BIOGRAPHY Pierre Lx

Out 1, the debut album by Pierre LX, slinks elegantly around the peripheries of electronic music in a way that only a record made in London can. Not really techno, kind of like house, but certainly influenced by the UK’s bass music scene, this is one of those albums that slips between genres into its own groove. His contemporaries, producers like John Roberts, Instra:mental and Pearson Sound, are on a similar wavelength. If you’ve heard Pierre play one of his regular DJ sets at Fabric, you’ll have an idea of what to expect.

Pierre’s analogue jams are moody and sensuous, raw and sometimes jacking, and they unravel in a cool, understated manner that makes them ideal for the warm-up and perfect for the after-party. You could say this is serious stuff, hopelessly self-indulgent and one for the purists, and you’d be right. But let Out 1 seduce you and it’s easy to see why Pierre LX is the producer many other producers and DJs are talking about. Panorama Bar’s Cassy led the way when she included one of his first releases, ‘Gabita’, on her 2009 Cocoon mix.

Out 1 is made up of eight pieces that were improvised on the machines in Pierre’s home studio over a short period. The album takes its name from French new-wave director Jacques Rivette’s 1971 avant-garde epic, a work Pierre encountered studying film and video art in London. “I wanted it to have a kind of geometrical feel. The idea is that the listener can approach the album from different angles, but they’ll still be able get into the narrative,” he says. “Each track was recorded as a continuous live take on hardware to heighten the sense of intimacy and realism.”

Based in Hackney, east London, but born in Paris 25 years ago, Pierre learned to make music on a cheap keyboard workstation when he was a teenager living in Curitiba, Brazil at the turn of the decade. Back then, he would play parties with the guys from Bonde de Role and was, he says, one of the first to DJ with a laptop there in 2002. These days he plays only vinyl.

At 16, Pierre discovered the finer side to electronic music when he attended a Kompakt label night in Paris. Hearing Closer Musik, the duo of Matias Aguayo and Dirk Leyers, perform for the first time had a profound effect on him. “I’d never been out to a club before,” he says, “and that night Closer Musik were so precise and subtle, so restrained compared to others. I started composing dance music the next day.”

Moving to London to study film in 2003, Pierre embraced DJing and studio engineering as part-time jobs. He got to grips with his gear and honed his subtle brand of techno, which he suffused with Detroit melody and the elliptical funk of STL and Chain Reaction, for the French label Initial Cuts.
More recently, he also ran the monthly Shoreditch night Millennium Disco, booking a long list of emerging talents that today reads like a ‘who’s who’ of modern house: Kassem Mosse, Mark E and John Roberts, to name a few. With Out 1, Pierre LX looks set to join them.