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In his latest French music round-up, David McKenna looks at what the French mean by \u2018electro\u2019 and delves into new releases from a multi-faceted Franco-Senegalese artist, guitar-and-damaged-turntable improv and more<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
Standfirst: In his latest French music round-up, David McKenna looks at what the French mean by \u2018electro\u2019 and delves into new releases from a multi-faceted Franco-Senegalese artist, guitar-and-damaged-turntable improv and more.\u00a0<\/p>\n
A recent call by Emmanuel Macron to have French electronic music, or \u2018French Touch\u2019, added to the UNESCO cultural heritage list \u2013 as Berlin techno has been \u2013 was greeted with some perplexity and even derision in the Anglosphere, thanks to his claim that the French are \u201cthe inventors of electro.\u201d Typical comments below a news piece on Mixmag would be, \u201cAfrika Bambaataa and Arthur Baker would like a word\u201d and \u201cWhen you don\u2019t know what electro is.\u201d Macron is eminently worthy of criticism, as is his statement, but it doesn\u2019t quite mean what these commenters took it to.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Macron definitely wasn\u2019t referring to the minimal dance music style, sometimes referred to as electro-funk, which was pioneered in the early 80s by Bambaataa and others, and I doubt that either he or his advisers have even a passing acquaintance with the genre. In fact, \u00e9lectro has never been widely used in France to describe that specific form of music. Hip hop \u2013 as Vincent Piolet highlights in Regarde Ta Jeunesse Dans Les Yeux<\/em>, his book about its early days in France \u2013 found its way into French culture through the medium of dance. The words of the moment, aside from hip hop, were \u2018le break\u2019 (breakdancing, of course) and \u2018le smurf\u2019 (another style where the dancer stays on their feet). It seems that le smurf, in particular, was sometimes used to refer to the entire movement, including the music associated with it; a 1984 news feature focused on Franco-Guadeloupean hip-hop pioneer Sidney, who presented the groundbreaking weekly TV rap show H.I.P. H.O.P.<\/em>, advises viewers that \u201cif you want to be hip, you shouldn\u2019t just be talking about the smurf\u201d while Sidney points out that le smurf is just one kind of hip hop dancing among many others.<\/p>\n Instead, \u2018l\u2019\u00e9lectro\u2019 has become a catch-all descriptor for every kind of electronic dance music. I spoke to Olivier Lamm, co-director of the culture section at French newspaper Lib\u00e9ration<\/em>, who has been fighting what he has come to feel is a losing battle against its use as a blanket term. \u201cI keep replacing the word wherever I can in articles,\u201d he confesses. According to Lamm, what happened is that \u201ctechno\u201d in the 90s was \u201ckind of radioactive\u201d in France thanks to its association with illegal rave parties and police suppression, and \u2018musique \u00e9lectronique\u2019 became the acceptable, sanitised term that covered a multitude of dance music styles. \u201cIt\u2019s kind of the opposite of British people who are obsessed with very specific sub-genres.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n At some point, musique \u00e9lectronique was abbreviated to \u00e9lectro. It\u2019s hard to pinpoint exactly when the shift happened but Lamm feels that it occurred during the second wave of French Touch artists (e.g. Justice and the Ed Banger crew) with the advent of this music that \u201cwasn\u2019t really house or techno anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n While \u00e9lectro may appear to be a neutral label, it nevertheless carries certain associations. I mention to Lamm that, for me, it evokes certain French electronic artists who focus more on melodies and sweeping, orchestral textures than the low end, and Lamm agrees \u201cit\u2019s the same connotation for me. Electronic music for the masses in way. \u00c9lectro is music that is acceptable for big set-piece events like the Olympics closing ceremony, whereas techno is still seen as dangerous and anti-system.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n For the French President, or whoever scripted his intervention, the point was to champion l\u2019\u00e9lectro rather than electro which, while maddening, is somewhat understandable within its French context. The more egregious aspect of the Macronian vision of l\u2019\u00e9lectro is the narrow fixation on French Touch (a term which itself has a flattening effect on the era it refers to), brushing over decades of French electronic innovation prior to the 90s.\u00a0 If you\u2019re insisting on French musique \u00e9lectronique\u2019s unique contribution to world culture, then \u2013 to give just a few examples \u2013 Pierre Schaeffer\u2019s musique concr\u00e8te experiments, the pioneering efforts of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (founded by Schaeffer), \u00c9liane Radigue\u2019s powerfully meditative works, Jean-Michel Jarre and disco dons like Marc Cerrone should also be part of the conversation.\u00a0<\/p>\n In the mix accompanying this column there\u2019s \u00e9lectro <\/em>from rRoxymore and most of the artists reviewed below, plus some new music from the Pagans label: A\u00e8des and Trucs \u2013 I I had planned to review the latter but Anna Mahtani did a far better job of providing context for their music in this Organic Intelligence newsletter<\/a> than I could have done; underground rap from Sadhana and Joaqm; a collaboration between \u00c9liane Blaise (aka \u00e6fv) and Emmanuelle de H\u00e9ricourt (EdH) under the name Therese; selections from a previously unreleased Brigitte Fontaine & Areski Belkacem album (Baraka 80<\/em>) and Souffle Continu\u2019s remastered collaboration between Breton harpist Kristen Nogu\u00e8s and British saxophonist John Surman; and an extract from \u00c1rmo<\/em>, <\/em>the last in a trilogy of long-form releases from S\u00e9bastien Forrester on the Superpang label.\u00a0<\/p>\n