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‘I will never trade a conversation against a sunset’ ... Philippe Zdar.
‘I will never trade a conversation against a sunset’ ... Philippe Zdar. Photograph: Foc Kan/Getty Images
‘I will never trade a conversation against a sunset’ ... Philippe Zdar. Photograph: Foc Kan/Getty Images

Philippe Zdar: a studio master who gave pop a peerless joie de vivre

This article is more than 4 years old
Laura Snapes

The French producer has died after a freak accident – but leaves a legacy as a bon viveur who sprinkled everyone from Phoenix to Kanye West with his magic

Philippe Zdar knew about the beauty of chance moments. On his first day as a tea boy at Studio Marcadet on the outskirts of Paris in the late 1980s, he earned respect when it turned out that, improbably, he was the only person present who knew how to roll a spliff. On his third day, Jane Birkin came to record, before a performance that night. She was suffering from chronic back pain and required a cortisone shot that nobody knew how to administer. The show would be cancelled if she didn’t get it. Zdar, fresh from his national service stint as an army nurse, volunteered to inject her. You can picture the scene: French music veterans holding their breath as a young scrapper performs DIY medicine on a national icon. It worked: the show went on, and studio owner Dominique Blanc-Francard hired the young Zdar.

After providing nascent productions for French rapper MC Solaar alongside Hubert Blanc-Francard (AKA Boom Bass), Zdar had a revelation on a dancefloor: in December 1992, he took ecstasy at a rave and realised he had to pursue his love of Detroit techno and Chicago house. He was encouraged by an offer from James Lavelle of Mo’ Wax to release his and Blanc-Francard’s Solaar productions as instrumental tracks. In 1994, the pair released two influential EPs of house, techno, hip-hop and breakbeat as La Funk Mob, before forming Cassius. Zdar also formed Motorbass with Étienne de Crécy, and helped define the sample-heavy, filtered take on house that would become known as French touch. But he turned down label deals, and remained sceptical of the scene and the speed with which this new sound coalesced into cliche.

His core project became Cassius, who created one of the defining French touch tracks: 1999, anchored by a voluptuous disco bassline amid a tornado of ghostly vocal samples. But Cassius were so much bigger than that one track: Feeling for You struck a chord with UK garage fans, and The Sound of Violence showed the breadth of their ambition, bringing in rock dynamics that would inspire Justice (and the bloghouse wave, and later EDM) and David Guetta to pursue that combination, albeit to very different ends.

An incident in the midst of this scene could have nixed what would become Zdar’s most fruitful collaboration outside of Cassius. At a party at cult Paris boutique Colette, he spied the four young men of Phoenix lingering in a hallway, and the two parties took an instant dislike to one another, assuming arrogant dispositions. Yet, his interest piqued by their demos, Zdar agreed to parachute in and attempt to save the disintegrating recording sessions for the group’s debut album in 1999. The record, United, was rescued and a brotherhood was born, fully flourishing a decade later when Zdar co-produced the group’s breakout album, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix. That wasn’t the plan: he had lent Phoenix his studio – literally a building site at the time – to work on the record at their leisure. As Zdar popped in and out to collect records for DJ slots, he offered the band transformative bits of advice. They asked him to come on board properly. The album became an era-defining smash and won the 2010 Grammy award for best alternative album.

When I interviewed Zdar this year, he reflected on the moment they were told that the album had gone gold after Phoenix’s headline performance at New York City’s vast Madison Square Garden arena. He was incredulous that music had taken him from his childhood as a Sex Pistols-obsessed drummer in the Savoie region of the western Alps, where he was born Philippe Cerboneschi, to making a record that prompted his other childhood heroes the Beastie Boys to ask him to produce their next album. To his immense pride, they had recognised how he mixed heavy bass with airy lightness on Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix. That night, he said, he was so overwhelmed that he had to go and drink alone in a bar, weeping into his whisky.

Zdar, second from right, with other stars of the French touch scene: Busy P, Gaspard Auge of Justice, DJ Mehdi and Boom Bass. Photograph: Michael Tullberg/Getty Images

It is not hard to see why Phoenix and the Beastie Boys – and a list of collaborators not limited to Cat Power, Kanye West, Franz Ferdinand, Pharrell Williams, Hot Chip, Kindness, OneRepublic and Fatboy Slim – wanted to work with Zdar. As well as being a veritable Zelig of French music innovation at the turn of the century, from rap to electro-rock, he was, to hear his peers describe him, the epitome of the bon viveur, a man of such precise taste that he could recommend the best kind of pepper and who maintained a fridge stacked with champagne even while the rest of his studio was a safety hazard.

He bought the studio, which he renamed Motorbass, in 2000, and demolished everything but the vintage equipment to prevent himself from getting comfortable – going a step too far when he smashed the toilet and realised that it was probably an essential item, offensive design or not. Everything he earned he put back into rebuilding the studio, importing the wood used to make Gibson guitars and stone from Java to improve the acoustics. Unsurprisingly, the studio is now renowned among musicians for the elegance of its design and rarity of its analogue equipment. Zdar’s joie de vivre was equally evident in his music. Cassius’s records were bumptious and bright, and in the 2000s they sampled Tom Zé, and made the unlikely yet brilliant move of recasting Cat Power as a diva house vocalist on their 2016 album Ibifornia.

Zdar’s dedication to pleasure stemmed from two things, he told me: losing his father as a child, and surviving cancer in his 20s. After that, he decided life was for eating well (more than one profile of Zdar describes his refined sweet tooth), celebrating family and friends, and taking a holiday whenever he deemed it necessary for his process. He wouldn’t work with anyone who didn’t understand that necessity, nor anyone evidently chasing an easy hit after he became successful. Cassius turned down Madonna when a collaboration request came via her manager. If she had asked directly, Zdar said, he would have invited her to the studio immediately. Connection was more important than work. “I will never trade a conversation against a sunset,” he once told the Fader.

Zdar died falling from a high window in Paris. It feels immensely cruel that a freak accident has claimed the life of someone so dedicated to seizing the moment and at such a young age (he was thought to be 52). If there is any consolation to be found after this premature loss, it is that Zdar wrung every drop of life from what precious little he had of it.

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