Chapter

01

In Residence

Concrete, Paris

Celebrating 12 of the world's best dance floors

In 2016, RA's In Residence series will celebrate club culture by throwing a month of parties at 12 of the world's best clubs. Clubs are the beating heart of dance music, and these are the venues that keep their local scenes thriving. Week-in, week-out, they open their doors to play the music we love.

For the second phase of the series we're setting up shop at Concrete, arguably the driving force of Paris's resurgent club scene. Located on a three-level boat docked on the Seine, Concrete throws parties that go all night or all day, soundtracked by artists from abroad and an inspired cast of local resident DJs. Five years since it opened, it's hard to imagine Paris without it.

As we settle in for a month at each of the clubs we'll be running an accompanying feature that, through a combination of different mediums, will hopefully provide a lasting document of these iconic spaces.

Apr 01 RA In Residence, Concrete, Paris
feat. Veronica Vasicka, Abdulla Rashim, Antigone, Kosme x S3A

Apr 10 RA In Residence, Concrete, Paris
feat. Move D, Margaret Dygas, FIT Siegel, Nicolas Lutz, Cabanne, Lowris, Le Loup

Apr 16 RA In Residence, Concrete, Paris
feat. Maurice Fulton, Max Graef v Glenn Astro, Mad Rey, Shanti Celeste, Aleqs Notal

Apr 28 RA In Residence, Concrete, Paris
feat. Jackmaster, Pit Spector x Ben Vedren

Chapter

02

Key info

Concrete at a glance

01
Address
69 Port De La Rapée, 75012, Paris, France
02
Club opened
2011
03
Soundsystem
Funktion-One
04
Dance floors
2
05
Capacity
1200
06
Resident DJs
S3A, Antigone, Behzad & Amarou, Ben Vedren, Cabanne, François X, Lowris, Shlømo

Chapter

03

History

How Paris got its groove back

"Paris, it's not the City Of Lights anymore... It goes to sleep at 11."

That was one of the more damning lines in a 2010 New York Times article that declared Paris's nightlife all but dead. Grim as that may sound, at the time it rang true for many in the city's music scene. Paris's importance to electronic music is beyond debate—from Daft Punk to Pépé Bradock to DJ Deep, the city has long been a fountainhead of fresh and inspired sounds. But for a while there, it got stale. "The promoters were old, the clubs were always the same," says Jeanson Antonin, the techno artist better known as Antigone. "It was pretty dead."

Five years later, things look much different. Spectacular dance floor experiences are now easy to find in the French capital. Raves and afterhours offer a refreshing rebuke to the glitzy discotheques that long dominated the city's nightlife. And a new crop of Parisian DJs are playing killer music every weekend. No one group is singly responsible for this change, but a lot of the credit can go to Concrete, a boat docked on the Seine that throws some of the best parties you'll find anywhere in the world.

"I could feel from the first time I played there that something was changing," says Francois X, one of Concrete's resident DJs. "The party went from seven in the morning till two the next morning, with Marcel Dettmann playing the last slot. That was something very unusual for Paris, but from the beginning till the end of the party, the whole crowd stayed, including me. It was a real turning point for the clubbing scene here, I'd say."

Concrete grew out of TWSTED, a traveling rave thrown by three friends with little previous experience putting on parties: Brice, Aurélien and Pete (all preferred we didn't use their last names). "Before that we were just a group of friends traveling the world, having fun on dance floors, never taking it seriously," says Brice. "We wanted to have a party with our friends with music that we liked, because otherwise it was boring in Paris. We thought, 'If it works, cool, if it doesn't work, we don't give a fuck.' But after two, three events we saw it was becoming quite big."

TWSTED happened in a new location every time, but good venues are hard to come by in Paris. The first one was in an old cinema. It didn't end well. "We really fucked that place up," Brice says. "They found a lot of vomit, they wanted to send us their lawyers." Next was their debut on what would later become the Concrete boat, an event that, purely by chance, featured in a 2011 RA profile on Dan Ghenacia. That one went swimmingly. The crew had a warehouse venue lined up for the next edition, but just before the party someone discovered a centuries-old corpse underneath the building and the whole place was cordoned off for archaeological research.

"It was so crazy, when we put it on Facebook people were not believing us," says Brice. "We didn't have any venue, so we were back on the boat. By then we were feeling quite good about it, and we figured it's too complicated to find new locations all the time, so we thought, 'Let's do something proper on the boat.' The last TWSTED was two years ago in a big garage in Paris, and the party lasted just two hours before the cops came. We grabbed the mic and said, 'OK, now everyone goes on Concrete, it's free for everyone,' and we continued the party there."

Concrete grew rapidly. At first it happened just one Sunday every month, from 7 AM till past midnight. Then it was open most weekends, and then more than once per week. The team grew increasingly ambitious, eventually starting a label, Concrete Music, a booking agency, Concrete Booking, and a festival, Weather. As it grew into a fully-staffed, multi-pronged operation, each of the founders fell into a different role. Pete became the charismatic face of the club, taking care of the artists and staying at the parties all night to make sure everything ran smoothly. Aurélien became the outfit's CEO. Brice defined Concrete's musical identity through his bookings, bringing in respected DJs from other cities and giving a platform to local artists. In Paris's community of DJs and producers, his efforts didn't go unnoticed.

"Brice is a pimp!" says Antonin. "When I met him, we went record shopping and chatted a bit. Eventually he said, 'Hey what are you doing on Sunday?' I said nothing, and he invited me to play at Concrete. I played in front of 600 people, which was totally new for me. I'd never even played on a real soundsystem. He is a really good programmer, he really takes risks, giving a chance to new artists and sometimes booking really weird music."

As Concrete expanded, the club itself got better and better. The upstairs deck became Woodfloor, a more laidback dance floor with a movable cover for the colder months. In the main room, which takes up the length of the boat's main cabin, the team designed a bespoke DJ booth that would become one of Concrete's defining features.

"For many years, I was going to clubs and I was never satisfied with the stage setup," Brice says. "It was always the same thing: you have the dance floor, a one-meter stage with a DJ on the top of it, as if it's a concert, and behind him you have a lot of people with wristbands and a backstage area. I wanted something more democratic—no VIP, no stage and, most importantly, the DJ is at the same level as everybody dancing, face-to-face with the crowd."

Even more interesting was the placement of the booth. Though it's at the far end of the room it has a few meters of space on all sides, so the crowd wraps around it completely. "The effect is really crazy," says Brice. "The DJs feel totally different. Everywhere you look there's people dancing. You don't see how many people are in the room, only those around you, so it feels like you're playing records for friends in the living room. And the DJ can't hide in the VIP, he has to stay with us. It's more human."

It's not hard to see why Concrete took off. The atmosphere is unique: a boat with floor-to-ceiling windows looking onto the Seine, with light pouring in all day. The music policy is bold and open-ended, hosting everything from Romanian minimal to summery house to full-on blazing techno on the same versatile dance floor. For Parisians, the overall experience is exhilaratingly different from everything else in recent memory. The club fills up fast with young and energetic ravers keen to get stuck in. More often than not, what they find inside keeps them there all day, or all night.

Like all of the world's great clubs, Concrete did more than give its city somewhere to party—it also gave its local scene a shot in the arm. "That's one of the main things for me," says Brice. "When we started, local artists didn't have such a good chance. I wanted to push the scene and push new Parisian artists, like Antigone and S3A. I'm trying to push them the best I can, putting them on good lineups, releasing their music on Concrete Music, which is dedicated to French artists. And we're not alone. Lots of crews arrived at the same time as us and did the same thing, like Sonotown."

That's something everyone in the Concrete family is quick to point out: they didn't singlehandedly give Paris its groove back, they just did it first and perhaps most successfully. Concrete proved that this type of event could work in Paris, and this realization galvanized the scene at large. "When we started, everyone told me, 'You're crazy, no one will come from 7 AM and stay all day long,'" Brice says. "But it turned out everybody was waiting for exactly this. And now it's normal."

Chapter

04

Residents

...in pictures

Chapter

05

Character profile

Pete

Co-founder

Pete used to run a circus—a detail that might be surprising with most people, but not with him. Bearded, twinkly-eyed and full of scrappy energy, he's exactly the kind of person you'd imagine leading a motley crew of traveling performers. His current job is normal by comparison but still perfectly suited to his zany disposition. A partner at Concrete since the beginning, his role is part night manager, part artist liaison, all around fixer and general vibe master.

"He's the funny guy that everybody knows in Paris," says Brice. "Always going in the crowd giving free shots of vodka to people, or getting the artists drunk after their set." Everyone seems to smile at the mention of his name. "It honestly seems like he knows everyone in the crowd," says François X. "It's quite amazing actually."

Before the club opens, Pete herds the night's artists to a bistro and chats them up over steaks and wine. From the minute the party starts he's in a state of constant motion. In the booth, he fills glasses and hands out drinks tickets with a flourish. On the dance floor, he kisses his hellos to his friends in the crowd, of which there are many. Occasionally he'll have to enforce the club's carefully selected rules (mostly the no photos policy), but always with a warm, finger-wagging admonishment, like he's caught you with your hand in the cookie jar. As he laughs, dances and hobnobs his way through the room, he still has the air of the big top about him. On a recent night, for no particular reason, he threw fake dollar bills over his shoulder as he went about his tasks, leaving a trail of counterfeit money in his path.

It's easy to see where Pete's restless energy comes from. "My parents were entrepreneurs," he said. "Growing up, they brought us all around France and the US. I've lived in Paris for eight years, but until that the average time I'd spent anywhere was about nine months." Pete claims he still hasn't settled down—"When I'm done here I'll just move on to the next thing," he says with a wistful shrug. But it's hard to imagine someone more in their element than he is at Concrete. Pete is one of those rare people who's found a way of making himself valuable simply by being himself. Artists who play Concrete won't forget him, and vice versa.

"If Pete isn't here, the boat doesn't live," says François X. "He's the one that makes the place really special."

Chapter

06

Soundsystem profile

Funktion-1

Years before he became Concrete's CEO, Aurélien met Jonathan Malaisé, a fellow raver who was working at technical firms like Magnum and Stage Craft Company. At the end of the '90s, the two started throwing parties together, with Malaisé handling the sound and lights. By 2011, Malaisé had his own production company, Giglam. Concrete, meanwhile, was just taking shape, and Aurélien hired him to handle the club's light and sound design. Among other things, he was tasked with designing the club's soundsystems.

"We chose Funktion-One because it no longer needs to prove its worth in electronic music," he says. "with a powerful rendering for the sub-bass and a high precision for the medium and high frequencies. We use multipoint diffusion in order to achieve homogeneity throughout the boat, with a great acoustic impact and real precision, without reaching excessive levels in the front diffusion. The main challenge was to adapt the diffusion to such an unusual space. The main room has a very low ceiling, which is what we chose the RES1,5TT for the delay."

During any given party, the technical side of Concrete flows like clockwork—in one particularly nice flourish, a table lowers from the ceiling with the setup for that night's live act completely ready to go, then retracts upwards once they're done. "We have a dedicated technician who takes care of the DJ booth (turntable switches, mixer, etc)," Malaisé says. "We also have a dedicated technician for the sound quality in the club. Thanks to the control of the mixer over Wi-Fi with an iPad, he can correct in real-time the sound and diffusion, which allows to have a unified sound all night, whatsoever the sources are."

Chapter

07

Mixes

The sound of Concrete

From low-slung house to 135 BPM techno, four Concrete residents show the breadth of the club's sound

This mix is all about a nothing-planned afternoon, no special selection, just records I love, going one after another, expressing my actual feelings in a way and order that I can't really explain. Exactly like I could do at a Concrete morning / night or afternoon party, not thinking about anything, just trying to catch the actual time and share music.

My first set as a resident in Concrete was in 2012, and the only directive given by the team was, "Do what you want during your three-hour set." It was cold outside but clear and sunny. I played after Ron Morelli. The crowd was very reactive and the vibe totally palpable.

I love to be there. It is my family, and playing there is always memorable. Each set is long (three hours or more) and we have time to build something great with the crowd, from ambient to disco or even techno to '92 UK hardcore rave stuff. I have a lot of great memories on the boat: the back-to-back with the great Laurent Garnier, playing before Moodymann, Floating Points, Little Louis, Awanto3. It was always challenging but always an amazing experience.

Thanks Concrete. For the love, the music and the open-mindedness.

Here is our introduction to techno. Inspired by the soul of our generation.

Straight from Batiment 21. 93 Love.

Peace.

Still haven't got your Concrete fix? You can visit its club profile here, and there's more information on the series via the dedicated In Residence page.