Are the true musical heroes those who go out on a limb and create challenging tracks that might not even work on the dancefloor? Or should we really be praising the hordes of blissfully instinctive slices of anonymity that flicker in and out of your favourite DJs set, happy to exist for the moment only? One producer who has thrown his hat in with the latter camp is Parisian native Shonky, who over the course of a dozen or so club-thumping remixes and EPs has managed to carve out a niche as a reliably playable producer.
Now comes a debut album, Time Zero, and the inevitable pressure to stretch the dance music form into an album format. The result is a typically Shonky-like blend of neatly-cut beats and sprightly dynamism that has an instinctive attention to patterns, so much so it’s unsurprising to learn that the hotly tipped 27-year old was something of a maths prodigy in his formative years. “Numbers were always really interesting to me,” he explains, “always exercising something different in your mind, things that you cannot see. It’s the same with electronic music – it takes you into another world.”
Like a perfectly flawed equation – or like the dude in π for those of us not blessed with such numerical dexterity – Shonky’s music is smart and sharply defined, yet strangely beguiling, and sometimes, in its own way, maddeningly intense. We caught up with him in his Berlin studio to talk about maths, memories, and music making.