It’s an obvious first question but, for once, the obvious question has to be asked. Ludovic Navarre, where in the name of bejaysus have you been?
It's 15 years since the French producer last released an album, the multimillion-selling and much acclaimed Tourist collection, so there must be quite a story to tell about his years away from the coalface. Was Navarre on the doss? Was he on a very long holiday? Just where the hell did he go?
It turns out that he didn’t actually go anywhere at all.
"I've been at home, but I've been working," he says. "It wasn't the plan to take so long between albums, believe me. When I stopped playing and promoting Tourist, I started to do research about what I wanted to do with this album. I knew I didn't want to repeat myself, but I didn't know what I wanted to do.
“When I did decide, it took me a long time to figure out the balance between the different sounds I was working on. I’ve actually been working for 15 years, you could say.”
The result of that decade- and-a-half endeavour is a colourful and vibrant record, with Navarre drawing on Africa, and most especially Mali, for inspiration.
Working with musicians such as guitarist Guimba Kouyaté and bringing traditional instruments, such as the kora and the balafon, into the St Germain ecosystem, he’s created loops, layers and grooves that zing with beautiful, ethereal shimmers and effects. As always, Navarre’s textures, tones and atmospheres are buffed and worked to perfection.
So what did Navarre make of Mali when he went there? Actually, he never left Paris.
Tracks and sounds
“I have never been to Mali or Africa,” he admits. Instead, he worked with and talked to Malian musicians now living in Paris, and came up with the ideas for tracks and sounds. He didn’t go in search of the music, it came to him.
“I’ve been into African music a long, long time,” he says. “I started to work with African music at one point earlier, but abandoned it and then picked it up again.”
What drew Navarre’s attention were the possibilities of what he could do with those traditional instruments that make Malian music unique.
“The beautiful sound of the kora attracted me, but also the way it is played,” he says. “That was something new for me to see and experience. I saw all the peculiarities of the instrument.
“There’s also the ngoni, which really struck me as a fantastic instrument. There’s a particular type of traditional music which comes from the hunters, involving two ngonis and a bass and a “griot” [a storytelling musician], and that was what I was listening to a lot.”
The album will remind listeners of such heralded Malian acts of recent times as Toumani Diabaté, Ali Farka Touré and Oumou Sangaré.
“It’s not directly about those influences,” says Navarre, “but I can understand why people would think that. The hypnotic quality of the music got to me.”
St Germain took so long to finish because Navarre worked and reworked each track until he was happy he'd done right by each musician who'd worked with him. He had the luxury of time to tinker and craft the album in this way, and such attention to detail has paid off.
“I work with constant pressure because I’m never satisfied,” he says. “Time after time, I would go into the studio and start all over again because I was not happy with what I had done. It would have been easier perhaps to take something from here and something from there and throw a track together, but that is not for me. That is not how I work.”
Radio silence
What's odd is that Navarre kept radio silence for so long between albums. A remix for Gregory Porter last year aside, Navarre rarely featured after Tourist wound down.
“I got a lot of offers to do remixes and productions,” he says, “but I generally said no to all of them. I don’t think I’m particularly talented when it comes to remixes. With Gregory Porter, I got a call and was asked if I would be interested. I said let me try and see what it sounds like. I didn’t want to do a dance track and as I was in my Malian music phase, I put that together.”
Gallic trailblazer
When he first emerged, Navarre was a trailblazer. The French Touch movement propelled a bunch of Gallic producers into the limelight in the 1990s and Navarre was in the pack alongside Cassius, Étienne de Crécy and Daft Punk.
His music stood out from the pack even then. While all involved with creating and reshaping house music did so with Gallic flair and dash, Navarre went deeper and wider. Bringing jazz, dub and blues into the realm of house and disco, Navarre created tracks on his 1995 album Boulevard, which were just magnificent. No wonder so many people bought the album or went to see the St Germain live show.
There has been talk these past months about that French Touch scene, thanks largely to Eden, Mia Hansen-Love's evocative and warm-hearted film about that scene's early days.
Navarre, though, has little truck with nostalgia for a scene that happened decades ago.
“I don’t think about that time very much,” he says. “It was a beautiful time. I think the people who were part of that movement back then who are still around need something new.
“Basically, I think they’re playing the same thing and are going around in circles. They could use some new ideas.”
St Germain is out now
