Interview: Teki Latex

Appearing on the then-burgeoning Ninja Tune subsidiary Big Dada at the turn of the century, TTC managed what most of the French rap scene had failed to do for most of the ’90s: break through into English-speaking countries. The crew – composed of Tido Berman, Cuizinier, Orgasmic, Tacteel, Para One and Teki Latex – released three everything-but-the-kitchen-sink albums for the London label. Evolving from weird, slightly absurd backpackers to (self-proclaimed) glam nerds, they fused electronic and hip hop like few others.

Timing is everything and unfortunately theirs – like many other pioneers – was slightly off. As part of research for a book on the evolution of hip hop production, Laurent Fintoni spoke to Teki about the crew’s origins, Diplo’s Parisian DJ heroes and why France should not be forgotten when looking at the evolution of hip hop’s electronic aesthetic.

The central idea of my upcoming book is to look at the progression and evolution of a certain type of instrumental hip hop production.

Of course this evolution exists, and it’s a big thing. It’s always been a big thing since Mo’ Wax. We, and by we I mean myself and the TTC extended family of producers and collaborators, our little French scene, we’ve always been very cautious about that because we came from a rap background. If you look at the French electronic scene you’ll notice there has always been a lot of people who came from rap. From DJ Mehdi to Cassius, even to a certain extent DJ Gilb’R and these guys, there was always a hip hop background. And the same goes for those involved in the French “electro thing,” like SebastiAn and even Feadz. In our youth we were all involved in hip hop groups or we started as hip hop DJs. So basically we thought [instrumental hip hop] was a trap in which not to fall. And I mean literally a trap. [laughs] We thought the trap was to make rap without rappers.

When we met Para One, who became one of TTC’s producers, he was making rap beats that sounded like generic boom bap – Mobb Deep, Premier-type beats. On the side, though, he was also making film scores. Those scores were a lot more broken, weirder. After we first collaborated with him we started hanging out and he began playing me his film scores. That’s when I told him, “These are the beats you need to play to us, these are the beats we want to rap over.” No one else wanted to rap over these beats, which was the other thing. He wanted to put them out as part of an instrumental hip hop project or something, but we felt that there was potential to do something more with them and this is basically how we ended up working together.

That’s really when I first got this idea that if you have good beats and you know rappers who can rap over them, no matter how weird the music is, you should get them on the beats.

Why did you feel it was a trap?

Because of the dark shadow that trip hop had cast over it. Trip hop for us was the trap. It was a dirty word. If someone was making instrumental hip hop the first thing that came to mind was, “Oh, danger, trip hop. Why are you doing that?” If you had to do instrumental hip hop it could only be via a slightly dancey sort of filter. A good example of that would be Modeselektor. They would do rap beats that were so anchored in an electronic aesthetic that it didn’t remind you of trip hop. There was so much shit happening on the beat that it didn’t really need rappers. That was the only acceptable instrumental rap stuff for us. That and what Feadz was doing.

Did you ignore the Mo’ Wax stuff basically?

Yeah, me personally I ignored it. I was really into Warp, the Squarepusher releases and the more complicated glitch output. I was into Prefuse 73, but more when he sounded futuristic as opposed to his more Dilla-sounding output.

What about Merck and early Machinedrum?

I love it now, but that’s an interesting one because back then we saw these guys as – and I don’t mean it in a negative way because we were a little clueless at the time – the ones who were doing what we were trying to do but two years later. For example when Sixtoo started doing super electronic stuff we didn’t get it, but now I can appreciate it more. I can appreciate more fully what Machinedrum is and was doing. I play his tracks in my sets. I’m a massive fan of Lazer Sword and others like that. Also I don’t want to come across as a dickhead when I talk about all those guys, I’m a big fan and we’ve all worked together. It’s just that back then I used to not be interested in it so much. At that point in time we were so in search of pop acceptance. That defined us until we split. We felt like we didn’t need to pay attention to the underground.

Again I don't want to sound like a hater, I have a lot of love for Montreal. I put a Lunice track in one of my first mixes for Mishka. I love and play Jacques Greene’s music but the stuff that came through the Montreal “Turbo Crunk” scene for us felt like people trying to jump on the euro crunk bandwagon a year later. Do you remember the euro crunk idea that the guys from Radioclit came up with?

Vaguely…

Radioclit are a French and Swedish duo. The Swedish guy, Johann, had an indie rap group called Stacs of Stamina, from Sweden. They rapped in Swedish and English and were super connected to the indie scene at the time: friends with the Def Jux guys, promoting events with those artists on an international level. Etienne, the French half of Radioclit, was working at Big Dada around the time they signed Diplo. He saw the whole Hollertronix thing happen and that’s when the Radioclit project was born. They were moving away from indie rap and becoming something else, more fun, more futuristic, a little more conscious of the dance scene and trying to bridge a gap between four-to-the-floor house music and hip hop, especially the crunk variety that we loved so much at the time.

Dirty South stuff?

Yeah. We were all about that back then and we were all friends. So Etienne and Johann started Radioclit and, in order to get people talking about it, they thought of putting all the like-minded people together and call it euro crunk. And there was a big hip hop magazine in the UK at the time that Will Ashon [Big Dada founder] used to work for…

Hip Hop Connection?

That’s the one. They did a double page feature on this euro crunk thing. The irony was that it didn’t even exist, it was just a joke. It was basically Stacs of Stamina having the opportunity to get an article in Hip Hop Connection and bringing all of their friends with them. There was Ceebrolistics from Finland, which is the rap group Teeth was a part of, TTC, Tacteel and Para One, Modeselektor, Stacks of Stamina, Radioclit and a bunch of other people all on the same tip. Then the wrong people started affiliating themselves with it, and we realized it was all a bit silly and never really used it. So now no one really knows about it, but it was another one of those things we did and then decided right away we didn’t really want to have anything to do with it anymore.

We should also talk about how the whole French Touch 2.0 thing came about with Justice, Ed Banger and all the media hype on French music generated by Daft Punk’s album Human After All. Basically this French banger sound started getting all the attention, and naturally a lot of the French crew that was experimenting with the idea of electronic club rap kind of abandoned that style to evolve into more 4/4 straight up electro/techno/house because that seemed like the new thing to do, and because that’s what everyone expected French music to sound like.

The French Touch 2.0 thing came around 2005 and it was so big that it kind of erased those four or five years of forging a new French sound on the basis of those early TTC/Feadz/Para One/Crunk vs Techno experiments. It’s too bad because we could have really built a new French sonic identity and other scenes in other cities kinda filled that void instead of us, as we were too busy making four-to-the-floor dance tracks. It’s also part of a natural evolution that led us to getting open to all forms of house music which is the genesis for the Sound Pellegrino stuff I do now. So, at the end of the day, it’s all good and now’s a great time for us all to look back at all that was happening in the first half of the ’00s and, in a way, pick up where we left off.

You mentioned Feadz before and I remember him from Audiomicid, who were putting out some seriously weird shit inside the turntablist scene back in the early ’00s. How did you guys meet?

It was that common hip hop background I mentioned before. In fact Feadz was the inspiration for us wanting to move away from hip hop in its classic format. He was signed to BPitch Control, a Berlin techno label owned by Ellen Allien, which also had Modeselektor on their roster.

Feadz and Tacteel [producer for TTC] were in the same French rap group, ATK. Early in his career Tacteel made a very Mo’ Wax-esque EP that he released independently and which I helped out with, just before we set up Institubes. That’s when he introduced me to Feadz, saying he was the guy who had done the scratches on the Mr Oizo album. As Feadz was touring through F Communications, Laurent Garnier’s label that Oizo was on, he got access to the whole universe of techno. He started digging in techno shops, became a fan of BPitch and decided to send them his demos, which is how they signed him. That was 2000, 2001.

TTC was just starting, the Leguman 12-inch had just come out and we’d just signed to Big Dada. And so we then had the opportunity to tour Germany so the first thing we did was call Feadz and asked him for record shop tips. He told us to go to Hard Wax, gave us a bunch of labels to check out. We were already fans of BPitch and big fans of Modeselektor. So we went to Hard Wax and the guy behind the counter looked familiar. We picked up a copy of Groove [magazine], which at the time had all the BPitch artists on the front cover, and the guy from Hard Wax we were looking at was Gernot from Modeselektor! We’re pointing at him going, “You’re this guy!” And he’s like, “And you’re the French guys!” Turns out he knew about TTC, we became friends and the rest is history. It all happened because of Feadz really.

We were really fascinated by Feadz though. He had one foot in the turntablist world, the scratch thing, and one foot in the real techno world. I remember seeing him DJ at Batofar around 2002, 2003 and he was playing pure Berlin techno mixed with Noreaga and Ludacris, back when I barely knew who Ludacris was. This idea that you could put a techno beat, a 4x4 beat, and blend it with Dirty South rap was blowing my mind.

These ideas are now fairly common, but back then it was ballsy.

If you read interviews Diplo did for French magazines he talks about how Feadz and Orgasmic influenced him. I think he only says it in French magazines though. [laughs]

Did you also know about Dabrye? Because [Feadz’s] “Fizzle” reminds me a lot of One/Three.

Through Feadz we did yes! I remember being fascinated by the minimal aspect of Dabrye’s music. It was almost like minimal techno adapted to the rap/hip hop aesthetic. There’s nothing going on for minutes and then something happens and it’s really exciting because there’s not really anything else going on during the rest of the track. [laughs] For us that stuff was crazy fresh.

“Hyped-Up Plus Tax” was crazy for me, but then I wasn’t so much into the stuff that sounded more like Dilla, or Jay Dee at the time. This is another thing. We were going through a phase back then of being against everything that was Jay Dee-related.

Why?

It was too jazzy for us. As backpackers we were really into Antipop Consortium, Company Flow, stuff that wasn’t really jazzy. All the more jazzy stuff sounded very middle ground to us and it was the sort of indie hip hop that was accepted by the French rap people who were also causing us trouble at the time, because they didn’t want to have anything to do with us. In a way our thing was to be like, “Well, okay, we’ll leave you this jazzy stuff and we’ll go with the weird shit.” Weird shit is what we made into our thing and so we rejected the rest.

What was it about Antipop and Co Flow’s sound that attracted you?

It was the hard-hitting kicks. The kicks did it. “Population Control.” The harshness of the drums. Simple, weird atmospheres backed by immense, hard ass beats.

What about the mood? It was particularly dark in that period you mention.

The dark aspect of the music was another thing for sure. I loved it back then but I wouldn’t go and listen to it now, it’s too dark for me now. The stuff from El-P I would still listen to now is the Co Flow album, and maybe some of the Cannibal Ox stuff. I also loved it when El-P tried to emulate the Neptunes and Timbaland.

Which tracks are you thinking of?

[Cannibal Ox’s] “Raspberry Fields.” He admitted to it on the Def Jux forums. This would be around 1998, 1999. I was always on there, reading what El-P was saying and I clearly remember him going on one day along the lines of, “Fuck you, backpackers. I’m listening to ‘Grindin’ by Clipse right now, and I love the Neptunes and Timbaland.”

In terms of TTC’s own evolution, I was listening to the instrumentals for Bâtards Sensibles today and it struck me that you guys presaged some things, especially the return of a more obvious electronic aesthetic. How did you look at it when you made the album, and how do you look at it now with hindsight?

We were sort of conscious that it was an important thing when we made it. We realized that we were the only ones taking a very nerdy approach to rap while using super pop-y and electronic dancefloor-friendly ingredients to make it.

“Dans Le Club” talks about the club, is supposed to be played in a club and glorifies the whole idea of the club. “Girlfriend” is a nod to ghettotech, which was super important for us too: Disco D, DJ Deeon, that whole scene, DJ Assault. We were really looking up to these guys.

I remember when all the indie rappers wanted to do jungle. It would have been around 1999. Ten years after jungle had happened they all wanted to do this jungle/drum & bass thing and there was a song by The Roots at the time with Erykah Badu that had these double time drums at the end and it added to this whole idea. We were super against this movement, mainly because drum & bass is the music of crusties in France. We hated it.

One of my friends, Etienne Menu, a long-standing music journalist, and part of the first generation of Institubes founders, told me at the time that “the future of hip hop doesn’t lie in the past of electronic music.” Jungle is only new and exciting for a rap guy, but for someone who makes electronic music it’s so passé and old. He also had a foot in both worlds, though, and so he was interested in finding a way to merge the two. And he thought that a good way to merge electronic music and hip hop in a credible way, a sincere way, in a way that was closer to hip hop aesthetics than passé electronic ones was ghettotech.

Because it was a fresh sound at the time?

Yeah, it was fresh at the time, it was more of a straight-forward, instinctive music rather than nerdy music. It was – and I hate to say this – more ghetto. It felt more like rap. And it also had the same subject matter as the Dirty South rap we were listening to all the time. It was a fresh way to approach it. It seemed more legitimate in our hip hop world. It proved a big influence on the Bâtards Sensibles album. The rest came from us experimenting. Grime also proved a big influence on that album.

In what way?

The hard-hitting kicks of Dizzee’s first album. I first heard “I Luv U” when Will Ashon played it on Radio Nova in Paris. He came to Paris to do a set on Nova, and so I came to see him. Here we are in the studio, and he plays this song and I was like, “What is this?” It sounded like Ludacris but with gabber kicks thrown in.

What happened with the recording process for Bâtards Sensibles is that Tacteel and Para One would give us the skeleton of a beat or ask us to rap over beats that we liked from other people. So we would do flows and weird shit and give that back to them to make the final beat. They would then sew the music together underneath our lyrics, working with the flow of it. This is most obvious on the track called “J’ai Pas Sommeil.” The beats on there follow our flow in quite obvious ways.

This is why when you strip out the vocals from the album it’s still so rich. The patterns of the beats on this album still follow a rap flow in a way.

We started talking after an article I wrote for RBMA on the influential club nights that helped shape the scene in the late ’00s. That’s when you mentioned that there was a string of club nights in Paris that had a similar ethos but never quite got too much attention abroad. Do you want to elaborate a bit more?

TTC started this thing called La SuperFamilleConne. [ed. note: French phonetic play on words on Super Famicom, the original Japanese name for the Super Nintendo, which loosely translates as Super Dumb Family] That was basically all the producers and rappers from TTC and this guy who was making techno coming together to play records in the most random and anarchic way. I wasn’t a DJ at the time, it was the first time I ever touched a CDJ in fact. This started in 2003.

At first we were mostly booked to play after TTC shows and also this party called USR, United Superhero Reunion, that was thrown at the Rex Club on a Wednesday by Clark Magazine, a French lifestyle mag. They were really into what we were doing so they would book us every now and then. This is all around 2003 and 2004 which is also when we started our residency at The Tryptique club (which is now called Social Club). That residency was called Alors Les Filles On Se Promenent? [ed. note: loosely translated as “Hey girls, we walking around?”] Then there was another night tied to all this called Poulet et Biere [ed. note: Chicken & Beer, named after the Ludacris album] which was Etienne from Radioclit and myself and which started in 2004. Finally DJ Orgasmic was also doing something at the Nouveau Casino, and that was called Monster Truck.

For about two, three years we booked pretty much everyone: Feadz, Surkin, all the guys who ended up on Institubes. At Poulet et Biere we brought Diplo for the first one and D Double E, Jammer and Earz for the second one. It was the first grime night in France. The SuperFamilleConne was involved every time basically. For the first Monster Truck party Orgasmic booked edIT and for the second one Phon.o, who’s now with Modeselektor’s label. He also brought Kano and Ghetto. We also had a lot of French guests with our Alors Les Filles residency, so it soon became our little thing.

The musical ethos or idea behind all these parties was a mix of genres and styles?

Yeah, just mixing it up as much as we could. Basically blending Vitalic with Bone Thugs. We also played a lot of chip tune stuff, 8-bit music. There was still a hip hop sensibility to it all, the way we explored things and brought it together. And it was also about the club, like I was saying before, making it fun again for nerds. This all happened more or less around the same time that Hollertronix blew up. The thing was that it never really got promoted beyond the clubs we did it in and maybe some articles in Clark Magazine. It was low-key, insular which is why I think it gets overlooked.