When Chicago house and Detroit techno swept over to England in the mid-1980s, transforming acid house incarnation from a gray industrial city of Manchester into a pill-filled Madchester, young Laurent Garnier was in the right place at the right time. Previously serving as a waiter at the French Embassy in London, he moved to Manchester in 1986 to serve the exciting new music that the forward-thinking DJ was putting on the plates at the time.
Under the somewhat silly but arguably appropriately Iberian name of DJ Pedro, he was as much behind the decks of legendary club The Haçienda as he was in the midst of a minor pop music revolution. The acid house in the Haçienda didn’t just remain acid house, but soon seeped into the psychedelic sound of various Madchester bands like the stone roses, the charlatans or the Happy Mondays one whose excess-loving members regularly danced their hearts out there.
He was awarded the Legion of Honor
A few decades later, DJ Pedro has long since become Laurent Garnier again and at the same time one of the most famous and versatile DJs and producers on the planet. Awarded the Order of the Legion of Honor, he counts as a major innovator of house music alongside the robots of who retired in 2021 daft punk and the fleece duo, which has been dormant for years air to the great French exports of electronic music.
Unlike the aforementioned, despite all the laurel wreaths, he still seems to be far from creative fatigue, as evidenced by his stunning latest album “De Película”, which was released largely unnoticed last autumn. Recorded in collaboration with the French psychedelic rock duo The Liminanasunconditionally danceable music unfolds, whose compelling indietronic combination of groovy sixties flair, herb-rock repetition and psychedelic sound reinforcement also leads back in a highly elegant way to that pill-colored Madchester, where everything once began for Laurent Garnier.
Laurent Garnier, Friday, April 29, doors open at 11 p.m. Blitz clubMuseum Island 1