Super Discount: Étienne de Crécy and the French touch seen from the control room

Before he was a name in filtered Parisian house, Étienne de Crécy was a sound technician. Raised in Versailles, where he attended the same secondary school as the future members of Air and producer Alex Gopher, he arrived at electronic music through a side door: he played bass in a punk band before choosing to learn the engineer’s trade instead. It was in that role that, in the early 1990s, he worked as an assistant at Studio +XXX in Paris, where he met Philippe Cerboneschi, known as Zdar, the studio’s staff engineer. The French touch that would follow, the one of clubs and international charts, starts here: two people who spent their days recording other artists and their nights taking apart funk and soul records with a sampler.

Inside a Paris recording studio

Zdar and de Crécy formed Motorbass in 1992, after sharing their first Parisian rave together. They worked with an Akai S1000, Cubase running on an Atari 1040 and a Mackie mixer: minimal gear, very fast turnaround. “We were young and we didn’t think that much, so we could do the music really fast,” de Crécy said years later. Their first single, “Flying Fingers,” circulated widely enough to catch the ear of hip hop producer Jimmy Jay, who heard Zdar working on it secretly in the studio. In 1996 came Pansoul, the duo’s only album: eleven tracks of filtered grooves and funk samples that DJ Mag has called a preview of what French touch would become. On “Les Ondes” the filter is not a passing effect but the subject of the track itself, opening and closing over the loop for its full length, years before that became the sound signature of the entire scene.

The store that discounts everything

That same year, 1996, de Crécy took the same method outside the duo. He released Super Discount, his first record under his own name, on Solid, the label he had recently founded with Alex Gopher; it is built like the shop window of an imaginary discount store: “Prix Choc,” “Tout Doit Disparaître,” “Liquidation Totale.” He has described having to rebuild the loop on “Prix Choc” from scratch, starting from a sampled saxophone solo that gave him no clean cut: patient sonic bricklaying, closer to engineering than to sudden inspiration. On “Super Disco” he calls back his schoolmate Alex Gopher; on “Soldissimo,” credited as the EDC Remix, he reworks a track by Air, more former schoolmates. Not the producer signing a feature for visibility, but the one literally re-editing the tapes of people he had known for years.

What remains

Motorbass ended in 1997, when de Crécy left the shared studio on rue Lepic to go live with his girlfriend. Zdar would describe the split as sudden and silent, “buried in one fell swoop, without any real explanation.” Zdar died in Paris in June 2019, at 52, in an accidental fall. Pansoul remains the only record the two made together; Super Discount is the point where de Crécy carried the same craft outside the studio and onto a record under his own name. Not the DJ filling the floor, but the technician who, earlier still, had decided how that floor was going to sound.