Etienne de Crécy

Etienne de Crécy

Etienne de Crécy is a French electronic music producer and DJ, born in Lyon in 1969. He moves from Marseille to Versailles in the mid-1980s and attends the same Jules Ferry college as Air and Alex Gopher.

He later works in Paris as a sound engineer at studio +XXX (plus thirty), where he meets Philippe Zdar of Cassius. He works with Zdar on the Motorbass album. With Alex Gopher, he also helps create the Solid label.

Albums and projects

His second album, Super Discount, is released in 1996 on Solid and features Air, Alex Gopher and other French artists. It includes tracks such as “Tout doit disparaître”, “Prix Choc” and “Tout à 10 Balles”. The album is widely seen as a key example of French touch, combining club-oriented house with a more electro sound. It receives very favourable reviews and sells over 200,000 copies.

Four years later he releases Tempovision. He describes it as a more mature record and, in his view, a blues album that reflects the electronic music of the period. The accompanying 3D animated videos for the singles are directed by his brother, Geoffroy de Crécy.

Eight years after the first Super Discount, he releases Super Discount 2 with the original team and Cassius. For this record he uses only old analogue instruments such as a TB303 and makes twelve electro-house-pop-new wave tracks aimed at clubs. The album continues the earlier Hard Discount idea, with track titles taken from peer-to-peer client names such as “Overnet” and “Napster”. The single “Someone like You” becomes a hit with house music listeners, and “Am I wrong” also stands out for its sample of Millie Jackson’s voice from “(If Loving You Is Wrong) I Don't Want to Be Right”.

Across his work, de Crécy is involved in a range of production projects and is associated with the development of the French touch scene on the international stage.