In 2006 when Bassam was 16 years old, growing up in Casablanca, Morocco he and his friends saw an advert for Rhythm of Peace Festival. It looked intriguing, so they bought tickets and went along.
Set on a beach in the glorious sunshine along the south coast of the Atlantic Sea, as fast, pumping psytrance blared from the sound system, he came face-to-face with the magic of dance music – something he hadn’t experienced before.
“It was the first time I was somewhere, and I was 100 per cent captivated by the music,” Bassam says. “I was like: ‘okay, this is some complex music – some music I won’t hear anywhere else.’”
It wouldn’t be his last either. Now a DJ, producer and Distrikt Records label head honcho alongside Blanco and Escko, his experience at the festival would be the beginning what would be more than a decades long love affair with electronic music.
While psytrance was his entry point with the scene, his sound these days is more subtle and considered, but still full of pulsing groove and rhythm. It’s been a long journey reaching where he is, by his own admission.
“I was going to the most commercial clubs hearing tracks from Benny Benassi, David Guetta – all that stuff,” he says. “So I started thinking: ‘Okay there is other kinds of music, we just need to look for it.’”
It would soon lead to him digging for music relentlessly – spending hours trawling through the internet across sites like YouTube and Discogs. “With the internet there is no limit,” he says. “You can find a lot of different kinds of music.”
He eventually moved to Paris in 2011, and quickly became involved in the minimal music scene in the city after meeting some like-minded people. It would lead him to start throwing underground Distrikt parties, often found in warehouses across France’s capital city, which quickly developed a reputation for the quality of music that would be spun at the nights.
All this time, Bassam was digging for music, building up an enviable collection of gems and defining his sound as an artist. He flips his chair around and pulls out a record from the piles behind him. The sleeve is splashed with unmistakeable Perlon font and design. “It’s Villalobos,” he says. “I bought it in 2013, it was my very first vinyl.”
“Even if I’m not digging so much minimal anymore, Perlon is one of my biggest inspirations,” he continues. “All the experiences – travelling, meeting people and curiosity, it has led me to define our sound as Distrikt now. It’s maturity.”
The label, which now has Four records on its main label, as well as a Bandcamp and a white label series, had its first release in 2020 – a genre-classic from Kosh, a fellow Moroccan and friend of Bassam’s.
“He was sending me a lot of tracks, so we decided to start the label,” he says. “And that was it – the right tracks, the right time and the right audience.”
The Bandcamp series idea came to Bassam during the COVID-19 lockdown. After nightclubs closed and parties stopped, and sitting in his home, he pondered a way to produce something different to the output that most others were coming up with.
With a creative play on the Distrikt name, he decided to come out with 20 records, each corresponding to the 20 districts, or arrondissements as they are known locally. Track names correspond to Metro stations of the districts where each release is located.
Each record has two tracks from different producers, or occasionally a unique collaboration between producers, but with a twist to keep buyers guessing. “There are only aliases,” Bassam says. “There are no real names, and these aliases are Parisian public personalities.”
Moving forwards, Bassam aims to keep the spirit of creativity going, never growing stale. He says that he does this by never limiting himself by only listening to the underground house and techno that he mainly plays.
“I always want to have some time for digging, and then I will listen to electronic music,” he says. “But sometimes when I want to think, I only listen to acoustic music, or downtempo music. It could be like jazz, blues, fusion Moroccan music, also hip hop,
“Every kind of music that gives me feelings,” he continues. “What I listen to outside of electronic stuff – it’s future inspiration.”
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