I get deep: DJ Deep

If ever there was a true stalwart of the French techno and house underground it’s DJ Deep. Known to his mum as Cyril Étienne des Rosaies, he’s been an associate of Laurent Garnier since the early 90s and has a long association with the city’s legendary Rex Club, plus seminal Parisian parties like Oz and Zoo at Club Boy and Le Palace respectively. A series of EPs as The Deep saw his music embraced by original US house dons such as Louie Vega, and he went on to achieve further success with mix albums on Distance Records. And like any DJ or producer with such a long love affair with dance music, that passion extends to the machines that help make and play music.

“I’ve always had a feeling that the machines from the early days of techno really influenced the sound,” he says. “Those Detroit musicians put their hands on equipment which had often been discarded by other musicians – [Roland] TR-909s, TR-808s and Juno keyboards. Somehow the meeting of those specific instruments with those musicians created a unique sound. I was really in love with the early Transmat records of Derrick May and Carl Craig. We heard them as landscapes of tomorrow, of the future. Twenty years later, hearing those same sounds recycled, I can’t help but ask: what does that mean now? Where is it going?”

Perhaps this has been the impetus behind the explosion of activity from this most debonair yet unpretentious of DJ-producers. In recent years his pairings with Roman Poncet, as the techno outfit Adventice, and the more experimental Sergie Rezza, have drawn plaudits, both in the live arena and for their recorded output (on Berlin techno mecca Tresor and Paris imprint Desire, respectively). Deep recalls Sergie Rezza’s concert debut, three years ago at the Institute du Monde Arabe in Paris, as an extraordinary and exciting experience. He takes pride in the way his projects combine old and new technologies.

“We draw from both worlds,” he says. “Ableton Live is our main sequencer but I love old samplers such as the Ensoniq EPS or ASR series, also the Ensoniq DP/4 Multi-Effects Unit or the Eventide H3000. That’s the sort of vintage equipment we like to combine with the digital world. We have the [Akai] MPC1000 for the road as it’s easy to load samples from different origins.

We have two or three drum machines, usually two [Roland Aira] TR-8s because they’re reliable and easy to use, plus a [Roland Aira] TB-3 for acid parts. We don’t carry around our original [Roland] TB303. And there’s a set of two Livid DS1 controllers, as we feel their faders have a bit of an organic touch, and a Midas Venice F24 as our onstage mixer.”

While Deep built his reputation on the dancefloors of Paris, more recently it’s his Deeply Rooted label that’s been getting him attention. With flavoursome releases from Jonas Kopp and Zadig, as well as a forthcoming showcase night at FUSE in Brussels in December, the labels’ on something of a roll. He also used to have a label called House Music Records that reissued lost classics but the admin side became too much hassle. Staying true to the underground roots of techno and house remains supremely important, though, as is made clear by his love of vinyl.

“The record stores in Paris are full of kids but I don’t see my DJ friends there,” he says with a smile. “However, I buy around 50 vinyl records a week, not all of them dance music.”

He doesn’t play vinyl out, though, finding that almost all clubs are now set up in such a way it’s impossible to do so without hours of sound-checking first. Instead he digitizes the records.

“I play vinyl on USB stick, recorded through a mixer I helped conceive, the E&S DJR 400 Rotary Mixer, going to Pro Tools, EQing them, making them good. I can promise that vinyl played by a blue needle on a Pioneer turntable won’t sound as good as my recording of the exact same vinyl via Pioneer CDJ3000.” He admits he’d prefer to play vinyl as he did when he was coming up, but it just isn’t practical now. Still, at least his current system is more conducive than CDs.

“I would get so disorganised,” he recalls. “I didn’t find it easy to locate material because I’d have these wallets, so many wallets, and I’d get lost with them. Kerri Chandler was the one who convinced me of the vinyl-USB route. He told me, ‘I know how much time you spend sorting out vinyl, digitizing it – if you plug those machines digitally to the mixer, you’re going to kill it!’.”

The E&S DJR 400 Rotary Mixer, which Deep worked on with Jerôme Barbé, was not his only foray into technological innovation. He also worked, a few years back, with Rémi Dury, one of the last students of Pierre Schaeffer, the great French ‘Musique Concrete’ electronic musician, on the Karlax MIDI-controller, a digital instrument which reacted to movement. It offered an astonishing new way of creating and presenting music. Deep found, however, that the techno community was wary of this strange, utterly original development. It leads him back, once again, to the theme of originality in techno and house.

“Without wishing to sound negative, things have become very polished,” he says. “I like it when the music is quite challenging, innovative and sonically rugged, and I try to play the sounds of producers such as Kareem, Surgeon and Blawan. I suppose what a lot of younger producers are doing is making tributes to the old sound of techno and house, appropriating it for themselves, but I want to be surprised by how we invent the techno of tomorrow. I like the music of 20 years ago but like to be challenged by new music and new sounds.”

DJ Deep has remained at the forefront of both DJing and technological development in the dance world for a quarter of a century. Whatever comes next, expect him to be deep into it.

DJ Deep’s 2017 Deeply Rooted Showcases begin with Robert Hood at Rex Club on January 28