Yuksek: the new whoever

Not that you’d know from reading this indie-pop-orientated blog, but Paris is renowned for dance music.

 

Generalising wildly, there are two strands of it. You’ve got your flashy, crowd-pleasing DJs like David Guetta and Bob Sinclar who are big in France but viewed worldwide as alcopop-flogging irritants. Then there’s your more cred electronica duos, Air and Daft Punk and Justice, who get greater international acclaim and cerebral critiques.

 

And, just as every late ‘80s/early ‘90s Irish band was labelled ‘The New U-Know-Who’, any promising French electronician is tagged as ‘The New Daft Punk’. Such was the case with Justice, and now it’s happening to an emerging DJ who looks like making it big in 2009.

 

(Why he’s not being called ‘the new Laurent Garnier’ or other French DJ is unclear to us. Incidentally, did you see the young kid from Lille being hailed as the new Zidane? Wow!)

 

Yuksek is the nom d’electro of Pierre-Alexandre Busson from Reims in the Champagne region of north-east France. He’s prominent these days for two current album releases. One is the new Birdy Nam Nam record, ‘Manual For Successful Rioting’ (a title that’ll bring a wry smile to anyone who saw them in action at the ALT in Dublin last December), which he produced. The other is his own first album, ‘Away From The Sea’.

 

‘Away From The Sea’ features Yuksek’s 2008 track ‘Tonight’, which is gaining the Frenchman a lot of floorplay and interest around the world. Indie kids will say: it’s closer to the classic and accessible dancefloor beats of Daft Punk than the darkness and distortion of Justice. As for his DJ credentials, others more dancefloor than us can take it from there. But your alt-pop blogger likes it.

 

As for his name, Yuksek is a Turkish word that means something like ‘a height’ or ‘a high level’. Apparently Busson wanted a non-anglophone DJ name, though he’s still gone for titles in English. Still, that strain of globalism hints at the international acclaim he’s due to pick up as the new sound of le French touch.

 

Yuksek will be at a Bodytonic night at the Twisted Pepper in Dublin on 8 May for a DJ set. We know now that when DJs do a DJ set they play other people’s records and not their own. So don’t go up and ask him for ‘Tonight’, alright? You’ll just be making an eejit of yourself.

 

If you want to hear Yuksek, off with you to his MySpace page. Meanwhile, here’s the video for ‘Tonight’: