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Parisian deep house DJ and producer
Etienne de Crécy was a key figure behind the French capital's rise as one of the world's dance music hubs during the 1990s. His first big project was
Motorbass, a duo with future
Cassius member
Philippe Zdar that released a string of smoothly uptempo, funky records in the early '90s. He then went solo, hitting big with the
Super Discount album in 1996. After that, he split his time releasing his own records (like 2000's disco house-inspired
Tempovision and two more volumes of the
Super Discount series, one in 2004 and one in 2015) and remixing artists like
Air,
Chromeo, and
Kraftwerk.
Born in Lyon,
de Crécy began his music career in the late '80s with the band Louba in Versailles, on the outskirts of Paris. When the band folded,
de Crécy set up shop in the capital and gravitated toward studio work with hip-hop and house, a move that swiftly earned him plenty of street cred. His first major undertaking, the deep house project
Motorbass, grabbed a cult following soon after its launch in 1991. The project, a collaboration with
Zdar (who went on to release the chart-topping album
1999 with
Cassius), was what first alerted the world to the rapidly evolving dance music scene in Paris. It spawned such underground favorites as the Motorbass EP and "Transphunk" single, and climaxed with the release of the
Pansoul album in 1996.
Only a few months later,
de Crécy served up the very popular
Super Discount album, offering his own house tunes (including the standout "Prix Choc"), as well as remixes of
Air and
Alex Gopher songs. Dance music critics around the globe were again praising the Parisian in late 2000 courtesy of the
Tempovision album -- a collection of disco house and downbeat tunes, such as "Am I Wrong?" and "Scratched" -- released under his own name. In 2004,
de Crécy released
Super Discount, Vol. 2, again featuring help from
Zdar and
Alex Gopher.
In the years that followed,
de Crécy stayed busy remixing a wide variety of artists; he did a mix CD (2005's House Party for the Most label) and also released a number of singles under his name for various labels, including his own
Pixadelic. In 2011, Dim Mak issued Beats 'n' Cubes, Vol. 1, a collection of these singles. The next year,
de Crécy released an ambitious career-spanning collection of his work, My Contribution to the Global Warming. Featuring guest appearances from
Alex Gopher and
De La Soul's Pos and Dave,
Super Discount, Vol. 3 followed in 2015. In 2017, he released a four-part series of EPs under the title After that showed him to be as inventive a producer as ever. In 2018, he teamed with
Baxter Dury and
Skinny Girl Diet vocalist
Delilah Holliday to release a short album of electro-tinged debauched balladry titled
B.E.D. ~ David Peter Wesolowski