Laurent Garnier

A former embassy employee in London, Frenchman Laurent Garnier launched his DJ career in Manchester toward the close of the 1980s. Within the next ten years he ranked among the planet’s most versatile selectors, comfortably bridging classic deep house with Detroit techno, tougher strains of acid and trance, and unexpectedly jazzy selections. Production entered his routine in the early 1990s, yielding several outstanding albums spread across decades that continued to showcase his appetite for stylistic range. The 1997 set 30 and the 2000 release Unreasonable Behaviour housed some of his strongest club tracks, while jazz, dub, and downtempo explorations surfaced on The Cloud Making Machine in 2005 and Tales of a Kleptomaniac in 2009. Soundtrack work later absorbed much of his focus, and he joined forces with psychedelic group the Limiñanas for the 2021 album De Película. Club singles kept appearing alongside these projects, culminating in his most floor-directed collection, 33 Tours et Puis S'en Vont, issued in 2023.

Among the earliest Europeans to introduce American house sounds on British soil, Garnier stood at the center of the late-1980s Madchester movement. Residencies at Manchester’s storied Haçienda helped prompt the Stone Roses and Happy Mondays to weave house grooves into their rock foundations. He redirected his energies toward France in the early 1990s, operating the Wake Up Club in Paris for three years while slowly entering the studio. On the FNAC imprint he issued French Connection in 1991 and the A Bout de Souffle EP in 1993. Once that label folded, he established F Communications alongside Eric Morand, another former FNAC colleague. By the middle of the decade a substantial catalog had accumulated, highlighted by the thirteen-minute “Acid Eiffel” under the Choice alias, yet his debut album Shot in the Dark did not surface until 1994. The follow-up, 30, arrived in 1997 and was succeeded by the retrospective Early Works.

Unreasonable Behaviour emerged in 2000, after which the more improvisatory and jazz-inflected The Cloud Making Machine appeared in 2005. Retrospective: 1994-2006 gathered key singles such as “Crispy Bacon” and “The Man with the Red Face” together with notable remixes for Alex Attias and Carl Craig. The 2007 live document Public Outburst, shaped by spontaneous jazz principles, presented pieces Garnier composed and performed with Bugge Wesseltoft, Benjamin Rippert, and Philippe Nadaud. A few seasons afterward he delivered the characteristically expansive Tales of a Kleptomaniac. During the same period he also assembled several eclectic DJ mixes, among them Excess Luggage, Life: Styles, and the two-disc The Kings of Techno shared with Craig.

Traditional studio output slowed somewhat during the 2010s, though DJ engagements, radio work, and oversight of F Communications remained constant, as did commissions for dance, television, and cinema. In 2015 he assembled La Home Box, a useful anthology of recent material that had appeared on Hypercolour, 50 Weapons, Still Music, and other outlets, augmented by exclusive cuts. Speicher 95: Tribute EP, his contribution to Kompakt’s ongoing series, followed in 2017. Original scores were supplied for the films Paris est à nous in 2019 and Le roi bâtard in 2020. He was later identified as a co-founder, alongside Scan X, of the anonymous COD3 QR label.

Sustained interest in cinematic atmospheres led to further collaboration with the Limiñanas on 2021’s De Película. His solo score Entre la vie et la mort reached listeners in 2022. The dancefloor-centered album 33 Tours et Puis S'en Vont surfaced the following year, featuring a track with French hip-hop collective 22Carbone and vocal contributions from Alan Watts and Alan Vega.