The early days of Sound Pellegrino involved a lot of back-to-back performances with DJ Orgasmic, who was formerly TTC's tour DJ, plus a major influence on my tastes, and taste for mixtape-making. We were like a fucking octopus on the decks, constantly stacking and building things on top of one another; our sets were a never-ending blend-a-thon. That became my signature thing. Then, inspired by Lorenzo Senni's work, when I did the Deconstructed Trance Reconstructed mix I was looking primarily for drumless melodic leads as a third component when two channels were already running: to create match-ups, rather than mash-ups. I might not use three CDJs when playing an Italo disco set, though. There's a separation between music as raw material, and music as a memory trigger. It's not easy to create something completely new with a song that brings a rush of familiarity and nostalgia.The immediate effectiveness of it is what catches my ear. It has to be minimal and have space, otherwise you can't superimpose it with something that's already busy. Errorsmith's " Stiff Neck " is a perfect example, and I would guess it's my most played-out song ever. It's minimalist but evolves and becomes more intense as it goes on, making it a playful, exciting and transformative tool for builds. Wiley's "Devil" Mixes also are great for this. There are no drums, and the melody switches every eighth bar, creating something that is both consistent and constantly resetting—a canvas that you can apply some progressive things on top of.It was interesting and necessary to shake things up. And I think that if I put myself in the shoes of someone who was never overly interested in clubs—who perhaps comes from an art, noise or punk background—it may have been an exciting way of messing around with these tropes, by finding extremes, even if they were un-danceable. But I love clubs. I love people coming together to have a good time. I love pure, raw, functional dance music. Functionality doesn't need to come at the price of sacrificing emotion, but there is great poetry within music made purposely for you to dance on it, and not think about it.When the whole deconstructed club music wave hit it make me think, "Oh no! Not IDM again!" We had to fight intellectualism in dance music back in the early 2000s by finding stuff that was futuristic and weird, but not experimental for the sake of being experimental. It felt like this was happening all over again. I got the impression these producers are challenging themselves to make something sophisticated. I would say to them that it's actually harder and more interesting to simplify your music and make a great dance record that's gonna tear the club up. To me the depth and beauty of dance music is so noble, it's unbeatable.

Man, I've played that Clipse instrumental so many times. I got into hip-hop around 1991, but my interest waned around 2007. The electronic phase of Teki has run without interruption from 2002-ish until the present day, and thus it has overtaken the hip-hop Teki. I went through eras. From '98 to '03 I was jamming Company Flow, Rawkus Records, Antipop Consortium, all the backpack stuff. Then Missy Elliott, Dipset, Hot Boys, D4L, Cash Money, snap, crunk—you name it. That was my shit. For me, that's the real golden era. I used to view Mobb Deep as something I needed to push back on: "Every fucking DJ in the whole wide world plays 'Shook Ones Part II' at every hip-hop party that exists, and I'm so tired of this song. Why do we idolise these guys so much? They're so conventional. They're like the Tories of hip-hop!" I was trying to get away from it as much as I could in my early rap years, and only just very recently am I admitting, "You know what? 'Shook Ones' is a good song."God no []. Granted, hip-hop is in my DNA, but not sonically as much as conceptually. When the Napster era took hold, we were listening to Warp and The Neptunes in tandem. Tell me: what is [Matmos side project] The Soft Pink Truth? Is it booty house? Is it broken bleep music? Now what's the difference between that and "Light Your Ass on Fire" by Busta Rhymes? It's all part of the same panorama.Even more so on Andre 3000 and Gwen Stefani's "We've Got a Long Way to Go," which is full of trademark Squarepusher bass slaps. You can find them all overas well. OutKast were a big influence for me already, but when I found out that Andre 3000 was as obsessed with Squarepusher as my friends were, we were like, "OK wow, this guy fucking gets it." Just like how Peder Mannerfelt was in the studio watching the beat for "Toxic" come together. Or how Kid606 made Missy Elliott bootlegs . It's all contemporary, exciting music. Why would you wish to separate these things when you could be appreciating them simultaneously?That happens a lot, where the basic notion of Song X makes me think of Song Y, regardless of tempo or genre they start out at. This is a good 50 percent of it or more. When it comes to the actual spark of connecting them, the soundcheck or opening moments of an evening is useful. There's no crowd or sometimes just the beginnings of people filtering into a room, so no pressure. I'm going inside my USB and finding old tracks that I'd forgotten about, arranging the CDJ screen to sort by BPM, so I spot the unlikely neighbours in my collection. The final percentage comes through back-to-backs. Since September of 2018 I changed my Rinse France show to be only unprepared back-to-backs on air, as a challenge.Yes, and you can only prepare them to an extent. For example, when I went back-to-back with Finn, I stole a blend from him that he improvised. His ear is incredible! I played the James Holden remix of "The Sky Was Pink," which maybe he had heard once or twice before, but it was not really on his radar, and he was certainly not anticipating me to pull the song out. Still, he superimposed an R&B track by the No Limit artist Mercedes that is in exactly the same key, and rode perfectly on top. I'm standing there wondering, "How the fuck…"Not at all. But this blend was insane, and I told him on the spot I intended to steal it []. A lot of ideas happen like that, or by manually playing around with rekordbox on my computer, going through song after song to find that perfect synergy.

I knew I had to use Ploy. I've learned from Diplo, Jubilee, Martelo, all these guys: if you're a party DJ, you have to play the hot song. It's a noble pursuit. Last year's hot song was "Ramos." But because everyone was playing it, I knew I had to find a crazy blend to make it my own. I was scrolling through rekordbox and noticed the "Fossil Falls" theme close enough to club tempos, and without drums. So I put it with 2018's ultimate drum track, and voila.It reinvents itself all the time. It hasn't aged because you can recontextualize it.By the mid 2000s we were starting to have our own thing in Paris that brought together rap and electro, taking cues from Prefuse 73, DJ /rupture, the Hollertronix online forum, that sort of style. Then all of a sudden the French electro house sound became prominent and everyone in the scene started doing "turbines"—our word for big ol' distorted electro house bangers—and started dismissing "electro rap" as if it was something cheap and corny. Inevitably some of it was, but I think French producers dismissed it too quickly, instead of pushing it into something more accomplished. Instead, Glasgow and Montreal walked through that open door, explored and refined the sound, and made it their trademark.Meanwhile in Paris the omnipresent sound did feel restrictive as hell. A handful of us felt we had to maintain the non-turbine side by playing Bmore, baile funk and ghettotech at parties, but this was not a full-blown resistance. By the time I started to really consider myself a DJ, that reliance on turbine bangers was dying down, Sound Pellegrino was just being born, and my angle was more about returning to fun, stripped-back house music. The mixing-everything phase was yet to come.Sure, I want to be mentioned in the same sentence as these guys, but there is a human aspect. In Manara's case we've known each other forever, we're part of the same musical family and I love hanging out with her. I value her taste, her worldview and her skills. She put DJing to the side for a while, then returned and now everyone knows what she is about.That is so beautiful to see. I wanted to show that to French audiences, and I wanted to associate myself with that kind of high-level DJing. When Spooky came, it was an education for me as much as the crowd. We went back-to-back and I learnt so much. When I see someone like Spyro or Spooky who's so good at mixing grime and has so many dubs, I recognize that I'm never going to be that DJ who is...Right. I can DJ grime classics, but the level of knowledge and exclusives you need to be on their level is not comparable. Also, the dimension of just me being a French kid and not living in the centre of it means that geographically I can never be that guy.In that case, it made sense. The whole idea had been in my head for a long time, even back to the early Sound Pellegrino days. I just didn't have the right people ready to play along, or maybe the producers surrounding me were already established and it made less sense to have them reinvent themselves that late in their career. Whereas with the school of Bérite, these guys were still early in their career and happy to catch people's attention. It came out of discussions with DJs in the UK, who would wonder who the fuck these crazy French kids were, trying to make grime: "You have Thomas Bangalter! Be proud of what you have. We had jungle and spun it into garage, grime, dubstep; the whole continuum. Why don't you kickstart your own transformation?" And you know, it was true.Reconstructing that family tree of original French music, and contemporary African music that became part of the French panorama of music over time, was very important to me. We created something new by taking elements from Afro trap, French rap, plus the melodic parts of French filter house and bringing it together in an ordered manner. I don't want French musicians who are solely influenced by UK music or Jersey club. That kills creativity. Because then what are we? Just an alien version of something that already exists and doesn't need us. If you want to feel loved and appreciated for what you do, if you want to have bookings outside of France, if you want to leave a mark outside of your tiny little town and the five people who love grime in France, then you need to create something that's your own. And this is why I thought Bérite as a movement was needed. Then people came for me: "This is not how scenes are made. This is not organic at all. A scene isn't born on the internet." These are all valid critiques. I just wish we had a fucking place where we could let the scene evolve organically.The ideal of club culture—where small basement bars have just as much to offer as big venues—is not just the same in France. Logistics are a fucking pain in the ass. Soundsystems have brutal limitations. I played Keep Hush in London last year, it was in a little off-radar spot with booming sound and a natural vibe. I was in love. But I spoke to our friend Ahad (AKA Ahadadream ) after he played Keep Hush the next month, and he said that there were other spots in the local area, like Rye Wax, that would be capable back-ups for this kind of event—perhaps even better. Multiple options in just one postcode! Come on. Londoners and Berliners simply do not realise how lucky they are with all this.As much as I'm not a technician in that strict sense of the term, it doesn't take a fucking sound engineer to figure out that a club with a nice sub is better than a club with no sub. The same song played on a better soundsystem will transform the mystery of the party. I know, I know, "Thank you Captain Obvious!" But that very first layer of understanding escapes many people involved within the catastrophic state of French clubs.