Friday, March 16   8:00 p.m.
Karma Lounge   (119 W 8th St)

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1979 ¬| Born in Orléans, Jean-Baptiste de Laubier aka Para One moves to Paris in 1983.
1987 | Gets into Public Enemy, thanks to his sisters. Moves from his older brothers’ classic rock (Deep Purple, Pink Floyd) to Flavor Flav impersonations. The Geto Boys, NWA and Native Tongue are close behind.
1989 | Darkness falls. Sent to a catholic boarding school, he learns two elfish dialects, starts an elfish zine, draws elfish comics, gives elfish lessons. Goes from blond- to dark-haired in six months. At night, he escapes from the dormitory, sneaks into the school’s chapel. There, he prays for his sick sister while playing random notes on the organ.
1992 | Moves to Chambéry, a smallish town near the French Alps. Gets into skiing, breakdancing, rapping and producing.
1993 | January 8th: first hip hop group. Para One takes the name Paradoxal H. Writes all the lyrics and produces all the songs.
1997 | Darkness falls once again. Comes back to Paris under a shroud of sadness. Produces two mixtapes in the QUALITY STREETZ series. Directs his first movies (literally experimental).
1998 | Leaves a VHS tape with some of his movies on the doorstep of legendary filmmaker Chris Marker, of LA JETÉE fame.
2000 | Produces for quite a number of French Rappers. Meets Tacteel.
2001 | Releases the BLUE RAIN EP on Ablode Recordings. Meets French rap superstars TTC. Produces one track on their first LP, CECI N’EST PAS UN DISQUE (Big Dada): “Pas D’Armure”, featuring Hi-Tekk from La Caution and Doseone from Anticon. Film school.
2002 | Produces “Baise les Gens” for Le Klub des Loosers (Record Makers) and “Helium Liquide” for L’Armée des 12 (Kerozen). Starts Fuckaloop with Tacteel. With supergroup L’Atelier, releases LE BUFFET DES ANCIENS ELEVES (Institubes/PIAS). Puts the last touches to a documentary entitled CHARLOTTE QUELQUE PART.
2003 | January 1st: Chris Marker responds, becomes a kind of mentor-at-large. Releases the BEAT DOWN EP (Institubes), his true first solo record, played by Laurent Garnier, DJ/Rupture, Team Shadetek, Michael Mayer.
2004 | Produces six tracks on BÂTARDS SENSIBLES, TTC’s acclaimed second album (Big Dada/V2), among which a true classic: “Dans le Club”. Directs a short film: CACHE TA JOIE.
2005 | His movies are shown in Tokyo. Remixes Agoria, Krazy Baldhead, Ellen Allien (with Tacteel), Daft Punk. Releases a second EP: CLUBHOPPN (Institubes), played by Feadz, Erol Alkan, Diplo, Modeselektor, Justice. Produces three tracks for Californian rapper Existereo. Works on TTC’s third LP.
2006 | EPIPHANIE.

Three brothers — one drummer, one guitar player, one singer — to guide him through the classic rock section, à la Deep Purple/Pink Floyd, a piano-playing mother handling the classical music duties, three sisters to launch him into hip-hop hyperspace, a cousin to get him into all sounds synthetic: Para One’s first big break was to be born into a family large enough to cover all bases. NWA, Public Enemy, De La Soul, Geto Boys, Ministère AMER, Drexciya, Cybotron, Mr Fingers, Dee Lite, Madness, Taxi Girl, Chopin and Pergolesi would be his most constant references, most of them established pretty early.

Para One started as soon as he could. Joining a hip-hop crew at fourteen, he spent four years rapping with and producing for his friends, Arab and Italian kids from the neighbouring projects. This is where he learned the harder-better-faster ethics shaping his sound today: in front of cruel and unforgiving rap crowds. You had to hold your own against the punishing Maceo-style funk DJs used to preface each and every rap show with. Having the hardest-hitting beats was just a matter of survival, and it still is. Echoes of this purity of purpose and dedication to efficiency can still be heard rolling in EPIPHANIE, filtered through early Daft Punk. TURTLE TROUBLE was called a “goddamn storming Techno track” (Philip Sherburne, The Wire) and indeed, it’s a straight-up four-to-the-floor dancefloor destruction tool, hailed in France as the second coming of Thomas Bangalter’s TRACKS ON DA ROCKS. PISTE BLEUE is all glittery textures and time-sensitive curlicues. NOBODY CARES’s vocoderfunk would sound good in most strip joints. DUDUN-DUN is, what? what is it not? It’s both the hardest, most ruthless and loveliest, most idyllic techno track for a long time. These tracks are tailor-made for the club, the dancefloor, the moment when the world dissolves into strobes, heat and sound, when the dancers move whether they like it or not, barely breathing machines operated by way of drugs, snares and synths.

But all this is far too easy, the narrative too clean. Para One got into machine funk back in the early nineties; eurodance, techno and house would reach him as a continuous and mostly anonymous stream, via his cousin’s mixtapes (said cousin being Saint Remy, founder of the Initial Cuts label). Elated and terrified in equal measure, he envisioned Detroit and Chicago as hell on earth, cities riddled with dark alleys prowled by bloodthirsty leatherqueens looking for a face to carve up. On the other hand, it was so defiant, this music, it dared to negate everything he knew and it was gorgeous. Behold the terrible beauty of the techno project: dangerous, inhuman, anti-Catholic, amoral. Behold the robot’s fixed and vacant gaze, just recording chromatic data, meaning nothing. Most of Epiphanie is a kind of electro crash test, with a live human dummy. The surviving flesh isn’t damaged or smashed but resolute and healthy: a powerful Plexiglas-veined, chrome-plated being, free from the brittle and the anxious.

Para One’s music is utilitarian and proud of it. But the musical experiences it stems from are too violent and complex for EPIPHANIE to be soluble in sweat, be it saturated with drugs. You won’t love it for its mind-emptying, responsibilities-voiding capabilities; it doesn’t hide or deny its violence and authoritarianism but looks it in the face and confronts it. These fourteen tracks are merciless and they let it be known. Enthusiasm and fright go hand in hand when, two bars into DEF TEA MACHINE’s tourettish rhythm section, you know you’ll have to surrender to this spasmodic carnival parade of girl soldiers. DUDUN-DUN taunts and threatens and displays much intimidatory drum muscle before giving way to its wondrous and all-engulfing vocal bliss. And in SAGES-FEMMES, a threatening bassline rises and swells through stabs sounding like ultimatums and when it breaks and unfurls it’s like “If there got to be a war, let it be right now cause there’s no way I won’t survive it.” And how come CLUBHOPPN, which started as a pleasant, if slightly hectic, soundtrack to club-cruising, breaks up and scatters darkly before reassembling into a half-melancholy, half-swaggering synth-driven dusky morning-after.

So yeah, OK, every track contains a million and one ideas, some linger, morphing among and around more fleeting gestures, some you only catch their trail. Sometimes you feel overwhelmed but never once exhausted, because it’s all a matter of structure and the structures here are consistently stunning. The machines are gods here, but it never deteriorates into some kind of pornography of glitches, virtuoso breaks and pure show-offy domination. The plug-ins move diligently behind the scenes or take center stage to dazzle the audience, Busby Berkeley-style. DEF TEA MACHINE: a Sao Paulo assembly plant taken over by ambisexual gym queens. MIDNIGHT SWIM: a hymn to Ibiza shuffling in silicon sand. F.U.D.G.E.: a love-and-revenge song, an electremo anthem, its vocal arpeggios a much-needed balm for a white-hot heart. LES SOLEILS ARTIFICIELS: a minute and a half of fuzzy nostalgia for a statistically-improbable future. And at the other end of time you have BOBBLE, a poem of timbre and decay beamed from some alternative childhood. Everything sounds necessary and relevant, oscillating between hard and easy, botching and refining, heartless and heartrending. One track was written on the train between Kobe and Tokyo, another one between Reims and Paris.

MUSCLOR features French rap heavyweights TTC in full vendetta mode, and a wonderfully decimated West Coast siren. LIEGE: beatless Detroit electro, what remains when you remove everything but the essence. There are six dancefloor bangers — seven. There’s one track best listened to walking through the city, looking dapper. There is, on the one hand, Cuizinier shouting proletarian playa obscenities, and on the other the overt pathos of the knee-buckling SKI LESSON BLUES, sounding like a gleaming mountain range soaring in the middle of Paris. There is a wedding song (MIDNIGHT SWIM), a song to lose your cherry to (F.U.D.G.E.), a song to go on a rampage to (MUSCLOR), a song to die peacefully to (SKI LESSON BLUES).