As both a DJ and producer, Agoria has traversed several generations, while still managing to remain completely fresh in his approach to electronica and dance music. Starting out in Lyon, his first experiences of playing were at his parents’ parties and at illegal raves with his friends. Now playing in front of audiences of up to 25,000 he’s come along way, but not lost sight of his original love for the dance music and its true message. Before heading to Eastern Electrics tomorrow, we took a few minutes out of his studio time to find out about his musical upbringing, plans for a new album, how he’s inspired by the new influx of young partygoers, what he likes about UK parties and how hard it is to understand Scots after a few drinks.
Catch Agoria at Knebworth Park tomorrow for Eastern Electrics, alongside Mano Le Tough, Kerri Chandler, Ellen Allien, Daniel Avery, Dense & Pika, Dyed Sondorum, Derrick Carter and more. Tickets to the full day and afterparty at The Coronet at the Eastern Electrics website.
Good morning Sebastien!
Good morning, sorry for being a little late. Where are you based?
I’m in London at the moment, where are you?
I’m in Paris. I was up later than planned last night in the studio.
People always talk of taking a journey through music and I read that your mother was an opera singer. Do you think that this has influenced you at all through your career?
The fact that she was a singer was maybe not what influenced me itself; let’s say that it’s more the fact that my family was always open minded in what kind of music they listened to. Surrounded by music from the age of about eight, my parents were always doing parties with many friends. They would spin records from bands like Magma to Vangelis or even classical stuff like Satie, Chopin and J.S. Bach. So it wasn’t really the fact that she was a singer, it was more that they both loved all kinds of music, no matter what it is.
What is your favourite thing about what you do? Is it the production side or DJing?
I honestly love both. And I miss both of them when I am doing just one of them. When you’re on tour, like a crazy tour for weeks, where you have just enough time to shower, then you miss the studio a lot. When you’re not in the studio you get many ideas. A lot of the time when I’m sitting in planes, I don’t know why but I write a lot of things and have many ideas. The fact that you’re leaving everything behind you sometimes helps. It means that when you get back to the studio you work through really fast. It’s the same when you are in the studio for a long period, you turn full circle and want to be touring again. I think both serve each other, it’s just a question of balance.
What came first for you, DJing or producing?
I started with DJing. I think I started when I was pretty young at my parents’ parties actually when I was 10 or around that age. They would give me the records to play with. But then you start playing at friends’ parties when you’re 14 or 16 and you really perform yourself. I was lazy in a way, because I tried to play the piano or the drums, but I’ve never been really into trying to make them work correctly. The point at which I bought my first turntables was a pivotal moment for me.
I guess I started to make music when I was 25. A friend of mine said that I should give it a go because of my background. I must say that I was not really into computers, but I started learning and my first record was out a couple of years later. It was truly bad. I’m still in touch with the people from these old days and I was speaking to the guy who released my first record and I think he still has about 400 copies of the 500 or so pressings he made in his garage, just waiting for me to get really famous so that he can sell them for a lot of money. It’s hilarious, but we all have to start somewhere I guess.
The rave parties were really the shit as well you know. Police were all over it, parties were popping up and cancelled at short notice. It was something so inspiring and so new that I wanted to be part of it. Playing drums or being in a band was something that was not so much usual, but it wasn’t the same as going every weekend to try to find a party and trying to escape the police constantly either in shit little places with 20 people or other times there were magical places in the forest with thousands of people and amazing sound. It actually took me a long time to go into the studio and try and make music myself.
You’ve now played to some huge crowds. Do you still get nervous or do you feel it comes naturally now?
I guess some of the time it comes naturally, because we are on tour so much, every day a new town. The rhythm of a DJ is epic. Partying, then rest, then on a plane, then an hour rest, and back to a party. In this way there is something a little mechanical of course, but always before I go on I just think ‘let’s have fun’. That’s really the main thing.The times that I get most nervous are when I’m playing on a stage where there are bands as well, especially when you have 25,000 people singing their tracks with them. I don’t really know what to play after that!
Has that changed with the growing popularity of house music?
It really has. Of course in a typical club like Fabric or at Eastern Electrics this weekend, you have very dedicated amazing lineups, but at many places nowadays you can have such varied lineups with bands as well. When it’s like that with a diverse program, I get more nervous. Some artists get more nervous when they are playing to a dedicated crowd because they really want to please them. They’re worried about the journalists and what they’ll say. They forget to have fun possibly. For a long time I didn’t want to play at festivals alongside indie bands because I felt totally paralysed. Today the youngest crowd is already very educated to our sounds
Is it a good thing that this music is going more towards a younger audience now? Not so much going mainstream but just catering to a different crowd.
There are two ways of looking at this. Some people say that the music will be vulgarised and in the end it’s maybe not the best thing for electronic music. But on the other hand I feel happy to see people who would have listened to really cheesy music but one day they go to a festival and finally they find music they truly love.
What I love about electronic music is that it is really music for peace. It’s a type of music that manages to make big crowds share the same thing. Every night around the world, people are dancing to the same records that only sold 500 copies. You have a community of people who dance only to this. The language is universal; it’s a message for peace.
Some artists take the view that it is our thing that we must keep secret, like at Berghain perhaps, that people will not understand it and destroy it. This is the opposite of our music. It is something very simple, but it’s the small details that make it beautiful. It’s the things you can’t hear that really make the record. The guy who comes to listen only once will not notice this, but after 20 times, they can start picking it out. Why should we say that we don’t want certain people? I’m so happy to go to South Africa, to Brazil, to Japan to see people dancing to the same record. It is really the message of our music. In the beginnings of electronic music, it had no message. It was about pressing white labels of brilliant records with no image, no message to send. That’s why I loved it from early on. It’s the most beautiful thing. I think it’s important to be a purist to a point, but not shut people out.
I really like that point of view, some DJs don’t see it like that any more and are lost in just the publicity side, but I feel that you have both in good balance.
We need both in our scene if I’m honest. It’s just a question of equilibrium. I would be lying if I said that I don’t do publicity and that I don’t need it. Of course I do. We have to play the game sometimes, but you must never forget your roots of the music and where you are coming from.
On a slightly different line, could you tell me a bit about why you started the Infiné label? Was there a certain philosophy behind it, as it’s quite a diverse label, releasing some more varied records from different records.
The main reason for starting it was because we discovered a guy called Francesco Tristano and we saw that he was just the most incredible pianist. It’s crazy that a guy like him went from the Juliard School in New York for the classical piano and then went on to play covers of Derrick May’s Strings of Life and The Bells by Jeff Mills. He was totally making his own versions of these classics of techno. So we just looked at him and thought that we should sign him and release all of this stuff. It was really as simple as that. We didn’t aim to be releasing so many records a year or to make it anything at all really. After some time I look back and think about what balls it took to release a reworking of Strings of Life as our first record.
It clearly worked though!
It was certainly fine. I’m still in touch with Francesco and we still make some music together. I really love that he comes to electronic music from a classical background. I love these kinds of bridges. I think this was the whole idea behind Infiné, building bridges in music. Taking Lebanese singers and classical pianists and releasing their music. I stopped being involved about two or three years ago now though.
Moving onto your own productions, I think that the modern generation of partygoers know you for tracks like Scala and Singing, but when did you feel that you were starting to be noticed by other DJs and the audience at parties?
Well I think that the most difficult thing for DJs playing electronic music really is that the crowd is constantly changing every six or seven years. As soon as people have a baby or fall in love… I mean that’s almost the main reason that people party is to meet people and they fall in love. After that people start to settle down and don’t go out as much, so there’s a new generation of people coming to parties. For example, when I started, people knew me for tracks like La 11em Marche, and then they would ask me to play this at every gig for five years. Then people asked me for Les Violons Ivres for five years, and now I think that people will be asking for Scala. I mean it’s nice, but as an artist, people that listened to and loved La 11em Marche when it came out are still out there on the party scene. They could be between 35 and 40 with families now.
You still see some of those at parties though!
Ah of course, thanks for saying that! Yes, but let’s just say that in terms of popularity of my tracks, people ask me for Scala nowadays, a bit less Les Violons Ivres and even fewer La 11em Marche you know.
Maybe that’s a good thing in a way. You have a completely fresh take on your music every 5 years or so. Where else in the world, in what field can you have that?
It’s so true. And actually you asked me earlier if I enjoy touring or being in the studio. I think that being in contact with this young generation gives you so much inspiration because they give you so much energy and positivity. Inspiration can come from many places though. I mean I share a studio building with Gesaffelstein and even though we do very different things, he was playing me some very atmospheric stuff with no kicks, but even that gave me ideas of some things to do, maybe on some releases in the future.
You were talking about doing another album in the near future, when will you be working on that?
We’ll stop touring from beginning of November to the beginning of March and I want to finish my next album in that time. I honestly don’t know what’s gonna happen though. Today I have one idea for it, but it will be so different by the time I come to fininshing it. That’s the beauty of our music, it is easy to change. A cinematic/atmospheric track can become a club track with only 2 hours work. The process of making the music is very inspiring in itself. This is a very good thing. We can choose one direction, but change it up easily. That can also be a bad thing though. An idea can sometimes be lost.
I see what you mean. Maybe because it can be so simple, ideas can be lost.
Well for me, most of the time, if a track sounds simple, it is usually better. In a way the simplest tracks are the hardest to make. For example Scala is composed of three notes. It’s also the parts around these three notes that make it listenable. Without that it would be crap. It’s all about how you produce them. A good simple techno track can actually be so hard to do.
What for you is your proudest achievement?
Honestly if I thought that I have achieved something real, I would stop. My motivation is that I always feel that I have much more to do and better things. I think some artists are good at finding a sound and really working on that constantly, getting to a specific point with just that and they become the master of this. For me though, what excites me is going into the studio and trying something different. I love exploring and it’s all really just like a bit of chemistry.
You’re playing Eastern Electrics this Saturday. Are you looking forward to it? And what other performances are you looking forward to this summer?
Oh gosh, I would have to look at my diary. I am definitely looking forward to Eastern Electrics. I haven’t played in the UK all that much recently. I played so much here around the time that I did my Fabric mix CD. The UK scene has always been very inspiring for me. The crowd is always so fun. I love the fact that you guys go out so much earlier in the UK. You go clubbing at 10 or 11pm. In Europe, people don’t really go out before 2am or 4am. I love that you guys have dinner, go to the pub and have some drinks and then come straight to the party. This makes the mood of the party so great. You can go through a real journey musically because you start earlier. This can make for some incredible events. On the other hand, I can find it so difficult to understand English people after 5am. The Scots after a few beers are the hardest to understand.
What really excites me these days is playing in places that I’ve never played before. I’m playing at a festival in Hungary later this year, and I have no idea what to expect. This really excites me.
The best places I love going to are Japan and Brazil. In Japan for instance, when we were speaking about people following you across the years, the Japanese crowd are truly the best for this. I really do see some of the same faces across decades of partying. There are some festivals in Japan where you have people who are 40 or 50 years old and they sleep at the place, only waking up to see the artists that they have come to see at the right times. They sleep because they work a lot, but they put their alarms on to see the guys that they have been following for the last 20 years or so. You’ve got to have big respect for this.
That must be incredible for you too. They are showing you so much respect!
It means that really you want to give them everything you’ve got.
When you play out, what’s your preferred set-up? Do you play records or CDs?
It’s so strange that a guy who wanted to work in a record shop back in the day now only uses USB sticks on CDJs. I still buy records, but I find it so much better to have whole music libraries with you at one time. It helps me to organise my music and it’s a completely different way to mix. It’s given me a new kick and inspiration. You go to a party with much more music than you need. In the beginning I hated playing with CDs, but then I really started to love it. With the memory sticks, you can have 1000s of records, and you can change up what you play so often. It’s different if you travel with many tour managers with 100s of records. But even then, with so many records, when you go to find one specific one, you don’t remember where to look if you’re playing very often. With a memory stick it’s so much better for that. It’s strange though because I don’t really like computers in general. I wouldn’t play with software live, but with CDJs and memory sticks you have the feeling of playing with records as well. You also get the opportunity to create loops and work with more than two sources – much easier. For me about creating the right amount of tension on the floor in a DJ set, keeping the crowd alive and interested. This is better and easier to create with memory sticks.
You can hear this creation of tension and loss of tension so easily in a recorded mix that DJs create in the studio.
You can hear that loss of tension, and then good luck getting it back. It’s the same with playing a bad set live. If you lose tension, then sometimes it can take up to an hour to get it back. It can even happen if you just play a couple of records that don’t fit perfectly with the vibe of the crowd at the time. You can lose the connection with the crowd. Of course some DJs choose to play just sure-fire bangers, then it’s easy to keep this tension, but I personally love to play long sets for this reason, to be able to really build something from the beginning.
What are your plans now?
Well today I’m going straight back to the studio now and then I think I’ll be in Switzerland on Friday and London for Eastern Electrics on Saturday. Then it’s straight on to Ibiza for Sunday. But you know what, it’s all summer vibes and I love it.
Thanks very much for your time Sebastien, see you at Eastern Electrics!
