Techno Age

11/06/2000 2:00 AM, Yahoo! Music
Justin Hampton

Five minutes of talking to Laurent Garnier could give just about anyone listening a good idea of what his music sounds like. At times moody and taciturn, at others highly excitable, Garnier possesses just the sort of passion and boldness needed to push his rough and uncompromising interpretation of electronic dance music to the forefront of the global techno scene.

"I'm sure anybody who's very skeptical about techno, there's a way to bring him into that music," Garnier says from his homebase in Paris. "It's really weird, because three years ago, people who used to listen to rock music would never accept a techno gig into a rock festival. What did I do this year? The two festivals I did in France were major, major rock festivals. Things have changed. Things have moved."

Garnier himself is one of the major factors in this change. Starting his career in the early '90s as a resident DJ at Manchester, England's legendary Hacienda club, Garnier gained international notoriety for his sprawling and eclectic sets. When Garnier moved back to Paris, he formed France's first independent dance music label, F-Communications, sowing the seeds for the likes of Daft Punk, Dimitri From Paris, and Air. Along the way, he polished up his production skills with dance-floor successes like "Acid Eiffel" and "Crispy Bacon," and initiated a live show as a means of developing new ideas for his music (his current single, "The Man With The Red Face," came out of those performances).

Arriving at the doorstep of the 21st century with his third LP, Unreasonable Behaviour, Garnier has honed his musical instincts to a razor's edge, bringing elements of jazz, techno, electro, industrial, and ambience together in a rough and edgy mixture. "Nothing was calculated at all. There are tons of mistakes on the album, which turned out to be really good," he reports. "The great thing about what we can do now is that whatever you can [make] sound-wise, even if it doesn't work, you can just go back to the original sound. So you are gradually trying things, and then you discover new things."

Now in his early thirties, Garnier knows all about this sort of trailblazing. He knows what works but isn't afraid to challenge himself as an artist, and he seems well-prepared to build on the foundation he's built for himself. "I think [Unreasonable Behaviour] closes a good trilogy. As a human being, growing up, you've got your teenage [years], and from 20 to 30, you're just living your life full-on. You're arriving at 30, then you start asking yourself questions: 'Where am I going? What should I do? Should I carry on? Will I still be there when I'm 40?' And you start having answers to these questions. These answers came at the same time as this album. So I really felt like I'm closing a big chapter here, and finishing this album was putting a comma to the sentence. And I started a new sentence after that."