TRANSMISSIONS
The Sound of Somewhere Else
On the release of Bound States, François X's new EP on XX LAB, a dive into the cultural mythology that shaped a record built in Paris from a Black American dance music history absorbed through forums, early internet archives and a connection that never seemed to go off.
The Paradise Garage closed in 1987
François X was barely old enough to walk.
By the time he first encountered it, not in person, but through recordings of Larry Levan's sets circulating on Deep House Page, through threads reconstructing what it felt like at 4AM with Richard Long's sound system running at 84 King Street, the club had been closed for more than thirteen years.
He was a teenager in Paris, spending nights and entire days on AudioGalaxy pulling down nineties compilations. Early broadband, P2P, a total geek. Deep House Page held both: the recordings themselves, Ron Hardy at the Power Plant, Tee Scott at Better Days, the legendary Garage sets, and the forums that went deep into what made those nights possible.
"What fascinated me was the mythology surrounding this culture. The clubs, the sound systems, the dancers, the records. The idea that people built entire invisible worlds through sound."
What fascinated me was the mythology surrounding this culture. The clubs, the sound systems, the dancers, the records. The idea that people built entire invisible worlds through sound."
The forums of the early 2000s were a particular ecosystem, a world before streaming algorithms reduced music culture to a succession of thumbnails. Deep House Page was the reference.
These forums were places where entire generations learned how club culture actually functioned, as infrastructure, as living culture.
People documented lineages, traced the specific engineering of sound systems across cities and decades, debated what it meant that Larry Levan mixed on a UREI 1620 rather than a fader mixer, how the rotary, with its continuous gradual movement, produced a fundamentally different relationship between a DJ and the music.
The Bozak CMA-10-2DL. The UREI 1620. The isolator. The amplifier rack. The physical architecture of sound as collective feeling. A culture of obsessive documentation, passed between people who believed history mattered.
What he absorbed during those years was an entire emotional framework built around Black American dance music and the communities, cities and spaces that produced it.
The Music Box in Chicago, where Ron Hardy played from midnight until the following afternoon. The Paradise Garage in New York, where Larry Levan ran a room that Richard Long had designed from the ground up as an instrument: the speaker placement, the amplifier rack, the motorized DJ console, an entire architecture built around the specific physics of collective feeling.
"For me," François says, "techno and house have never simply been a musical genre. It is a cultural memory, a form of transmission, an emotional architecture, a way of inhabiting space, sound and even the body itself."
He also believes that Black American culture deserves to remain central to any honest conversation about electronic music, because of how profoundly rich, innovative and emotionally influential it has been.
"So much of what still moves people in clubs today was shaped through generations of Black musical innovation. It would feel wasteful", he says, to reduce that to a footnote.
Paris in the early 2000s began to close the gap between mythology and experience.
Through DJ Deep, DJ Grégory, Betino Record Shop, a generation of French DJs and diggers who had gone deep into Black American dance music and came back with the knowledge, François received something closer to mentoring than influence.
The nights at Djoon, the TGV parties, Sounds Up, the Rex Club: spaces where the culture he'd been studying in isolation suddenly had a physical temperature, a volume, a room. The education was also technical. One moment crystallizes it. Through DJ Deep, François found himself in première loge as Jérôme Barbé built the DJR400, a rotary mixer made in France, hand-assembled, carrying the direct lineage of the Bozak and UREI tradition forward into the present. He owns a limited series DJR100 himself.
The relay was a physical object, built by hand in Paris, in the same spirit as the machines that had shaped the rooms he'd been reconstructing in his imagination for years.
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