Sound of Somewhere Else

Online forums of the early 2000s were a particular ecosystem, a world before streaming algorithms reduced music culture to a succession of thumbnails, and DeepHousePage was the reference. These were places where entire generations learned how club culture actually functioned, as infrastructure and as living culture.
Over the decade people documented lineages, traced the specific sound systems across cities, debated what it meant that Larry Levan mixed on a rotary mixer UREI 1620 rather than a fader mixer, and why it produced a fundamentally different relationship between a DJ and the music. The Bozak CMA-10-2DL, the UREI 1620, the isolator, the amplifier rack, those mythical pieces of equipment that gave the early pioneers their lettres de noblesse, obsessively documented by people who believed history mattered

What I 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 Mu(z)ic Box in Chicago, where Ron Hardy played from midnight until late in the morning, or the Paradise Garage in New York, where Larry Levan ran a room that acoustic designer Richard Long had built from the ground up as an instrument.
There was something about Ron Hardy that never left me: music that felt lived rather than engineered, permanently on the edge of losing control without ever actually doing so.

For me, techno and house have never simply been a musical genre, it's a cultural memory, a form of transmission, an emotional architecture, a way of inhabiting space, sound and even the body itself.
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, because so much of what still moves people in clubs today was shaped through generations of its musical innovation.

That history is not a footnote.

The pull was also personal.

Raised in Paris, I grew up in a household where the music was already plural. My mother was French of Corsican heritage, my father from Benin, the household ran on UB40, Otis Redding, Fania Records and West African rhythms. My parents danced at Le Palace and Keur Samba in Paris through the late 70-80's. When I eventually fell into the mythology of Detroit, Chicago and New York, it didn't feel like a foreign discovery. It felt like a recognition, an echo of something I had already lived.

Paris in the early 2000s is where the mythology became experience. I had the chance to become close to DJ Deep, one of the purest and most respected DJs from the early house and techno days, someone who had witnessed the full arc of this music and passed on everything you needed to know about this culture (god bless him for that). Through him, and through figures like DJ Grégory and Betino, who ran a record shop where house, techno and disco existed without hierarchy between them, I found something closer to mentoring than influence, a lineage that ran directly from French crate-digging back to Black American dance music. I was still young, rarely with enough money to buy everything I'd selected, leaving stacks behind the counter until I could come back for them. Betino would write "François X" on the sleeves to keep track. That is where the name came from.
Nights at TGV parties, the Rex Club, and countless other events gave physical temperature to a culture I had previously encountered in isolation. I was fully immersed.

At some point, references stop being references. By the time my production work began in earnest, the line between my identity and this history had dissolved. I was no longer citing this culture. I was thinking in it.

The Berlin chapter arrived not as a separate tradition but as a refraction of the first. Around 2006, discovering early releases on labels like MDR and Klockworks, through Ben Klock and Marcel Dettmann, and nights at Berghain, what struck me was echo: Detroit, Chicago, New York were inside their productions, filtered through something darker and colder. In their sets, a classic Chicago record might give way to a Maurizio record, the legendary berlin duo. Same soul different temperature.

What the Black American mythology had given me emotionally, the European tradition gave back as physical architecture. One culture, seen from both sides.