David Chong

If David Chong has become a producer of international reach on planet House, it has nothing to do with fashion vagaries. Sound is a precious material and it has to be thoroughly studied before one can shape it to perfection. David grows up with his eyes and ears widely open to the world. His father is a biochemist and the family travels to many places: Guyana, Ivory Coast, Madagascar... They end up in France in 1988. Time for graduation and above all, time for David's first nights out around Paris and its suburbs and for his first mixes in rave parties. In 1990, David studies economy and gets his diploma, he's on the right track. Thanks to his brother RLP (Hip Hop DJ and artistic director in a record company) David moves away from his economy diploma and starts a trainee in the Guillaume Tell recording studio, at that time the best in town. That's where he's going to understand the importance of studio work. "Everybody can learn how to mix records with two turntables in three weeks. A sound engineer does real work". Six months later, David is fired for not showing up at a session. His trump card: he meets a publicist who lends him his professional home studio. That's where he will make his first three 12" inches that will come out on a small label in 93. From then on, David makes records the wild way and goes around most of the independant parisian labels (Pschent, Basenautic...)
1997: reunion with Bruce Skin, head sound engineer at Guillaume Tell's. He has his own studio, Avec Brio. Both found of Funk, Bruce and David create the Sunshine Funk collection and pull out four 12" inches. At the same time, David goes on the air with Sunshine mix on Radio Nova. That's where he meets Dee Nasty, the Hip Hop chemist. Together they bring forth the anthem of the 1999 Techno Parade "Music makes me dance". After twenty 12" inches/remixes and two compilations, David Chong comes out in the States on Trax and Guidance and puts his sharp yet sensitive sound engineer's ear at work on Dee Nasty's fifth album. At the moment, after joining Le Maquis, David Chong prepares his first album, somewhere in Amsterdam. Complete quietude. Complete modesty. "It takes many nights, many years to understand the subtley of a machine".

(by Philippe Pierre-Adoplhe & José-Louis Bocquet)