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PARA-NORMAL ACTIVITY


Words: JOHN POWER H


ip-hop has always had an important influence on French electronic mu- sic, with many of the main players moving from one to the other — and sometimes back again — through- out their careers. During the ‘90s, when France’s homegrown hip-hop


scene was at its creative peak, the likes of Cassius’s Zdar and Boom Bass were cutting their teeth producing records for MC Solaar; Bob Sinclar, yet to start churning out global house anthems, was content producing leftfield beats as The Mighty Bop; and in an apartment somewhere in Paris, Jean-Baptiste de Laubier, later to become known as Para One, was setting out on his career as a producer. Hooking up with the French hip-hop group TTC, Jean-Baptiste’s work on their first album — ‘Ceci N’est Pas Un Disque’ — was inventive and full of playful surprises, but it was around the release of the band’s second album, ‘Batards Sensibles’, that he dropped the dusty-sounding beats for a new sound that blew all- comers away. One of the most original hip-hop albums released in the past ten years, tracks like ‘Dans Le Club’ exploded out of the speakers, pounding electronic rhythms and distorted blasts of synthesized noise that would set the agenda for French electronic music for years to come. “Back in the ‘90s I was producing pretty traditional hip-hop,” Jean-Baptiste explains through the haze of cigarette smoke that forms a permanent halo around him throughout our interview. “Then I met the TTC guys and together with them and Tacteel, the other producer, we discovered a lot of things for the first time. We were hanging out and going out to clubs like Le Batofar and The Triptych — what is now The Social Club — for the first time, when before that we were just hanging out in our apartments and in studios. “So all of a sudden, Teki [Latex] from TTC told me, come on… you know how to do it, mix more elec- tronic sounds into your production. So I started experimenting more, because TTC really loved my weirdest beats. I said, ‘OK, let’s really go all the way with this and build our own sound’, and that’s how it started.”


ELECTRO The release of ‘Batards Sensibles’ coincided with the launch of the band’s own Institubes record label and Jean-Baptiste’s first solo release as Para One. Taking that electronic ex- perimentation a step further, the ‘Beat Down EP’ and its follow-up, ‘Clubhoppn’, saw vocals become just another sound to be manipulated, chopped and twisted into club-ready rhythms. With similarly minded Parisian labels like Ed Banger just beginning their meteoric rise too, Jean-Baptiste’s new direction chimed perfectly


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with clubbers worldwide growing tired of minimal techno and smooth house, and his debut album would spawn the massive club hits ‘Dundun-Dun’ and ‘Midnight Swim’. Despite this affinity for producing peak-time electro anthems, his debut ‘Epiphanie’ wasn’t all fist-pumping four-to-the-floor bangers, and throughout displayed an experimental edge that’s kept it sounding fresher than many others from that time. That lighter touch would become even more apparent on his second long-player, the soundtrack to the film, ‘Naissance Des Pieuvres’, synthesized chamber music that could have easily passed for Boards Of Canada enjoying a summer residency at the Palace of Versailles.


POP ‘Passion’ (out now), sees Jean-Baptiste flip the script again. A rollercoaster mix of styles and sounds, it sees acid house rub shoulders with everything from R&B and hip-hop to UK garage and twisted electronica. The result is a joyful tour de force that ranges from ‘Every Little Thing’’s lovelorn robo-step to ‘The Talking Drums’, one of the finest updates of Mr Fingers’ warm Chicago house sound you’ll hear this year. “At first the idea that I had was to do a very personal album and just not care about making tracks that DJs could play in clubs, or get on the radio,” Para One tells DJ Mag. “I just wanted to do my thing, so I started gathering lots of influences from the music I had been listening to for my whole life, basically. In the end, though, the focus of the album turned out to be mostly early Chicago house mixed with IDM from the late ‘90s. Actually, when I set out to produce the album, I wanted to have Larry Heard, Aphex Twin, The Bomb Squad [producers] from Public Enemy, and of course that pop thing like Prince, all in the same room, in my mind.”


With his own album in the bag, and his label Marble Music releasing a steady stream of hard-hitting club classics, things are looking good for Jean-Baptiste. He even holds out the possibility of returning to his hip-hop roots at some point. “I’ve been listening to hip-hop all my life, I think it’s the music that I’ve listened to most and I still love hip-hop,” he says. “We had a huge, really good scene in the ‘90s, but now it’s not nearly as exciting as it was. I’d rather wait for the right mo- ment and a good opportunity to do it, but right now I just really want to go on tour and do my live thing.”


French Producer Para One has flipped the script at various times in his career, from making straight-up hip-hop albums to crafting electro, house and even pop-tinged cuts — as well as directing films and creating soundtracks. DJ Mag USA caught up with him on the eve of the release of his new album, ‘Passion’...


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