Parisian tech wunderkinder Paul Ritch hits Beijing

With Beijing becoming one of the cities to watch in the global minimal tech scene, it’s no surprise that we’ve attracted the attention of Paul Ritch, who must feel solidarity with our recently garnered wunderkind reputation. The 25 year-old French producer has been creating major waves in the world of minimal tech since his debut, “Winter Ceremony,” a sinuous blend of Latin groove and shadowy techno, on Germany’s Resopal Schallware label last year.

The most astounding bit of background on the Paris ingénue is that Ritch didn’t get his start as a DJ. A DJ weaves together pre-recorded song segments, whereas a producer creates his or her own sounds to develop original tracks. While the majority of electronic music producers actually began their careers as DJs, Ritch cultivated his expertise as a maverick of beats as a student of sound engineering. By 2006, Ritch had already risen in the ranks of the international electronic music circuit to gain the admiration of techno heavyweights Richie Hawtin, Anja Schneider and Adam Beyer.

Fellow Paris native Maxime Bureau, Baicai Music Planning’s marketing and promotion guru, first noticed Ritch’s seductive sound in the spring of 2006. Bureau invited the producer for a gig that would bring down the house in Bureau’s present pied-a-terre. Bureau raves, “His first released track is a masterpiece. We want the Beijing scene to discover not some random DJ, but a real artist from whom young local producers can find inspiration.”

The refreshingly low-key Ritch is still reeling from all the attention that his influences have lauded on him. Ritch admits that his “biggest challenge is making music on the plane on my way to a gig and then having to play it just a few hours later during my live set.”

Despite an exhausting routine of reconciling remixes with jetlag, Ritch maintains enough energy to muster excitement over his newest musical projects, confiding, “I’ve just finished a remix for Bloody Mary that I’m really proud of. It will be out soon but everyone in Beijing will have the chance to hear it before!” Beijing audiences will no doubt congregate en masse for the infectious, unforgettable sounds of one of techno’s most in-demand young stars before he abandons us for another all-day flight with only his laptop, headphones and a mental blueprint of the coming sonic boom.

–Rachel Simhon