10/29/2023 0 Comments Pharoahe monch simon says spotifyIt makes me feel really, really nice to scratch - it’s the only instrument I can play.”įor Nico, it was after a friend of his - who was opening for French rap group Suprême NTM at the time - had a set of turntables in his home, the first time Nico had ever seen one. “Two years after that, I started to work and bought my own turntables. “We were like, ‘Oh my God, he’s the best! We have to do something like that,” he says. It was a more primitive time for the Internet back then, and they stumbled upon a 240p-quality video of DJ Qbert scratching. At 15, Ben saw a friend who’d bought his first set of turntables to scratch with. Making bassy, genre-bending electronic music with a gritty and menacing atmosphere - not fully hip-hop and not too old school, in Nico’s words - and with turntablism as its defining feature, the group members had varying journeys toward discovering a love for DJing and scratching. For one, Tony considers finding work in a studio to be easier here than in France, and ditto for meeting people within the scene. On a professional level, taking the leap of faith and moving to Montreal has worked out quite nicely for the trio thus far. Montreal trio Turbine compete in the 2022 DMC DJ Team Championship “I already played (music) in France, but I started from scratch.” “At 25 years old, I said, ‘Okay, I move now or never,’ so I moved,” he says. Nico was working for the French Ministry of Justice for “too many years,” and came to a similar realization as he got further into his 20s. Similarly, Ben was working for the French Ministry of the Armed Forces, and found himself wondering why he was working there and not in music by the time he turned 30, leading to him moving to Montreal in 2014. Tired of working in the boating industry back home and wanting a fresh start professionally, Tony moved to Montreal to try turning music into a more serious endeavour. Nico and Tony would eventually become neighbours in the Plateau, an area with a sizeable presence from the motherland. A few years after they’d started new lives across the Atlantic, they met Nico, who thinks he probably met them both at a scratch session. Tony then moved to Montreal about a decade ago, and Ben followed him, where they’ve continued their working relationship in music. “We met in Brittany, in fact, at an electronic music festival, and then we became friends. Then I moved to (Ben’s region of) Normandy,” says Tony. “I used to live in the west part of France, below Brittany. Ben and Tony have known each other since the mid-aughts, though, and they’ve been scratching together ever since. Joining forces in September 2021, all three members originally hail from different parts of France, but formed in Montreal. Tony and Ben have also had experience as sound designers prior to Turbine - Ben in video games, and Tony in advertising and movies/TV. Ben produces almost every track Turbine makes, while Tony is more focused on the technical side of things, and Nico calls himself mostly a “stage guy” with a solid DJing background. They’d also spell their group name as TBN, an acronym standing for Tony, Benjamin and Nicolas (“Turbine” is also the name of a French electronic subgenre of music). The group - consisting of Tony Ragon, Benjamin Bongert and Nicolas Rame - take their name partly since turbines represent a circular movement similar to them spinning and scratching on their turntables, and partly from the verb “turbiner” often used in France (which means “working a lot”). Three Montreal-based DJs/turntablists known as Turbine are actively helping to keep that legacy intact. Montreal has long had a reputation for supremely talented turntablists and DJs (A-Trak, anyone?).
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