Paris-based DJ and producer Francois X has released a new EP, Bound States, through his XX LAB imprint.
The four-track EP, which was released on 19 June, follows on from a series of recent releases on XX LAB, including Digital Fever, CEO, Straight Edge Society and The Skin Between Us.
Francois X describes Bound States as “a series of states, fully formed, fully lived, where years of immersion have dissolved into instinct. The EP captures the moment where external noise disappears completely, leaving only a deeply internalised connection to music, shaped through decades of listening, club culture and physical experience.”
A core theme of the release is the relationship between Black American dance music traditions and European club culture – a “natural continuation of a living history”, as he puts it.
“What interests me is not recreating the past, it is understanding how these emotional codes, philosophies and physical experiences can continue to evolve inside contemporary techno without losing their essence,” he says. “For me, techno and house have never simply been a musical genre. It is a cultural memory, a form of transmission, an emotional architecture, a way of inhabiting space, sound and even the body itself.
“With Bound States, I wanted to avoid two traps that often exist in electronic music today: on one side, a caricatural form of old-school revivalism that reduces history to aesthetics; on the other, a contemporary techno culture that sometimes feels disconnected from its roots, detached from the deeper lineage that originally gave this music its emotional and cultural force. The project exists somewhere in between those two extremes: fully modern, but deeply rooted.”
The release is accompanied by visual artwork that references his 2022 EP Digital Fever, in keeping with the visual language associated with XX LAB. XX LAB was founded in 2021, and serves as François X’s platform for music, design and multimedia projects, as well as enabling the artist to explore themes connected to club culture, identity and technology.
Francois X – Bound States is out now on XX LAB. Check it out here.