He’s a mainstay of Dan Ghenacia’s label Freak n’Chic, he’s just released his debut album, Time Zero, and he’s done us an MP3 mix. Welcome to the spacey world of Shonky…
"The style of Time Zero is techno/hypno – it’s Shonky world.” So says Olivier Ducreux – aka Shonky – of his debut album, and it’s not a bad summation of Time Zero’s sound. For the last few years, the French DJ and producer has been making other-wordly sounds for the likes of Crosstown Rebels, Mobilee, Substatic and Reposal, winning plaudits from house and techno spinners along the way. But he really seems to have found his spiritual home on Dan Ghenacia's Freak n'Chic, and he really seems to have hit his stride with Time Zero. Olivier was first introduced to the Parisian dance scene via Dan Ghenacia's infamous Sunday Kwality Batofar parties. He studied mathematics for five years until he decided to become a full-time producer and DJ – releasing his first track on Freak n'Chic in 2005 and fast becoming a key player in the revival of the underground scene in Paris. We’re betting that you’re likely to hear a lot more of Shonky in the coming months, so we tracked him down for a chat, and managed to blag an MP3 mix off him too…
There’s a good buzz about Shonky just now. There must have been a lot of people waiting for this album.
There are a lot of artists who are going up all the time, and I think it’s difficult for people to focus on just one. People get interested in your music, but they can easily forget about you in two months. Unless you have fresh news for them, they’re like: “Who’s Shonky?” So I don’t want to focus on whether there’s a buzz about me – it’s just good to get good feedback about the album. I prefer not to ask too many questions beyond that.
There must be a lot of Shonky fans out there now though?
Are there? I don’t know. To be honest, up to the end of 2006, I made a lot of productions, but through 2007, I only did a few remixes for people like Tiefschwarz and Danton Eeprom. If I look back at my schedule for 2007, there aren’t a lot of releases because I was just focused on the album.
Was making the album a difficult process then?
The most difficult thing was the fact that I didn’t let anyone listen to any of the tracks until the album was finished. Most of the time, when I make a track, I send it to Dan and he’ll give me advice about the sound. He’ll let me know if it’s good or bad. But with the album, I didn’t let anyone here it. I wanted to just let people hear the whole project. So it was difficult to carry on without any advice, without knowing if the tracks were good or bad. When I sent the finished album to Dan, I didn’t know what to expect. That was a bit hard – I was quite stressed about that.
Do you think that working without Dan’s input changed your sound at all?
I think when you send music to someone and they say: “Yeah, that’s really good,” you relax a bit when you make your next record. And for me, that sometimes means your next record isn’t as good. I don’t know if it’s real or in my head, but that’s how I feel. So with Time Zero, I didn’t want to feel good after feedback from the first tracks, and then not work so hard on the others.
Is it true mathematics had a lot to do with the making of the album?
I studied maths for a long time, and that lets you see how you can build a track. It’s always good with music to break the rules, but I think it’s important to know them first. Mathematics helped me learn the rules. It’s taught me a lot about music. I read somewhere that Ricardo Villalobos studied mathematics too.
You’re in good company then?
Yeah, when I read that, I was like: “Ricardo did maths like me. Cool!”
The album has quite a theme to it – the whole spacey thing. What was the thinking behind that?
There’s no real reason for it. It’s just that whenever I was working on the album, I always ended up in the same sort of mood. I always start with a groove, then I add other elements to it, and I love those spacey sounds. My album is all techno tracks – there’s nothing downtempo or ambient – so it was more interesting to me to have a theme running through all the tracks.
It’s worked though, because a lot of albums lose themselves when they try to do too much.
It worked for me. Perhaps I’m not ready to make downtempo tracks – I think a lot of people can make those better than me. So it made sense to link the tracks on the album somehow. At the end, I wanted people to be able to see the tracks belong together, and the spacey sound does that. But you always have more to learn about production. For me, making music is really important, so you have to work hard to keep your music good. And for me, I never think my work is complete – I always think I could make it better. I spent a lot of time working on this project – but I have a lot more work to do before the next one.
Time Zero is out now on Freak n’Chic. Visit www.myspace.com/shonkar, www.freaknchic.com and www.myspace.com/freaknchic
CLICK HERE FOR SHONKY’S MP3 MIX…
