"It was a shock back in 1992. That was 20 years ago and I still haven’t recovered from it. It was really powerful and straight to the brain!

It hit Philippe Zdar and me at the same time, on a barge in the suburbs of Paris. The party was called ‘Transbody Express’ and the music we discovered that night was the first act of a revolution to come.

First a personal revolution, one that diametrically changed my perception of music and the way I understood it. And then a global revolution. Pop music was totally transformed by the fact that the whole world now had access to production equipment. No style of music escaped the influence of techno. I was lucky enough to live through this revolution and to be able to make my own “small” contribution to it.

I have two different types of fans. There are people my age who discovered house, techno and electronic music at the same time as me. They liked Air, Daft Punk, Alex Gopher, SUPERDISCOUNT and the rest of that pulsating 90s scene. Then they grew older, got a job, had children and stopped going to clubs. Whenever I bump into them, they ask me how I am, what I’m up to and if I’m still making music.

And then there are kids of between 15 and 20 now and got into electronic music through the Bloody Beetroots and Justice. They’re the ones who now go clubbing on a Saturday night. They’ve never heard of SUPERDISCOUNT and when they meet me, they’re surprised to find I’m the same age as their parents!

Admittedly I’ve gone to great pains to confuse matters. I’ve always given out information sparingly and done my best to release my projects at unexpected times, announcing them as obscurely and as elusively as possible. It wasn’t deliberate – I just thought I was doing the right thing!

I’m releasing this retrospective to unite these two sets of fans. People who thought I’d stopped after Tempovision will find out that since the beginning of the millennium I’ve taken a more underground path more closely in tune with the music that lit up my life – techno! And people who were under the impression that my career began in a cube will, I hope, understand the road that led me here.

To give a representative overview of my work, I brought together the most symbolic tracks of the different stages of my career along with remixes I’ve done for other artists and a lot of previously unreleased tracks. For 20 years now I’ve been trying to make our planet a warmer place – especially on Saturday nights! This box set sums up how I’ve gone about it." - Etienne de Crécy