Le Tone was French Touch’s arse between two seats
When you make a guess as to where an underground electronic music producer you have loved since the late 90s has disappeared to, presenting Top Gear France is somewhere near the very bottom of your thoughts. And yet that, improbably, is where I found Le Tone - aka French producer Yann Larret-Menezo - hiding in plain sight in the 2020s. It’s like discovering that Stacy Kidd has popped up hosting The Traitors.
Perhaps, though, in a way, this bizarre career trajectory suits Le Tone, who always was the oddball’s oddball among the French Touch crop of the mid 90s, a producer whose debut release was on the epochal Source Lab 2 compilation in 1996, alongside Daft Punk, Air, Dimitri from Paris and Alex Gopher, with the weirdly rattling jazz of Bomb De Bretagne (Bombe Breizh), and who would later sign to Creation Records at its Oasis-led pomp.
When you listen to Le Tone’s music - and especially his 1999 debut album Le Petit Nabab - it is pretty clear that this is a producer who really doesn’t give a toss what conventional music thinking would have of him, the album kicking off with Intro, an outlandish slice of barnyard hip hop that combines a classic Beach Boys sample with assorted animal noises, telephone calls, lilting piano roll and a genuinely filthy synth line that could, in other hands, be taking a drum & bass banger further down the K Hole. It sounds awful when you describe it. But Intro is charm personified.
Le Tone, who I tracked down via his website, says that his music is “le cul entre deux chaises” - literally “the arse between two seats”, an expression that basically applies to something stuck in the middle of two opposing ideas.
“I think when you make ‘instrumental’ music or music with sampled parts, you need to produce very differently than you do with ‘pop songs’,” he explains, via email. “Every sound can be the lead of the track and you have to cherish it like you would do a singer. It’s a question of the charisma of the sound you find, I think.”
His music, he adds, is like his mind: “bright but not mainstream”. And this is one of the most unique things about Le Tone. Our idea of experimental music is often dark and brooding, menacing drones meeting stumbling beats; and because this sonic language is so established, we tend to accept that weird = dark = weird and get on with it.
But, if you think about it, there’s actually no reason why this should be the way, no logic behind the idea that dark music is more experimental, and, in fact, plenty of evidence the other way, such as the early records of electronic music pioneer Jean-Jacques Perrey and his Ondioline, which were often borderline hilarious. (See Chicken on the Rocks and Barnyard in Orbit.)
Le Tone offered another rebuke to this idea, right when dark music was among its most fashionable. (1999, lest we forget, was when drum & bass was entering its most objectionable phase, while techno was still dominated by the fearsome loops of Jeff Mills et al.) Le Tone’s music is ultra light, utterly happy and ultra weird, which makes for a thrilling combination, even if you might have to re-programme your musical brain to appreciate it.
“Very often for people ‘dark’ means ‘sensitive’ and ‘bright’ is immature (or not so serious),” Le Tone says. “We all know that to be very funny you need to be sensitive! But life is hard and I think a lots of people find something that talks to them in dark music.”
Jean-Jacques Perrey is a useful comparison. Le Tone’s first full record, 1997’s superb Jean Jacques Et Les Dauphins EP, is, in fact a homage to Perry, combining the synth pioneer’s experimentally quirky, ultra-bright melodies, with the hip hop influences that Le Tone had also grown up with.
“In 1989 I started singing hip hop in a band,” Le Tone says. “I started off making artwork for them. They were called L.I.S. Quite soon I felt the need to make my own tracks for my own songs. I bought a sampler, an Akai S1000 and started making tracks with Cubase on my Atari ST. I really enjoyed making music with that kind of tool, it was very close to the graphic universe were I was: small pieces of Lego assembled together. But my ears acted wildly sometimes and I never had a musical education or whatever before.”
Le Tone explains that he first met Perrey through his roommate David Chazam, who was making the Indicatif Spatial album with the veteran musician. “JJ was very kind,” he says. “We chatted a lot and I made him listen to all the hip hop bands who had sampled his music (Gangstarr, House of Pain etc.) Then I decided to make a tribute to him.”
Perrey, of course, was also an influence on Air (with whom he later collaborated) and the sharp scratches on Jean Jacques Et Les Dauphins were probably just enough to keep Le Tone’s outlandish edges within the bounds of Parisian cool. Brilliantly, though, Le Tone would only get odder as he released his debut album, Le Petit Nabab in 1999. It is a record that both stands out like a sore thumb among the French Touch hordes and also, in a way, makes a lot of French Touch sense.
Joli Dragon, the album’s stand-out track, might be a bouncing ball of operatic vocal samples, synth squelch patchwork and the sweetest spoken word you can imagine, but it also has a tight house beat, coming off a little like Mr Oizo’s Flat Beat meeting Pepe Bradock at his most abstruse, if both characters had been entirely stripped of any lingering bad vibes. The song even has a happy ending, for god’s sake, as Judith Chancel, the song’s narrator, finally locates the beautiful dragon she has been looking for.
In fact, Pepe Bradock, Mr Oizo and the Micronauts are about the closest points of comparison I can find for Le Tone circa Le Petit Nabab: Bradock for the use of esoteric sample material and the sense of humour - the freakish howling on Expression du domaine de la Lutte is very Pepe Bradock - Micronauts for the air of bleeps and low-end that hangs over the album’s jollity and Mr Oizo for the grotesque but catchy synth hooks that run throughout the album.
There is a touch of Dimitri from Paris, too, in the album’s loungey air and occasional dips into jazz and reggae, as on Pietrafitta, a reggae-influenced lurch that only a French producer could make without driving us all insane. Add to that a lightly-worn yet clearly important hip hop influence in the beats, samples and scratches - a little like Teki Latex’s rap crew TTC - and you have the lion’s share of the album’s sound.
Or at least you think you do until Le Tone throws into a pointed air of drum & bass on Mauvaise Graine, a breakbeat lounge number with an absolutely ridiculous bass noise, like a worm chewing through a sewage pipe. As someone who lived in France in 1999, when this album was released, I can say that French drum & bass in this period was extremely rare: the genre never really caught on in France like it did in its Britannic neighbour and Le Tone is one of a very small number of French producers to make any kind of impact with a drum & bass sound.
“I think it was a period when ‘instrumental music’ could have a massive impact,” Le Tone says of his debut album. “And everybody felt free to experiment or liberate in making music.”
Le Petit Nabab sold well in France, Germany and Japan and, if Creation didn’t quite get the next Daft Punk they were looking for, Le Tone says the relationship worked. Later albums would see him retreat somewhat from the sunshine quirk of Le Petit Nabab as he came under the influence of Indian music, which he wove rather beautifully into hip-hop-ish beats on his 2006 album En Inde (“In India” - where he was, in fact, living at the time.)
And yet you can, if you squint, maybe see some of Le Tone’s music as a precursor to the dayglo ultra-humour of hyperpop acts like 100 gecs, his tendency to jam together sounds that other producers might consider beyond the pale in fascinatingly vivid shapes like a kind of hyperpop avant la lettre. (I recently compared Barcelona weirdo beatmaster Asra3’s liquid reggaeton production to Le Tone and he said he liked the comparison.)
Does that make Le Tone a 2024 kind of act? I’m not entirely sure. I don’t think I can really see Le Tone fitting in anywhere that would have him, nor would he really want to. The fact that he works for Top Gear France makes absolutely no sense; but then little in the world of Le Tone ever did.
Le Tone says he looks back on the French Touch times with fondness. “I liked this period a lot,” he says. “I was free to make my music, my first daughter, my first car… I was so proud to sign a record deal!… It was the beginning of my life.”
I ask him, to end, what role he played in the French Touch. “I don’t know really because I feel excluded from all the ‘remembering’ stuff about French Touch,” he says. “I sold too many records to be underground but not enough to be in the Premier league. LOL. ‘Le cul entre 2 chaises’.”
But what greater place to be? Arse stuck between two chairs, with one of France’s most intriguing electronic music producers.
Some listening
Anish Kumar - Everything Blooms Around Her
House music is a wonderfully adaptable beast, hoovering up the influence of everything from country music to hard rock in its endless thirst for four four thrills. Anish Kumar’s Everything Blooms Around Her is a wonderful example of this, with the song based around a Nepali ballad “of a mother singing to her child to observe the valleys around her adorned with flowers and beauty”. Frankly, the ballad itself would probably make wonderful listening. But you probably couldn’t really dance to it, which you certainly can to Kumar’s production, as he twists rumbling bass and springing drums around the mother’s spell-binding song.
Sometimes I want to throw myself to the floor and start crying at how simple and beautiful house music can be. A case in point: Night Train by Kyiv-via-Chicago-via Berlin producer Alinka. The song reverberates around the kind of borderline nasty descending bass riff that so many rave acts made their own, the kind of riff you’d think anyone could hammer out in their sleep but so people actually do well, to which it adds a thumping house beat, cut-up vocal and occasional melodic twist for an ultra catchy house stomp delight.
Worm is well named. The song - part of the Snake EP, apparently Nikki Nair’s most personal work to date - writhes around in the electronic filth like Mr. Oizo gone punk, twitching and turning and swallowing dirt as it traces irresistible patterns of funk. Worm is both totally weird and a guaranteed hit, which is a winning combination.