Para One

The French electronic music scene is hotter than hell right now and one of the main forces on the scene is PARA ONE. Known for his killer track "Dun Dun" (remixed from MSTRKRFT) and remixes of Agoria, Krazy Baldhead, Ellen Alien (with Tacteel) and Daft Punk, among others. His music’s been played by a wide array of the dance floor’s elite from Feadz, Erol Alkan, Diplo, Modeselektor and Justice to Laurent Garnier, DJ/Rupture, Team Shadetek and Michael Mayer. Bubbling up from the underground blogisphere, Para One is now ready to launch his debut album "Epiphanie" on North American shores. Released September 11, "Epiphanie" features 14 tracks of French electronic mayhem.

The first single "Dun Dun" is both the hardest, most ruthless and loveliest, most idyllic techno track in a long time. These tracks are tailor-made for the club, the dancefloor, the moment when the world dissolves into strobes, heat and sound, when the dancers move whether they like it or not, barely breathing machines operated by way of drugs, snares and synths.
Para One started as soon as he could. Joining a hip-hop crew at fourteen, he spent four years rapping with and producing for his friends, Arab and Italian kids from the neighboring projects. This is where he learned the harder-better-faster ethics shaping his sound today: in front of cruel and unforgiving rap crowds. You had to hold your own against the punishing Maceo-style funk DJs used to preface each and every rap show with. Having the hardest-hitting beats was just a matter of survival, and it still is. Echoes of this purity of purpose and dedication to efficiency can still be heard rolling in "Epiphanie", filtered through early Daft Punk. "Turtle Trouble" was called a “goddamn storming Techno track” (Philip Sherburne, The Wire) and indeed, it’s a straight-up four-to-the-floor dancefloor destruction tool, hailed in France as the second coming of Thomas Bangalter’s Tracks On Da Rocks. “Piste Bleue" is all glittery textures and time-sensitive curlicues. “Nobody Cares’” vocoderfunk would sound good in most strip joints.

But all this is far too easy, the narrative too clean. Para One got into machine funk back in the early nineties; eurodance, techno and house would reach him as a continuous and mostly anonymous stream, via his cousin’s mixtapes (said cousin being Saint Remy, founder of the Initial Cuts label). Elated and terrified in equal measure, he envisioned Detroit and Chicago as hell on earth, cities riddled with dark alleys prowled by bloodthirsty leatherqueens looking for a face to carve up. On the other hand, it was so defiant, this music, it dared to negate everything he knew and it was gorgeous. Behold the terrible beauty of the techno project: dangerous, inhuman, anti-Catholic, amoral. Behold the robot’s fixed and vacant gaze, just recording chromatic data, meaning nothing. Most of Epiphanie is a kind of electro crash test, with a live human dummy. The surviving flesh isn’t damaged or smashed but resolute and healthy: a powerful Plexiglas-veined, chrome-plated being, free from the brittle and the anxious.