Mapping the dancefloor with COUCOU CHLOE

Of course, from disco through to trance and dubstep, the dancefloor has long played host to raw expressions of romance, no matter how addictive or punishing. But Chloe’s work exists in a more shadowy territory altogether, a sweet spot between sanctuary and clubland. She trades not in lively house vocals or acid-drenched synths, but in classic, driving rhythms and murky soundscapes that yearn for embrace despite their sinister inflections.

Born Chloe Erika Jane, the artist grew up in a village in the south of France that couldn’t feel further away from anything thrilling to a precocious, creative kid. “Everything was quite calm and pretty isolated,” she recalls, remembering how she would crave the hustle and bustle of city life. Signs of the artist’s curious approach to sound started looming in childhood when, as a young girl, Chloe would sync unique samples of collected sounds that she’d gathered and play them on her keyboard. She took up piano at the age of four and, in her late teens, without any certainty as to where it might take her, enrolled at Nice’s elite contemporary art school, Villa Arson.

As it turns out, Nice wasn’t quite the sprawling metropolis she had in mind, nor were Villa Arson’s classes on contemporary art scratching her itch to create. So, COUCOU CHLOE (still known to the world then just as Chloe) packed her bags and headed across the English Channel to join a close friend in London, where she still finds herself, eight years on. While immersing herself in the UK capital’s vibrant underground club scene, in particular the debauched and sweat-dripping functions held by the likes of Bala Club and PDA, Chloe began toying with bootleg production software given to her by her brother. Then, in 2016, the budding producer released her thud-heavy debut EP, HALO, on Berlin’s Creamcake label, and began fostering a creative partnership with her former e-pen pal Salvador Navarrete (Sega Bodega) and his keen musical collaborator Blane Muise (Shygirl).

The trio would go on to establish NUXXE (pronounced nukes-ee), a collective-cum-independent label that would not only house their many left-of-field sonic experiments, including Chloe and Sega Bodega’s short-lived alias Y1640, but also turn the artists into bonafide stars in their own right. As the scene around them began to sprawl with the proliferation of labels such as PC Music and LuckyMe, which gave audiences a constant fix of new and high-octane sounds, NUXXE set itself apart by cutting hard and unusual samples. From hysteric squeals and dog barks to chesty coughs, they drove unrelenting beats to their extremes and stamped a nightmarishly gritty fingerprint on whatever remained – dubbed “deconstructed club” by some, also known as “post-club”.

“I find the [terms] a bit outdated and annoying,” the singer says. “I can understand why it was called that at the time, because it didn’t follow traditional club music patterns. But since first being introduced [at Hood By Air designer Shayne Oliver and Venus X’s cult New York club night GHE20G0TH1K in the early 2010s] it has evolved so much.”

Part of this evolution involves the mixing and melding of totally disparate sonic worlds, the dissolution of rigid genre rules. And though Chloe was drawn into the mix through her “attraction to bass, and the simplicity you can find in electronic music”, being at the forefront of this new sonic avant-garde was never necessarily the goal. “I’ve never really related to the universe around [dance music], or the places where it was being played out,” she says. Indeed, her club-leaning sound, which can flit from UK bass to industrial hip-hop in the blink of an eye, speaks to an unquenchable need for experimentation, rather than any burning desire to reconfigure the sound of an entire genre.