Techno Tuesday: POPOF on falling in love with technoTechno Tuesdays

Techno Tuesday: POPOF on falling in love with techno

Techno Tuesday is a feature on Dancing Astronaut documenting the culture of underground dance music. We’ll bring you exclusive interviews, tracks, and narratives from artists within the techno, tech house, and deep house world in an effort to shed light on some of the best talent outside the world of mainstream dance music.

For the inaugural edition of Techno Tuesday, we’ve got French legend Alexandre Paounov (POPOF) in the building. Paounov was a pioneering figure in France’s rave scene in the ’90s and has been a leading figure in the minimal world ever since. Last week, he released his new album Love Somebody on Jamie Jones and Lee Foss’s Hot Creations — the first long-player of the year for the imprint.

POPOF’s relationship with dance music began in the ’90s as a member of the free-party underground collective Heretik System in Paris.

The purpose was to organize illegal and free parties, thus contributing for many years to the development of the Rave and Free party movement in France. Today, we are considered by many as one of the pillars of the French underground scene, thanks to numerous incredible rave parties we organized – notably at Bercy freight station and at the Piscine Molitor swimming pool.”

Inspired by tracks like Jeff Mills’ “The Bells” and free party sound system Spiral Tribe, POPOF developed a signature techno sound that has helped shaped his long-standing artistic identity. With his new album, however, POPOF was afforded the chance to change things up a bit: “I’ve been composing club-oriented dancefloor music since the beginning, and this album project allowed me to create tracks with a calmer side to them.”

One of the standout tracks from the album includes a collaboration alongside Miss Kittin. Like the rest of the album, it explores a bit of novel territory for POPOF while still maintaining his minimal footprint.

“I’ve always liked listening to various musical genres depending on specific moments in my life, such as jazz, funk, hip-hop or rock music. All these different influences have obviously left their imprint on the music I create nowadays.”

Signing the album to Hot Creations was a natural fit:

“Jamie Jones & Lee Foss’  Hot Creations label one I love and respect tremendously, so I sent them about thirty different tracks and they liked what they heard. Later on, we selected together the tracks that corresponded musically the most with the label’s identity and we came up with ‘Love Somebody’– something I’m really happy about.”

POPOF’s Love Somebody is out now.

Purchase: Beatport

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