Disco Cubizm, a cassette and a label that did not exist yet

Before the record there is a cassette posted to a radio station.

Nicolas Chaix, who signs his records I:Cube, taught himself on what he calls really shitty toys: a Casio mini sampler, with Paris radio as the school.

“At the time in Paris, ‘84 to ‘90, some radios were playing some Art of Noise, new wave, early hip-hop and house, all mixed together,” he says. “I learned by my own, making a lot of mistakes that became part of my sound.”

The station he sends the tape to is Radio Nova, and he explains why: it was one of the only ones playing a blend of interesting music you could not hear anywhere else. These were the years before the internet.

On the other end of the tape was a man about to start a label

The tape ends up with Gilbert Cohen, who worked at the station and who at that point was planning to set up a label.

That is where Versatile comes from, and Disco Cubizm, in 1996, is I:Cube’s first record: it comes out on the brand-new label, which has housed most of his work ever since.

On the start of that relationship Chaix is dry: “We were both quite naive and we didn’t know what to expect. There was no plan.”

Then he adds the part that explains why those records sound unlike the ones around them: very instinctive, no real plan, not trying to follow the trends. “Being independent means things are a little more difficult but you also have total freedom.”

The remix that did the rest

On the twelve-inch, next to his own version, there is a remix credited to Daft Punk, who in 1996 were just starting out.

Chaix does not dance around it: “The first release was Disco Cubizm on Versatile in 1996, with a Daft Punk Remix. I suppose that helped a lot.”

The two versions are not doing the same job, and you can tell from the running time before you can tell from the sound. His runs six minutes and thirty-one seconds, the remix goes to eight seventeen.

We passed the two versions around for a week arguing about which one was the good one, and the argument is still open.

The room, not the party

The rest of Versatile’s path does not head for the dancefloor. Soon afterwards Cohen was offered a remix of Pierre Henry, one of the fathers of musique concrète, on a 1967 ballet made with Maurice Béjart.

He knew Chaix was into that sound, so they made the remix together. That is where their joint project, Château Flight, comes from.

In 2018, when the label reaches its hundred and twentieth release, the way Chaix describes the work is still that of somebody in a room: the best part, he says, is the moment when the first ideas spark, when it is still totally free and the track almost seems to write itself.

Around the same time he puts out Étire en avant, a recording from twenty years earlier, made when he was still living at his parents’ place.

French touch, in the version usually told, is a scene of enormous records. This is his first one, and it came from a cassette posted to a radio station by somebody with no plan.