Electro. From Kraftwerk to Daft Punk

Sure enough, Paris is romantic, but Electro can be romantic too. In movies, Paris is always associated with accordion music, but in reality, a lot of Electro artists are French like Daft Punk, Laurent Garnier, Air, Laurent Garnier, Etienne de Crecy, Cerrone or David Guetta... Hum, no, not David Guetta, he's not an artist and he does supermarket music, not Electro, but apart from him, there are a lot of French techno artists like Mr. Oizo, Bob Sinclar, Martin Solveig or Justice, to name a few.

Now that you are convinced, and to dive even more in the history of Electro Music, not only French Electro but Electro in general, I can't advise you enough to go to the Philharmonie de Paris, from April 9 to August 11, 2019, to see "Electro Exhibition".

Press release:

At more than 120 BPM, electronic music sets the tempo on dancefloors around the globe. Originating in Chicago and Detroit in the 1980s, house and techno introduced radically new, machine-generated sonic landscapes inducing a rare state of physical ecstasy. Since the 2000s, Electro has claimed its place as a major artistic movement in modern-day global culture, from Berlin to Tunis and Buenos Aires to Los Angeles.

In today's atomised society, this category of music is far more than a sonic experience: it has become an important vector for bringing people together, building community both on the dancefloor and through social media and the activism of numerous collectives. Now more than ever, Electro is defining a new relation to alterity and to the world, notably in the visibility it brings to queer culture and in the expression of feminist resistance.

This first major exhibition on electronic music explores the genre’s imaginary, its innovations and mythologies, and its correlations with contemporary art. Featuring a soundtrack mixed by Laurent Garnier, it is firmly anchored in the present. The itinerary is the product of creative input and engagement from a number of the musicians involved: Kraftwerk, Daft Punk, Jean-Michel Jarre, Jacques and Molécule all appropriated the exhibition as a testing ground for their concepts and ideas.

Essential to the ambitions behind this exhibition is the strong visual identity achieved through active collaborations with leading photographers and visual artists, such as Andreas Gursky, Xavier Veilhan, Christian Marclay and Claude Lévêque. The scenography by the collective 1024 Architecture creates a jarring space—all scaffolding and moving lights—conjuring the environments in which Electro is produced and experienced. Which brings us, in 2019, to reiterate the words of techno pioneer Juan Atkins from twenty years ago: “There are no UFOs. Machine music is the only way forward”.