DJ Cam

All Music Guide:

Parisian hip-hop devotee Laurent Daumail is one of a few but growing number of French artists updating hip-hop for the chill-out crowd, drawing on the beats'n'samples groundwork of producers such as Rakim, DJ Premier, and Prince Paul and combining it with broad, impressionistic strokes of dub, jazz, and soundtrack-y ambience. Like countrymen the Mighty Bop and la Funk Mob, Cam is stylistically closest to Mo'Wax artists such as DJ Shadow and DJ Krush; minimalist, downbeat instrumental hip-hop built from obscure samples and stomp-box turntable accompaniment, bent and twisted into new, artfully arranged compositions. His debut, 1994's Underground Vibes, was released on the tiny French label Street Jazz and was followed by a live recording for the Inflammable imprint (one of only a few "live" recordings in a genre so reliant on the temporal concessions of the recording studio). Dubbed Underground Live, the album featured performed extrapolations of many of the tracks from his debut, as well as a few new and improvised tracks. Now nearly impossible to find, those first two albums were reissued in America by Shadow Records, packaged together as the single-CD priced Mad Blunted Jazz (particularly useful since acquiring both on import could run more than 50 dollars!).

Although Cam's music has found little acceptance in his home country, where racial tension has stratified the hip-hop community into rigid definitions of what the music is -- and who should be making it (Cam himself is white) -- audiences in the U.K., Japan, and America have begun picking up on his style. In 1996 Cam was featured on, among many others, the sprawling Mo'Wax compilation Headz 2, remixed tracks for such artists as Tek 9 and la Funk Mob, and most recently collaborated on live and in-studio projects with Snooze and DJ Krush (he co-wrote a few tracks on the latter's 1997 Mo'Wax release, Mi Sound). Cam released Substances on Inflammable in 1997. The next year, his major-label debut, The Beat Assassinated, appeared on Columbia Records. In 2000, he released a three-volume series named The Loa Project. Cam dropped HoneyMoon, a smooth mix album that combined jazz and underground hip hop, at the close of 2001.

Wikipedia:

DJ Cam (born Laurent Daumail in 1973) is a French DJ. His tunes are almost entirely a hybrid of both hip-hop and jazz music, and are presented in an abstract manner. His first LP was Underground Vibes in 1994, and was revolutionary for its time, featuring familiar jazz samples and many vibe samples and heavy hip-hop influences. His second studio album was Substances, which carried on with the tradition of its predecessor. He released The Beat Assassinated in 1998, which contained cameos from underground rappers, and also released The Loa Project vol, 2 and various DJ Mixes during 98-02. In 2003, he departed his regular sound for the Soulshine LP, which featured an appearance by Gang Starr's Guru (Credited as Baldhead Slick). He went back to his hip-hop roots in 2004 with Liquid Hip-Hop, in 2006, he released an iTunes exclusive Best Of compilation, featuring a new song at the end.

With Seven (2011), DJ Cam served up his most personal album since the acclaimed Substances. Inspired as ever by the original jazz and hip-hop influences that helped him become one of the founders of the trip-hop scene back in 1995, this new album is also full of exciting new musical and visual influences. As a mainstay of the French Touch (he started his career in the 1990s together with Daft Punk, Air, Cassius, Bob Sinclar...), DJ Cam has released six albums, helmed a number of side projects and given countless performances all around the world, helping him to acquire global notoriety. His 2002 single Summer in Paris with Anggun sold over a million copies and remains an emblematic tune of the Parisian dolce vita.

DJ Cam is now based in Los Angeles, where his musical and visual projects can converge, including production and remixes (Michael Jackson, Serge Gainsbourg, Air, Miles Davis...), sound design (Louis Vuitton, Cartier, Sephora, Agnès b...), soundtracks for both TV (CSI: Miami...) and cinema (Gus Van Sant, Wayne Wang...). Seven has touches of well-crafted pop and folk (Swim, with vocals by Stateless’ Chris James and a video directed by Sonia Sieff, reminds one of Radiohead, one of the album’s major influences. And Chris James is also present on Ghost and Uncomfortable), hints of old school electronica (Dreamcatcher), and cinematic ambient tracks that invite you to dream (Seven, California Dreaming). For a feminine touch, DJ Cam adds the vocals of Inlove, a new signing on his Inflammable label, and Nicolette, long-time collaborator with Massive Attack, the legendary group that DJ Cam feels closer to now than ever before, and to whom he dedicates the album. DJ Cam: “After the acoustic album Soulshine and various projects with high-profile collaborations and large groups, I wanted to get back to the essentials of being a producer: going into the studio alone, having total freedom, and allowing my inspiration free reign [sic]. Seven has turned out to be so intimate because I approached it in the same way as my earliest tracks; with experimentation and pleasure as the prime motivation.” Written in Paris and Los Angeles, Seven is an album whose enveloping, melancholic tone and wide-open soundscapes are supposed to help make your mind wander. The release of the album is the moment for DJ Cam – who admits to spending as much time in art galleries as he does listening to and composing music – to show us his talents as a photographer through the Landscape Architecture project, a series of mysterious landscapes where nature and architecture intermingle in a ghost-like world. An exhibition is planned, and the visuals will be projected on a big screen during DJ Cam’s concerts, as revealed for the first time at the SXSW festival last March.