Belle Deejay

Behold la double vie de Chloé Thevenin. A revered deejay, she is one of the first to bring the spare clicks and bumps of Detroit techno to the Parisian club scene. Yet she is also a sensitive, introspective musician who, after late nights and long weekends, likes to mellowly play folk tunes on her guitar and tinker with delicate electronic sounds on her computer. Her first album, 2007's The Waiting Room, was suffused with a quiet, typically French suggestiveness, inducting listeners into a world of muted beats and sonic experimentation (she spent the early 2000s studying electroacoustics at Paris’s Academy of Music). This spring Chloé (her professional mononym) releases One in Other, an expansive, thoughtful follow-up to her debut combining elements of folk, minimal techno and dub, all with a swooning, sighing sense of phrasing that recalls fellow Parisians Serge Gainsbourg and Air. “In my productions I feel I have no limits or rules,” she says. “I’m not obliged to make dance-floor tracks.” One in Other was influenced by the process of turning The Waiting Room into a live show in which Thevenin would create improvised sound collages using clips from her back catalog of remixes and productions. In advance of the album release by Kill The DJ in Europe and the US on May 17, Chloé will play a showcase on April 15 at Paris boutique Colette.