Album review

Laurent Garnier

The Cloud Making Machine

Paris 

04/02/2005 - 

Laurent Garnier, probably the best-known French DJ in the world, spent almost five years working on a follow-up to his third album Unreasonable Behaviour. But the globe-trotting mixmaster is finally back in the news with The Cloud Making Machine, a cinematic new album on which he serves up a dark ecumenical vision of techno.

Laurent Garnier's new album opens with a cinematic prologue, layers of sci-fi sounds wrapping themselves around swirling synthesisers and half-finished sentences floating in mid-air: "Travelling, travelling, travelling/The image keeps coming back." This haunting introduction on The Cloud Making Machine Pt.1 sets the scene for Garnier's fourth opus, reflecting its conception in a disused factory on the outskirts of Paris. Following the release of his last album, Unreasonable Behaviour (in 2000), the world-famous DJ went into retreat, setting himself up in a community 'squat' he shared with a number of other artists. The 'squat' was hidden away between the 'boulevard périphérique' (the bleak ringroad around Paris) and railway lines spewing out of the Gare d'Austerlitz with two industrial chimneys looming in the distance, belching out clouds of white smoke. And it was these chimneys which inspired Garnier when it came to the title of his new album.

Working in a post-modern industrial wasteland appears to have influenced Garnier's music, too. The electro sounds on his new album hark back to the industrial roots of techno, born two decades ago in Detroit, out of the ashes of the city's once thriving car-manufacturing industry. And the sound of machines hums throughout The Cloud Making Machine as a poignant counterpoint. Garnier's fourth album is certainly a dark, melancholic affair, but it never tips over into bitterness. The Cloud Making Machine is more like the inevitable hangover that kicks in after years of all-night partying, when the rave bubble finally bursts. This is the moment when the early-morning low hits in the form of Barbiturik Blues, a moody introspective number partway between jazz and dub (featuring Norwegian pianist Bugge Wesseltoft).

The Barbiturik Blues may well run deeper than this, too, reflecting a more profound state of resignation and regret. It should not be forgotten that Garnier was one of the DJs who pioneered the techno movement in France and his career and personal history has been closely tied up with its evolution – and eventual demise. In Electrochoc, an analysis-cum-memoir of the rave years (written in collaboration with the journalist David Brun-Lambert), Garnier ended his reminiscences on a note of disenchantment and disillusionment, sounding the death knoll of the movement. And as The Cloud Making Machine advances, darker and darker clouds loom on the horizon, thudding beats and moaning cellos punctuating 9:01-9:06 and an uncertain twilight sky hanging over Act I Minotaure Ex (a track heavily influenced by Bowie in his Berlin period). On other tracks, such as Huis Clos, featuring Dhafer Youssef on the 'ud (Arab lute) and vocals, electro beats are fused with more organic sounds.

Interrupting the dance

Distant thunder rumbles on the horizon on First Reaction – and this is not just a stylistic effect! The song is a hard-hitting reaction to the first round of the French presidential elections (when the far-right candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen muscled out the socialist candidate Lionel Jospin). Garnier vents his spleen no holds barred thanks to slam-style vocals from drummer Sangoma Everett: "I woke up from this dream/Well, it was more like a nightmare/I didn't really know where I was." It might come as a surprise to see a DJ taking a political stand, but it should be remembered that in 2003 Garnier actually ground his turntables to a halt in a UK club to make a passionate speech against the war in Iraq.

Dance music takes a back seat on The Cloud Making Machine, only really coming into its own on the seventh track with pumping techno beats and infectious dub rhythms swirling to the fore on Controlling the House Part 2. From this point on, the album whizzes into a more vibrant, energetic vein, rock guitars thrashing against a metronomic drumbeat on Waiting For My Plane (a cheeky nod to Velvet Underground's Waiting For My Man). But nightmare visions are just around the corner on Jeux d'Enfants, a track where incessant synthetic loops and dark undercurrents cut the party atmosphere at a stroke.

Garnier is a DJ who has known it all in his career, experiencing both the euphoric highs and the bass lows. He started out as an eighteen-year-old Parisian exiled in London, trying to make ends meet by working as a waiter at the French Embassy there. Eighteen months later, the young French entrepreneur had moved to Manchester, the UK's buzzing northern hotspot which was about to experience the American house invasion and become the hub of rave culture. This was back in 1986, when Garnier landed himself a spot at the legendary Hacienda club (part owned by the group New Order), mixing sets under the name DJ Pedro.

From that point on, Garnier rocketed to fame as the pioneer of the French house movement, flying round the world to play sets in all the top international clubs. In 1994, he also found time to set up French electro label F Communications in collaboration with Eric Morand. Then there was the string of mixes, maxis, remixes and albums, the book Electrochoc, appearances on various radio stations and the creation of his own web-radio.

Now, it seems, with so much under his belt, the multi-talented mixmaster is eager to break out in another direction, venturing into the world of film. Garnier has already composed soundtracks for four short films and he appears to have his sights set on a longer feature, too. For The Cloud Making Machine is an album which impresses as much for its cinematic quality as it does for its versatility. Garnier's eclecticism might well lose a few of his less committed fans en route, bewildered as these fans will inevitably be at his distancing himself from the dancefloor and experimenting with post-techno sounds. But the French turntable pioneer is obviously in it for the distance. The only question now is whether Garnier will eventually abandon his machines and really take us all by surprise one day?

Nicolas  Dambre

Translation : Julie  Street