OTAD#16 - Romain

I cannot believe that in all these articles I wrote, especially in my long form biographical, I managed not to mention my best friend Romain. Him and I met in the first year of engineering school, in Angers in 2012. We were fresh out of preparatory school and could not be happier to be out of this soul crushing machine. We originally bonded over a small extra-scholar project, where the idea was to build a business case for an app (startup nation represent). We were both convinced a cool idea would be to build Jukevox, an app allowing people visiting a bar to vote for the next track to play.

The project never came to life, as we quickly discovered how fucked up the entire situation around copyright laws was (and sadly still is to this day). Yet, our deep and continued relationship with music was born. Romain came from a rock background, I can even remember that on the first day of school he was wearing a Foals T-shirt that he had printed himself. I was barely starting my dabbles with electronic music, mostly coming from a hip-hop background. Electronic music wise, we were going in blind.

In the parties we kept throwing, we had a quite restricted playlist in the beginning, surviving with the party tracks we had grabbed here and there randomly with time. A monumental example of such a track would be Carte Blanche - Gare du Nord, released in 2010 on Ed Banger… it was our party classic. More people from the group were interested in expanding our horizons, for instance BBL - now hosting All We Need Is Acid show on Radio Panik in Brussels - was playing all kinds of French electro, from the Bloody Beetroots to The Subs, sprinkled with some Mr Oizo. Romain and I kept playing Die Antwoord too… anyway.

Things took a different turn when Romain invested in a Vestax controller based on BBL’s advice, and we truly started investing time to dig tracks, to be able to play sets together. In the second year, Romain’s apartment was the best venue you could think of for our first errings in the DJ’ing world: a garage on the ground floor, with old sofas, a sturdy table, some speakers and a fridge, both holding our beers and serving as a table for the controller. Some tracks from that era that come to mind are Kink - Detonator, Jagwar Ma - Come Save Me (Pachanga Boys Remix), Andhim - Bermudachords, Laurent Garnier - Jacques In The Box (Brodinski & Gesaffelstein Dirty Sprite Remix), Bruno Sacco - Deformed (Franck Valat Remix) or even the house classic Lil Louis - French Kiss. Our peak time banger though was Chiqito Bozeman; which he had ripped from Arno Gonzalez’s DJ set, a local DJ:

We would host parties before and after Arno Gonzalez’s Domingo events that were happening very close, on the docks of the old part of town where our school was, la Doutre. I have an accidental renaissance picture stuck in my head of one particular moment where I was sitting on a sofa, across the room from Romain, and we both looked at each other, like frozen in time, while absolute mayhem was happening between us. Tens of people dancing, jumping on the table, throwing drinks at each other, with loud music pumping in the background. A truly beautiful composition, which symbolizes in my mind the peak of my student life.

I will keep the following of my music adventures with Romain for a next article, and close the article with my pick from this period, the gem among the bangers, a track I’d often play for opening, to warm things up with some deep, deep house: Awanto 3 - Pregnant. The track just keeps building, and building and building… into another timeless house track. Enjoy!