Sene’s Manu’s own heritage. African languages, rhythms, and textures run through the album, not as exotic decoration but as grounding elements. For KAS:ST, weaving these sounds into the record is both a personal reconnection and an artistic provocation.
“It’s both. On one hand, it’s a personal reconnection with my heritage, and on the other, it’s an artistic will to push techno into new territories of rhythms and voices. It’s essential for me not to forget where I come from, but also to transform that heritage into something alive that speaks to the present. I feel very close to my Senegalese roots, but I’m also a product of French and Western culture, so the album is truly a mix of both.”
KAS:ST’s visual world has always stood apart. Where many techno acts treat videos as marketing collateral, he uses them as narrative extensions of the music. The films for LEGACY and The Tribe are not backdrops but central pieces of his artistic identity, stories that carry almost as much weight as the tracks themselves.
“I think those stories resonate because they speak to something universal: exile, survival, the search for identity. Even though they’re inspired by my own life and the people around me, everyone can relate to them in their own way. The success of the videos shows that people are hungry for strong narratives, even within music that is often labeled as underground.”
The challenge with an album like ADORE is how to carry its cinematic scale into the booth. Techno culture is still built around clubs and festivals, where intensity and stamina often take priority over nuance. For KAS:ST, the answer lies in rethinking performance itself, shaping something that sits between a DJ set and an audiovisual journey.
“Of course, I’m aiming to build a full audiovisual show with my team connected to the world of ADORE, but I need more time for the project to be fully developed. My DJ sets are already eclectic. I can move from melodic techno to harder sounds, but in the club context, I still like to keep things intense and techno-driven. Beyond the club tracks, the album itself is more about listening and escaping. I always include the more club-oriented tracks in my sets, but ADORE is also an invitation to experience something deeper.”
Legacy and the Next Chapter
ADORE feels like both culmination and departure. It gathers everything KAS:ST has carried until now and pushes it toward something new, a space where techno merges with soul, storytelling, and risk. For Manu, it is not the final word, but the opening of a new cycle.
“For me, ADORE is clearly the start of a new cycle. It’s the most complete project of my career so far, but it also opens the door to new explorations. In ten years, I hope people will remember ADORE as a record without creative limits, one that proved techno could carry emotion, storytelling, and soul, and as the moment where a new chapter of KAS: ST truly began.”
If his vision holds, ADORE will not just sit as another techno album but as a benchmark, a reminder of what happens when the genre stops hiding behind uniformity and embraces its full spectrum.
KAS:ST has always operated on a grand scale, but ADORE shifts that ambition inward. The record is not defined by oversized synths or cinematic build-ups; it is defined by the way he folds his own life, heritage, and vulnerability into a genre that often resists such exposure. In that move, he drags techno into unfamiliar territory, one where honesty becomes as powerful as impact.
That honesty is what sets him apart. It is not the safe choice, but it is the one that gives ADORE its weight. And weight is what survives beyond hype cycles and festival seasons.
Looking at the bigger picture, ADORE feels less like a statement and more like a roadmap. It shows how techno can stretch, how visuals can carry as much meaning as sound, how heritage can drive the rhythm forward, and how personal lives can bleed into the booth without diluting the energy. If this is the beginning of KAS:ST’s new cycle, then the next decade is not just about harder kicks or bigger drops. It is about opening techno up to its own potential, and that is where ADORE leaves its mark.
