"Paris, it's not the City Of Lights anymore... It goes to sleep at 11."That was one of the more damning lines in a 2010 New York Times article that declared Paris's nightlife all but dead. Grim as that may sound, at the time it rang true for many in the city's music scene. Paris's importance to electronic music is beyond debate—from Daft Punk to Pépé Bradock to DJ Deep, the city has long been a fountainhead of fresh and inspired sounds. But for a while there, it got stale. "The promoters were old, the clubs were always the same," says Jeanson Antonin, the techno artist better known as Antigone. "It was pretty dead."Five years later, things look much different. Spectacular dance floor experiences are now easy to find in the French capital. Raves and afterhours offer a refreshing rebuke to the glitzy discotheques that long dominated the city's nightlife. And a new crop of Parisian DJs are playing killer music every weekend. No one group is singly responsible for this change, but a lot of the credit can go to Concrete, a boat docked on the Seine that throws some of the best parties you'll find anywhere in the world."I could feel from the first time I played there that something was changing," says Francois X, one of Concrete's resident DJs. "The party went from seven in the morning till two the next morning, with Marcel Dettmann playing the last slot. That was something very unusual for Paris, but from the beginning till the end of the party, the whole crowd stayed, including me. It was a real turning point for the clubbing scene here, I'd say."Concrete grew out of TWSTED, a traveling rave thrown by three friends with little previous experience putting on parties: Brice, Aurélien and Pete (all preferred we didn't use their last names). "Before that we were just a group of friends traveling the world, having fun on dance floors, never taking it seriously," says Brice. "We wanted to have a party with our friends with music that we liked, because otherwise it was boring in Paris. We thought, 'If it works, cool, if it doesn't work, we don't give a fuck.' But after two, three events we saw it was becoming quite big."TWSTED happened in a new location every time, but good venues are hard to come by in Paris. The first one was in an old cinema. It didn't end well. "We really fucked that place up," Brice says. "They found a lot of vomit, they wanted to send us their lawyers." Next was their debut on what would later become the Concrete boat, an event that, purely by chance, featured in a 2011 RA profile on Dan Ghenacia . That one went swimmingly. The crew had a warehouse venue lined up for the next edition, but just before the party someone discovered a centuries-old corpse underneath the building and the whole place was cordoned off for archaeological research."It was so crazy, when we put it on Facebook people were not believing us," says Brice. "We didn't have any venue, so we were back on the boat. By then we were feeling quite good about it, and we figured it's too complicated to find new locations all the time, so we thought, 'Let's do something proper on the boat.' The last TWSTED was two years ago in a big garage in Paris, and the party lasted just two hours before the cops came. We grabbed the mic and said, 'OK, now everyone goes on Concrete, it's free for everyone,' and we continued the party there."

Concrete grew rapidly. At first it happened just one Sunday every month, from 7 AM till past midnight. Then it was open most weekends, and then more than once per week. The team grew increasingly ambitious, eventually starting a label, Concrete Music, a booking agency, Concrete Booking, and a festival, Weather. As it grew into a fully-staffed, multi-pronged operation, each of the founders fell into a different role. Pete became the charismatic face of the club, taking care of the artists and staying at the parties all night to make sure everything ran smoothly. Aurélien became the outfit's CEO. Brice defined Concrete's musical identity through his bookings, bringing in respected DJs from other cities and giving a platform to local artists. In Paris's community of DJs and producers, his efforts didn't go unnoticed."Brice is a pimp!" says Antonin. "When I met him, we went record shopping and chatted a bit. Eventually he said, 'Hey what are you doing on Sunday?' I said nothing, and he invited me to play at Concrete. I played in front of 600 people, which was totally new for me. I'd never even played on a real soundsystem. He is a really good programmer, he really takes risks, giving a chance to new artists and sometimes booking really weird music."As Concrete expanded, the club itself got better and better. The upstairs deck became Woodfloor, a more laidback dance floor with a movable cover for the colder months. In the main room, which takes up the length of the boat's main cabin, the team designed a bespoke DJ booth that would become one of Concrete's defining features."For many years, I was going to clubs and I was never satisfied with the stage setup," Brice says. "It was always the same thing: you have the dance floor, a one-meter stage with a DJ on the top of it, as if it's a concert, and behind him you have a lot of people with wristbands and a backstage area. I wanted something more democratic—no VIP, no stage and, most importantly, the DJ is at the same level as everybody dancing, face-to-face with the crowd."Even more interesting was the placement of the booth. Though it's at the far end of the room it has a few meters of space on all sides, so the crowd wraps around it completely. "The effect is really crazy," says Brice. "The DJs feel totally different. Everywhere you look there's people dancing. You don't see how many people are in the room, only those around you, so it feels like you're playing records for friends in the living room. And the DJ can't hide in the VIP, he has to stay with us. It's more human."It's not hard to see why Concrete took off. The atmosphere is unique: a boat with floor-to-ceiling windows looking onto the Seine, with light pouring in all day. The music policy is bold and open-ended, hosting everything from Romanian minimal to summery house to full-on blazing techno on the same versatile dance floor. For Parisians, the overall experience is exhilaratingly different from everything else in recent memory. The club fills up fast with young and energetic ravers keen to get stuck in. More often than not, what they find inside keeps them there all day, or all night.Like all of the world's great clubs, Concrete did more than give its city somewhere to party—it also gave its local scene a shot in the arm. "That's one of the main things for me," says Brice. "When we started, local artists didn't have such a good chance. I wanted to push the scene and push new Parisian artists, like Antigone and S3A. I'm trying to push them the best I can, putting them on good lineups, releasing their music on Concrete Music, which is dedicated to French artists. And we're not alone. Lots of crews arrived at the same time as us and did the same thing, like Sonotown."That's something everyone in the Concrete family is quick to point out: they didn't singlehandedly give Paris its groove back, they just did it first and perhaps most successfully. Concrete proved that this type of event could work in Paris, and this realization galvanized the scene at large. "When we started, everyone told me, 'You're crazy, no one will come from 7 AM and stay all day long,'" Brice says. "But it turned out everybody was waiting for exactly this. And now it's normal."