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ovember 20, 2018 at Concrete, a boat club in the 13th district of Paris, French DJ and producer Antigone was blasting techno to the ears of hundreds of French ravers during an all-night set from midnight to 10 a.m. It was one of the best Detroit-inspired sets mixed this year, captivating the crowd with dreamy ambient synths and punchy analog percussion. Although it is an underground genre in essence, there is a reason why a lot of people listen to techno in Paris. Techno’s origins can be traced back to the early 1980s when some DJs from Detroit got their hands on Japanese drum machines and synthesizers, notably from Roland and Korg. They fiddled around on them, dialing in some repetitive patterns some say were inspired by the sounds of the Motor City’s automotive factories. Around that time, there was a radio show called The Electrifying Mojo through which artists such as Jeff Mills and Derrick May became known. They began throwing raves and eventually became known internationally. Following their success, an artist named Kenny Dixon Jr., known as Moodymann, got an email from a German group called Kraftwerk saying that they wanted to book him. Having heard their music before, he thought it was a joke. An influential group, Kraftwerk’s music had been soundtracking illegal raves in East Berlin squats after the Berlin Wall’s collapse in 1989, blending distorted and snappy analog percussions with intense, repetitive bass lines. Soon enough, Detroiters and Germans alike started playing in later-legalized Berlin clubs such as Tresor. The scene comprised many LGBT community members
and represented the unification of East and West. At the same time in France, the younger generation was listening to a lot of American music, from punk to rock and disco. Artists like Daft Punk and Laurent Garnier used these influences to shape and create the base of the French sound. As Garnier said in his Red Bull Music Academy 2015 interview, “America represented black music for me. [It] was the thing that was making me move.” Disco was still the big thing at the time, but after 1993, the Rex Club and Gibus changed direction and began focusing on electronic dance music, a milestone in France’s music scene. Illegal raves began happening in the outskirts of Paris in places like hangars, the Collège Arménien or the Fort de Champigny—a scene that became known as the Rave Age. While France developed a few major record labels at the time, these raves were often booking DJs and live acts from the UK. Collaborations like these led to Daft Punk releasing their debut album Homework on Virgin Records, a British label. A few years later, many more artists like Miss Kittin, with more of a minimal techy style, Emmanuel Top, with aggressive Berlin-inspired patterns, and Mister Oizo, a movie director who makes his own caricatured resonant electro, began releasing their music and many more record labels emerged. Radio stations like Radio FG and Radio Nova also played a big role in promoting the genre. They would host any DJ who was booked at the time and garnered a large following from people already in the scene. Throughout the early 2000s, more techno clubs either opened or began to book more electronic music, such as La Machine du Moulin Rouge, Glazart and
TECHNOL THE EVOLUTION OF PARISIAN Techno MUSIC. BY SHADI AYOUBI PHOTOGRAPHY BY SOPHIA FOERSTER
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