French artist Agoria might be marking 30 years in electronic music this year, but over the course of his career he has been all too eager to stray from the discipline, working across art, film and technology, as well as being an early adopter of AI’s creative potential.
This year marks the 10th anniversary of his Sapiens imprint, founded in 2016, with the label’s 100-plus releases to date spanning club music, ambient, political content and spoken word – as idiosyncratic as its founder, in other words.
His latest release is a remix of his classic track Scala by Vintage Culture, which was released on Sapiens on 11 September, and will be the first in a series of reinterpretations set for release on the label. Check it out here. 909originals caught up with him.
Thanks for talking to us. Let’s start with your latest release, the Vintage Culture remix of Scala, which was first released about 12 or 13 years ago. How did that come together?
Vintage Culture sent me an edit, after I saw someone playing it. I thought it would be a shame not to release it, because it’s a very good re-edit of the original, in his own way of production. It’s more clubby, but it’s very efficient, and the sound is huge.
It comes not long after you reached the 100-release mark on Sapiens, as well as marking the label’s 10-year anniversary. When you started the label in 2016, I came across a quote of yours in which you said you were seeking to convey a ‘free, rebellious and intimate voice’. Do you think you’ve achieved that? Has it lived up to your expectations?
Yes and no. At the initial stage, I was really into many kinds of experiences.
I released some records that were only speeches – no music, only political speeches. Every experiment I did was something very pleasant for me, but I also felt that the club scene was not really ready, or not really into these kinds of experimentations. So, Sapiens became more like a club music label.
I have always had one artist name – Agoria. I have always refused to be catalogued in one style or another, and I know that for some period of my artistic life, people were a bit lost, because when you do techno for two years, people think you’re going to keep with techno, or when you do house, people think you’re going to keep with house.
The good thing about being an electronic artist is that you can be very curious, and because producing is relatively easy, you can do so many different things.
When I play as a DJ, people might not know what to expect. I remember some critics saying at the time when I was doing a lot of mix CDs, like the Balance mix, or the Fabric mix CDs, ‘Well, Agoria is the only one who was able to match tracks that are not supposed to match.’
That’s something that I liked, because DJing, in a way, is easy. If you want to play house for two or three hours, same vibes, same drums, you set a mood, and the same goes for any kind of music. I’m not saying everyone can do it, but I don’t think it’s very difficult.
But when you have a long set – when you have the chance to play for four hours or more, you can definitely go for different genres. I love to express myself through different genres and different kinds of music, because that’s how I am.
I’m surrounded by artists, I’m surrounded by philosophers, I’m surrounded by scientists, by coders, and that creates who I am. And it’s the same with music. I’m very open.
I’m not saying it’s good or bad. Some artists do the same kind of music all their life, and they are perfectly fine with it, and they go very deep into it, and every time it might be better than the time before. It’s their own thing, and I totally respect that. But on my own, when I finish a track, I want to do a track that sounds like something opposite.
So, when I started the label, I took a similar approach. The first release was a Balearic piano track, and then there was a cover of Oxia – Domino, and then a Maceo Plex remix of Dino Lenny, and then an ambient album by Stefan Smith, and then a political speech.
The label has evolved a lot during these 10 years, and I think it’s much more focused now.
The way you’re describing it, it sounds like you’re a bit disappointed that you had to make it club focused? That the experimentation was really what made the label in the early days.
I think there’s nothing to be disappointed about, because I really love what I did, and I really love the projects. You can’t force an audience to follow something if they’re not into it. Maybe if I was 25, I would say, ‘wow, shit, they don’t like it’, or whatever. No, I’m fine with it.
You never know what project is going to work. You never know what’s going to be a success. You never know what’s going to be a classic, or what’s going to be trendy in a period of time.
So I’m fine with it, and I totally understand that with people, there’s such a mass of information – so many things are visible, every single minute. It’s very difficult just to get visibility. People might never see your message.
So instead of keeping on pushing something that I know is difficult to get, I try to keep my projects separate. That’s the same with my art – it’s very different from my music. When I do an exhibition at Musée d’Orsay, for example, it’s very different from what I’m doing as a DJ or as an electronic musician.
And on both sides, I have the same reactions. From the art world, they say, ‘oh, but you’re also a DJ. Like, is it possible to be a DJ and an artist?’ And in the music industry, people say, ‘oh, have you stopped doing music?’ I do realise that you can’t expect people to be that open-minded for you.
I think that I understand artists very well because people try to reduce artists to one single thing. And by definition, an artist is complex. By definition, there is no easy artist. Or if there is, he or she is trying to fake it. Being an artist is very different from simplicity. It is what it is.
Every culture has an idea of what an artist should be. If you ask me ‘what is an artist’, my own definition is that it’s someone who is expressing through different areas.
Otherwise, you’re more a specialist than an artist. If you’re a specialist in one thing, then that’s fine. But if you look at the biggest artists in the world, they touch so many different areas.
I think it’s good for your brain, most of all. Sometimes, when you spend a week talking about after-parties and technology, you’re like, ‘OK, that’s fine’. But then you need to get out and do something else, like have a dinner with a scientist, speaking about molecules, or bacteria that can change the world. That’s very healthy for your brain. For my brain, particularly.
Also, that’s why I named the label Sapiens. The world nowadays is a difficult place. Because of social media, if you speak loudly, people can think that you are as smart as a specialist in a particular area. It’s very difficult to know the truth, very difficult to know what’s right.
As a result, people have totally lost this sense of gradients of nuance. It’s always black or white. And that’s terrible, because there are so many different gradients between black and white.
You mentioned keeping your art discipline very separate from your musical discipline. Did you come into art through the lens of music, or was it always there at the same time, concurrently? Were you always making art and music under two different personas?
There are two people that really pushed me to start doing things in art. The first one is Nicolas Becker, who won an Oscar for the sound of the movie The Sound of Metal. I collaborated a lot with him, doing some exhibitions, performing.
I also worked with Philippe Parreno, who is one of the major artists, nowadays, in contemporary art. We worked on an installation in the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern, and then we did Armory Park in New York for a few months.
After that, I started to have ideas on my own. So I started to do some painting, some photos. I did a few exhibitions at Art Basel, in Miami, in Paris. And then COVID happened, so we were locked down. That led me to embrace digital culture, the digital art culture.
From that, I had the chance to do an exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, which is one of my favourite museums in the world. That was the first indication that ‘ok, now I have stepped into the art world’. And it was mind-blowing, because we had 100,000 visitors.
That was described as a ‘bioregenerative art installation’. What is bioregenerative art – how do you define that?
That was actually defined by my collectors. Through the process of my art collections, they define it.
One of the two pieces we did at the Musée d’Orsay was actually made in a bioreactor. We were studying yeast for six months in a bioreactor. We made a film of what happened, and that was projected at the Musée d’Orsay.
Before that, I don’t know if you know this, but I’ve worked with AI since 2010, so like 16 years.
This was way before became really hyped, and before the tools were really easy to use. We created a model that tried to find in my art what we couldn’t see with our own eyes.
I’ve read previous interviews where you’ve talked about the augmenting capabilities of artificial intelligence as something that doesn’t ‘replace’, but ‘shines a new light on’ how things are created. Where do you stand on the AI debate today, considering how much AI is influencing our lives, and indeed the criticism of AI-generated art and music?
Music-wise, I think that globally, the beauty of AI is to do things that we can’t do as humans. That means two things.
So, if you’re a musician, actually, you don’t really need AI, because you can do it by yourself. It’s not something that is really useful for you, and you might be a bit sceptical, so I totally get it.
If you’re not a musician, it’s a fantastic tool to achieve what you have in your mind. Because you might have an idea of how to make it, you might have the idea to create it. That’s a bit of a punk vision of it, but it’s amazing that everyone is able to create things they have in their mind.
Even if there are only 0.1% of people that can achieve fantastic things with it, that’s fine with me. AI is still in the hands of humans.
Do you think AI could help to unlock a musician’s thought processes more elaborately, where they have an idea they’re trying to tease out and they lean on AI to extrapolate that? Or do you think, when it comes to music, it’s a wholly creative process and AI only gets in the way?
I have a different vision, in a sense, in that when I use AI, it’s not to replace the work I could do in the studio. When I use AI in music, it’s to make projects that I wasn’t able to do before.
For example, I did a project with Ela Minus – What If The Dead Dream? – where every time you press play, you have another version of the song. Every time you press play, you might have a version with Ela Minus’ voice, you might not, you might have a three-minute song, a four-minute song, you might have an intro of 30 seconds, or no intro. Every time, the version is different.
Recently, I did an upgrade of this where you could, as a listener, choose the version you like. You can curate the exact version you want. If you want to have an infinite song, if you want to be lobotomised by it, it’s your choice. You can have an infinite version of it.
The track will never repeat itself. You will never have the same chorus. It’s always changing.
Okay, so the use of AI is very much around the listening experience as opposed to the creation.
Exactly, but it still happens in the creative process because you need to make sure that it’s musical.
You need to make sure that there’s not something off, that you can have some weird effects or weird moments, but it’s still musical. It could descend into chaos, but it’s still musical. The difficult part of this project was to find the grace through the chaos and make sure that it’s always listenable. I love to use AI to do things that I was not supposed to do.
I’m thinking of that piece, As Slow As Possible by John Cage, which is to be played over 600 years or something like that.
I have a project in mind – maybe I’ll do it, maybe I won’t – where every time you press play, the song is disintegrating. So it’s like a good bottle of wine. The more you listen to it, just as the more you drink it, the less you have of it. There’s something that I love in the idea, because I like to use things in the opposite way that people tend to use them.
AI is synonymous with information. But what if it was the opposite? If you love a song, then think twice before you listen to it, as it will be gone soon.
I want to revive that desire for music, because while it hasn’t disappeared, the affection we have for music moves so fast now. Sometimes you have a track that’s a hit for two weeks, and then you move on to something else. So you lose the love of the music a little bit.
This is why people are buying physical music again, and why vinyl is so popular, because it’s tangible, it’s not throwaway.
And there’s something mechanical about it. When you sit through a turntable to listen to a track, you will listen to it. When you put on a Spotify playlist, you will take call, write an email, speak with your friends. I’m not saying you need to be in a church and listen to music like a nun, but there’s another way of listening to music when it’s a vinyl, compared to when it’s an audio file.
I won’t say AI is good or bad, because it’s both. It’s not black or white. AI can be fabulous, AI can be tremendous, but in the meantime, we need AI to be the expression of diversity. So that’s why I’m saying to every artist, use AI. Not because you ‘have to’ use AI, but because if you’re an artist, you will bring diversity to AI.
Otherwise, these models will keep running and running on themselves, and then you will have information that will be very average, and the result will be very average. As much as artists are people think out of the box, they will use AI to do things that are crazy, or different.
Your career has had several chapters. You organised underground parties in Lyon, then you broke through as an artist, and then you experimented into art and fashion and film. Is there a common thread, would you say, that connects all periods, all aspects of your career? Is there a certain approach or a way of doing things that runs through all your work?
It’s a very good question. I just moved to Marrakech. I’m appealed by the desert. I don’t know what sort of project is going to be birthed here, but there will be something.
I mean, when I was living in Lyon, it was the moment where all the rave parties were cancelled, so I created a festival to make sure people could still enjoy electronic music. When I moved to Italy, I went into fashion. I was music director of the brand Courrèges.
Then when I moved back to Paris, I met a fantastic woman named Brigitte Maccioni, the CEO and President of UGC [Union Générale Cinématographique], and I was really into cinema. Through this, I met Nicolas Becker, who brought me into art. I love networking.
You absorb the location, it seems, everywhere you go. You absorb the mood.
And that’s why I moved to Marrakech now, to change to a totally different culture, because I want to try something, again, different.
And you don’t know what that is yet. I guess you’re just being open-minded.
We’ll see. But I can already feel that something’s going to happen.
To finish, I wanted to focus on a track that meant a lot to me when it came out. This year marks the 25th anniversary of the release of La Onzième Marche, which came out on Tekmics and then on PIAS. It obviously went on to be massive, and established you to a certain degree as an artist. What do you remember from its release?
I didn’t know it was the 25th anniversary. There are so many anniversaries this year…!
What I can remember is that before it came out on PIAS, when it was on Tekmics, it was a big fail. Nobody liked it. Maybe only two or three DJs, like DJ Hell, Laurent Garnier… very few DJs were playing it.
That’s like what I said at the beginning, it’s difficult to know what makes a success or not. And then PIAS licensed it, and it was a big success. I can’t explain this.
Okay, so there was nothing different from the original Tekmics version?
Maybe the production was a bit different, but honestly, it really didn’t change much.
Most of my friends were saying they preferred the Tekmics version, of course, because they were really purists, but I don’t know, I like both versions. Honestly, it’s pretty much the same track.
When you said nothing happened with it, were you happy with it? Did you think you had something there?
When I released it the first time, I was doing a lot of loop-based tracks. I was obsessed by Jeff Mills and those PurposeMaker records of his, which were four or five minutes of loops, loops, loops. Also producers like Steve Bicknell.
So I was making tracks to try to sound like that. And then one day, I put a melody on top, and it was the eleventh loop. I called it ‘The Eleventh March’ – La Onzième Marche.
I sent it to The Hacker – he had the likes of Oxia and Miss Kittin on his label, Goodlife – and he said, ‘oh, I’m not so sure’. Actually, about 10 years ago, he told me that there were two tracks he regrets not signing – this one and Vitalic’s Poney EP.
Yeah, it’s interesting you say that because, when it came out on PIAS, it was at same time as things like Vitalic, and all that Gigolo Records stuff – this electro-techno wave. Do you think there was an element of good timing, in the end as to why it took off the way it did?
Yes, maybe it was just a question of timing. Of course, maybe a bit of marketing too. But at that time, the money that people invested in marketing was very small compared to nowadays.
On Tekmics, I think we sold maybe 500 vinyls, very few. At that time it was practically nothing. And then on PIAS, maybe 40,000 vinyls. That looks insane today, thinking about it. I would love to sell 40,000 vinyls nowadays!
Agoria – Scala (Vintage Culture Remix) is out now. Check it out here.
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