Etienne De Crécy

Etienne de Crécy, the Parisian deep house DJ and producer, helped transform the French capital into a worldwide hub for dance music across the 1990s. His earliest significant venture was the duo Motorbass alongside Philippe Zdar, later of Cassius, which issued a run of smoothly uptempo and funky tracks during the early part of the decade. Moving into solo work, he scored major success with the Super Discount album in 1996. Thereafter he alternated between his own projects—including the disco house–oriented Tempovision in 2000 and further editions of the Super Discount series in 2004 and 2015—and remix assignments for Air, Chromeo, and Kraftwerk.

Born in Lyon, de Crécy started out in the late ’80s playing with the Versailles band Louba on the edge of Paris. After that group disbanded he settled in the capital and turned to studio sessions in hip-hop and house, quickly building underground credibility. The deep house project Motorbass, begun in 1991, soon attracted a cult audience. The partnership with Zdar, who would later appear on Cassius’s chart-topping 1999 album, first drew international attention to Paris’s fast-developing dance scene. It yielded underground staples such as the Motorbass EP and the “Transphunk” single before reaching its peak with the 1996 album Pansoul.

Only months afterward de Crécy released the widely embraced Super Discount album, which contained his own house cuts—most prominently “Prix Choc”—plus remixes of songs by Air and Alex Gopher. Dance critics worldwide renewed their praise for the Parisian late in 2000 upon the arrival of Tempovision, issued under his own name and featuring disco house and downbeat material such as “Am I Wrong?” and “Scratched.” Super Discount, Vol. 2 followed in 2004, again drawing on contributions from Zdar and Alex Gopher.

In the years that followed de Crécy remained active remixing numerous artists, issued the mix CD House Party on the Most label in 2005, and put out several singles under his own name on various imprints including his Pixadelic. Dim Mak released Beats ’n’ Cubes, Vol. 1 in 2011, gathering those earlier singles into one collection. The expansive career retrospective My Contribution to the Global Warming appeared the next year. Super Discount, Vol. 3 arrived in 2015 with guest spots from Alex Gopher and De La Soul’s Pos and Dave. Demonstrating continued inventiveness, he issued the four-part EP series After in 2017. In 2018 he joined Baxter Dury and Skinny Girl Diet vocalist Delilah Holliday for the short album B.E.D., a set of electro-tinged debauched balladry.