About

A former staffer at the embassy in London, Frenchman Laurent Garnier began DJing in Manchester during the late '80s. By the following decade, he had become one of the best all-around DJs in the world, able to span classic deep house and Detroit techno, the harder side of acid/trance, and surprisingly jazzy tracks as well. He added production work to his schedule in the early '90s, and recorded several brilliant LPs across multiple decades that displayed a similar penchant for diversity. 30 (1997) and Unreasonable Behaviour (2000) contained some of his biggest club hits, while he delved into jazz, dub, downtempo, and other sounds on releases like The Cloud Making Machine (2005) and Tales of a Kleptomaniac (2009). Garnier later focused on soundtrack work, and collaborated with psychedelic group the Limiñanas on the 2021 full-length De Película. He continued releasing club singles all the while, and issued his most dancefloor-oriented album, 33 Tours et Puis S'en Vont, in 2023.

As Laurent later wrote in Electrochoc, “And one day with my partner Eric I said ‘I’d like to go on stage.’ And we thought ‘how can we make a real live show?’ and I said to him, the best thing is Jazz. We went to Jazz musicians, because they can improvise” said Garnier later. “Again, my connection with Jazz and Techno is so strong… the whole frame of mind for making this music is the same, exactly the same. It took me a long time to get the right musicians. Garnier thought it would be disrespectful to the public if he played pure techno at a jazz festival. This is why the noisy percussion and throbbing beats were diluted by a thematical thing played almost impromptu with a saxophonist he barely knew (With Finn Martin.) Laurent doubted if he should include such a thing on his third album, but decided to risk it after all and for the saxophone solo he invited a person from his team, who he had toured around the earth with performing live for the last three months. He invited Philippe Nadaud. “We were in the studio and we put a pair of headphones on his head so we could speak to him while he was playing. He was playing and we were going ‘nah, this is shit, this is really shit’. But it wasn’t actually shit. No no, it was great, I just really wanted to piss him off”. Phillippe felt uneasy and couldn’t let the music control him. “We did it for about 20 minutes, the poor guy just couldn’t breathe, he was bright red, with a sweaty face, the mouthpiece seemed to be stuck between his lips, while we continued: ‘This is f***ing shit, go harder, go harder’… and this is why the track goes nuts.” And this why it got this name. In 2000, it was released as a single and became one of the most famous tracks by the French maestro. — via George Palladev

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Label: F Communications
Format: Vinyl, 12", 33 ⅓ RPM, Repress
Released: 2000
Genre: Electronic
Style: Techno, House

File under: House / Electro / Techno
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