Canblaster
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Cedric Steffens, aka Canblaster, the wild card of the Club Cheval
crew, grew up in Douai, Northern France, in the 1990s.
While in elementary school, his music-loving parents sent him at the
local music conservatory with his two sisters, where he learnt classical
piano. He also later followed a one-year jazz course, that'll give him,
several years after, the theoretical basis to understand R&B, which is
now one of his main influences. As a teenager, the young Cedric also
spent loads of time playing Sega Saturn and developed a fondness for the
aural aspect of video games - both the music and the sound design. Music
games like Beatmania and Freqency, which afford the gamer to play
virtual keyboards, show him the way to music-making.
At the same period - the early nineties -, he got into mainstream,
album-based electronic music classics like Daft Punk, Cassius,
Chemicals, Fatboy Slim and most specially Basement Jaxx, whom he revered
the ability to concentrate multiple influences in a very tight manner.
One has to mention Cedric has always been an album CD fiend, burned or
bought second-hand. He loves the freedom allowed by the format, and
often rather listens to interludes, skits or drum-less tracks than the
hits. For a long time, his ear has been much more oriented towards the
car-backseat-with-headphones experience than the dance floor.
When 'French Touch 2' broke through around 2005-2006, Cedric finally
decided to try producing club material after hearing labels like Ed
Banger and Institubes, dug deep into the brief history of French dance
music and actually happened to make tracks clumsily emulating Alan Braxe
or Vitalic. He then met fellow Club Cheval member Myd, while the both of
them were in audiovisual school, and sometimes helped him out for
technical issues in his then-band Sexual Earthquake. Canblaster's
work eventually came to blossom around 2008, when he chose to
incorporate British (garage, dubstep) and American (club rap, B-More,
Diplo) influences to his sound. Those new scenes were introduced to him
by two of Myd's friends, Panteros666 and Sam Tiba. The four boys then
feel they have to launch their own crew, and Club Cheval was born.
His first EP, called 'Jetpack', came out in 2010 and immediately
defined his very own touch : techno's mechanical proficiency melt with a
nippophile, romantic melodic sentimentality. 'Jetpack' soon was played
by major UK DJ Sinden, then by French DJ / vocalist / A&R Tekilatex.
Cedric was then quickly commissioned plenty of remixes - for Rusko, Drop
the Lime, Tekilatex & Para One, Spoek Mathambo or Style of Eye, just to
name a few. To him, a remix is much more than just a commission work :
his Basement Jaxx - inspired obsession for detail and tendency to baroque
overproduction, and his admiration for early Justice's remixes often make
him radically rework the originals, and the final products always sound
magical.
In 2011 his second EP came, 'Master of Complication' on the Nightshifters label. It confirms his taste for playful, sophisticated, start-stop structures - there's a megamix thing going on there, probably coming from his gaming days but also from old eurodance cassettes he used to listen as a young kid. A few months later, he released a third EP on Marble, the label created by former Institubes mainstays Para One, Surkin and Bobmo. 'Totem', as it was called, had three (very) different mixes of one same track. With Club Cheval, he released 2 EPs on Brodinski's Bromance Records and worked on his fourth EP 'Infinite' which was released on Marble in 2013.
More recently, Canblaster teams up with Lido for a collaborative
6 tracks EP called 'Superspeed', released on April 2015. The EP subtly
follows the idea of time (or lack of it) - a
concept Canblaster has previous experimented with throughout his
career ('Clockworks', 'Timemaster's Cronicles') and a notion that is
very close to his heart.
With his fellows from Club Cheval, he has just put the last touch to
their first album 'Discipline' which will be released later this year.
Canblaster now more than ever masterizes his tools and
imagination, and his aesthetic miraculously fuses spacey nerd
romanticism with architectural complexity : everything moves and goes
round and round, but stands still, as a dream-carrousel for entranced
kids and grown-ups.
As a DJ, Canblaster mixes straight house and techno to tracks
teeming micro-breaks, trompe l'oeil rushes, harmonic and rhythmic
paradoxes, and most definitely wants people to get down.
So check out his intense and exhilarating DJ skills if he comes in your
local area, and expect more and more stunning tracks from him in a near
future.
Canblaster