Having moved to Paris, he met up with Tacteel and formed a duo, Fuckaloop, whose live show was, and remains, a sight to behold. “They’re twiddling knobs all over the place,” grins Latex. “They look like a fucking octopus.”
In 2001, Para came to the attention of TTC, and produced the track “Pas D’Armure”—also featuring Anticon’s Dose One—on their groundbreaking debut LP. By album two, he’d become a permanent member and helmed five cuts, including the now classic “Dans le Club,” a laser-synthed dance-floor-devastating monster, which began the Para buzz in earnest.
A remix of Daft Punk’s “Prime Time of Your Life” pushed him further across the boundaries, as indie-crossover DJs like Erol Alkan and Justice began to regularly crank out his cuts. Still, not everyone was impressed. Para’s debut album, Epiphanie , emerged in late 2006, a relentless rush of jagged synth lines and relentless acidic riffs, but nothing for purist hip-hop heads to hook on to, and his live sets followed a similar pattern. So does he still classify his solo work as hip-hop?
“It’s not hip-hop, it’s four-to-the-floor techno,” admits de Laubier, helmet still under his arm. “Maybe some people don’t get it. Maybe others see it as refreshing.” Latex, now actively trying to offer the floor to others, again can’t contain himself. “The connection, for me, it’s so obvious,” he fumes. “Forty percent of Para One’s album is stuff I’d rap to.”
Perhaps it’s a French thing, but it’s hard to fathom that Para One and Teki Latex are actually part of the same group. Where Latex is brash, shaven-headed and clad in colorful hip-hop regalia, de Laubier is suave, reserved, even faintly aloof amid the general reverie, without really meaning to be. He may be the coolest kid in the crew, but Para insists that TTC is still as important to him as he is to it. Indeed, it transpires that it was Latex who originally encouraged Para to go it alone.
“I had beats and Teki said ‘Hey, these are good songs, why do you need to put raps over them?’ Before TTC, I was producing really normal hip-hop. Then we started to hang out together, and the electronic influence on our music began at this time, because TTC were always really into innovation and had a lot of electronic influences. So I think TTC made me do that kind of stuff, and I developed it in my own way.”
All of the TTC members have burgeoning solo careers, in fact. The charismatic Cuizinier and Berman are also cranking out tracks, while Orgasmic has just released his first, very fine mix LP, featuring everything from 2 Unlimited to The Futureheads. Rather than forge inter-band rivalries or a Wu-Tang-style watered-down effect, Para suggests that these solo projects help keep the collective ethos intact, allowing them to do stuff that perhaps wouldn’t work in a band context. Not that TTC are closed off to new ideas, exactly.
Over three albums, this impressively democratic crew has taken hip-hop into uncharted territories, culminating in the rich tapestry of beats and bleeps that grace the new record, 3615. From Para’s click-and-moog master class on “Quand Je Claque Des Doigts” to the guest beats of Berlin glitchmeisters Modeselektor on the closer, “Une Bande de Mec Sympa,” it’s the distilled soundtrack of a thousand band outings. Such has been TTC’s love-hate relationship with the regular French hip-hop scene over the years that their bonding sessions tend to be at clubs, playing a diverse assortment of styles, many of which then seep into the subsequent records.
Nowadays of course, de Laubier and company find themselves playing out at a similarly varied array of venues, and so the range of beats continues to increase. Although, perhaps they can sometimes stray a little too far from the original path. Having come from a hip-hop background, doesn’t Para feel uncomfortable following indie bands?
“It’s a whole different scene, but we don’t see our careers as straight lines. My next album will be completely different. Maybe people will be pissed off or stunned again, but that’s no problem. We’re here to surprise people, not to bore them.”
“We’re gonna force these guys to understand,” Teki lashes out. “That’s the way we plan to take over the fucking industry, we’re gonna force it down their throat and if they’re not ready for it, then fuck it. I’m tired of making compromises.”
The Institubes invasion has only just begun.
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