5 Reasons to Rejoice in the Return of St Germain
After a fifteen year absence, the pioneering French Touch producer returns with a self-titled new album
It wasn’t so long ago that French media were wondering where on earth Ludovic Navarre — aka St Germain — had wandered off to. His last album was 2000’s excellent Tourist, which rolled into a global tour. Then came 15 years of near silence, punctuated only by a remix of Gregory Porter’s “Musical Genocide” in 2014.
Then in May 2015, entirely out of the blue, came news of not just a new single and album — “Real Blues” and St Germain, respectively — but also a European tour. Today, Friday October 9, his new album is finally released. Here are five reasons why you should be very excited indeed.
1. He Paved the Way for Daft Punk
France, it is probably fair to say, was not the first country out of the traps when the rave revolution started to spread around Europe, with St Germain’s 1993 debut, the French Traxx EP, a very early example of French dance production. The Motherland EP, released later the same year, even made international waves, thanks to Alabama Blues (later remixed by Todd Edwards to great effect) and the evergreen Soul Salsa Soul.
But it was St Germain’s debut album, Boulevard, released in 1995 that really blew things open, proving a hit with consumers and journalists alike. It has, apparently sold close to 1 million copies to date and was named Album of the Year by influential UK dance mag Muzik. Nothing so strange about that, you might think. But this was French music. And French music at the time had a reputation so snake-belly low among international audiences — especially British ones — that seeing an album by a Parisian producer scale the critical heights was genuinely something of a shock.
Boulevard, then, softened British audiences and the UK music industry towards French music. And so the territory was set for Motorbass, I:Cube, Daft Punk and all to break out of France in the following years.
2. He is the anti-EDM
As inexorably as EDM has risen, dance music producers have queued up to denounce it, putting distance between their work and the day-glow, tooth-rotting sweet sound of Avicii et al. In fact, it has become pretty boring.
But St Germain’s deep, jazzy take on house music really does sound like it comes from an entirely different planet than EDM, a place where jazz samples are allowed to breath, where tracks can build over a nonchalant ten minutes and where subtle shifts in production replace the dead-eyed drop. That might make St Germain sound boring — in fact, most examples of jazzy deep house are almost intolerably dull. But Navarre has the rare gift of using precisely the right sounds and making just enough changes to the mix to keep his music hugely engrossing.
What’s more, the jazz influences of St Germain are arguably more in touch with popular culture than at any point in the last decade, thanks to the jazz edge on Kendrick Lamar’s chart-topping To Pimp a Butterfly and the subsequent break-out albums from the likes of Kamasi Washington and Thundercat.
3. He Has Sold a Lot of Records
Boulevard shifted a million copies despite not even getting a release in the US until 2002. But its follow up, 2000’s Tourist, did even better, selling some 4m copies worldwide. For a jazz album, that’s remarkable. For an album of deep house jazz, it’s almost unthinkable. By contrast, Daft Punk’s Discovery, release in 2001, had sold 2.6m copies by 2005.
Tourist even spawned something approaching a hit single in “Rouse Rouge,” a buzzing caffeine hit of a jazz loop that was inescapable in the early 2000s, even turning up in the official trailer for Joss Whedon’s 2013 film Much Ado About Nothing.
Many of these sales, it is true, are down to the dinner-party effect: St Germain’s music does, undeniably, make a classy musical background to a bourgeois soirée, where no one is really paying attention. But the same could be said of Portishead’s debut album. The difference between St Germain and Portishead, on one side, and other dinner-party friendly acts like Groove Armada or London Grammar, is that you can happily sit down and concentrate on the music of St Germain without wanting to stick your head in the soup tureen.
4. Every St Germain Record is an Evolution
We may have had to wait 15 years for a new St Germain album, but at least it sounds notably different from its predecessor. “After a couple of years, I realised that I didn’t want to do something like Tourist again — I needed to do something new,” Navarre told The Independent. “And so I began this long, long journey of research…”
This took him to the sounds of Africa and in particular Mali, with instruments like the kora, the balafon and the n’goni all over the new album. Single “Real Blues,” for example, combines Malian percussion, a balafon, a Lightnin’ Hopkins sample and a very subtle house kick in a brilliantly taught mix, while album tracks “Forget Me Not” and “How Dare You” are led by the stringed wonder of Mamadou Cherif Soumano’s kora. And yet the results are still recognisably St Germain.
5. He Makes Sampling into an Art
“Sampling,” Navarre once side, “isn’t stealing someone else’s music. It is interpreting a melody, bending it to your will as any musician would do.”
These are strong words. But there is countless evidence in the St Germain back catalogue to back it up. “Rose Rouge,” for example, is a brilliant piece of sampling work, a tiny sample of jazz staple “Take Five” by Dave Brubeck Quartet sped up and looped until it sounds like the most exciting noise on earth, to which is added a brief, possibly ad-libbed, vocal from a live take on Marlena Shaw’s “Woman of the Ghetto.” Both samples are utterly integral to “Rose Rouge.” And yet Navarre has lifted just five, not particularly obvious, seconds from each and wrung every possible inch of vitality out of them. The economy is dazzling. The effect is transformative.
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Follow Ben Cardew on Twitter @bencardew
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