Marylou // From Ritual to Rave
We’re always here for DJs disregarding the dogma of the dancefloor to break into compelling new zones. Joseph Francis links up with one of the shining beacons of this practice, the one and only Marylou.
It’s barely 10pm on a Sunday and a circle of dancers have swarmed the DJ at the centre of London’s Ormside Projects. Only moments ago these revellers were lying on the floor, gazing up at the spindly branch hanging above the DJ booth and listening to soothing ambient music as wafts of incense and dal filtered in from the kitchen next door. But Marylou has stirred Free Movements’ Spring equinox out of its ritual and into the rave.
Now, apron on, Marylou has just been dragged away from a similarly fragrant ritual at her flat in Berlin. “I’m pretty dogmatic in cooking – not like DJing,” she laughs. She’s in the middle of her weekly food prep and as much as she’s excited to chat over video call, you can tell she’s itching to get back to the kitchen.
Marylou’s apartment is cosy – an everything-in-arm’s-reach sort of cosy. Her computer sits atop a turntable that’s atop one of those IKEA storage units so packed with records that each segment now just resembles a block of Lego. Unfinished canvases slouch round the rooms edges, waiting for their next splash of colour, while turrets of books form makeshift lookout posts in the flat’s hidden crevices. The general vibe seems to sit somewhere between home studio and the ordered chaos of a hustling polymath.
As a DJ, Marylou has been startling dancefloors with her eclectic taste and non-conformist approach since the early 2010s: she’s had residencies with Rinse France, Cashmere Radio and Refuge Worldwide, not to mention guest appearances on NTS. This year alone she played Freerotation, Persona and 5311 festivals, and she’s one of very few DJs who can count the likes of Kassem Mosse, Batu, Lena Willikens, ‘DJ-of-the-moment’ CCL and legend Jane Fitz as their admirers. Her secret? Never wanting to be a DJ. For her, getting into DJing was just a case of sharing and playing records that she would do habitually, like you would read a book or prepare a meal.
“I want first to be grounded and have a good routine because it drives me to do music on the side,” says Marylou in reference to her prep for the week ahead, working a full-time job in gastronomy. Marylou is not a career DJ. In fact, she had very little interest in becoming a DJ until a couple of years ago, though it seems she was always fated to end up on the dancefloor. Her parents would throw parties at their home in the Bordeaux countryside, fostering an early appreciation for music and nightlife. “I had a good education,” she says, before pointing out that her dad was also a bit of a DJ, “and that showed me how to party in an adult and healthy way which is why I’ve never been into drugs or anything.”
Her parents also nurtured a love of cooking and travelling: they took Marylou and her sister backpacking all over the world – especially in South East Asia where she has some heritage on her mum’s side. “We were always bringing ingredients back and they were cooking a lot at home and finding interesting recipes,” she remembers fondly. This opened doors for Marylou later on when, soon after moving to Paris to pursue a career in graphic design she made the switch to gastronomy. “I think I realised pretty shortly after becoming an animator that I would end up sitting in a studio all day working for other people’s minds. I was too experimental for that, and I guess I wasn’t committed to the technical side of the job to make a career out of it.” She quickly landed a job at a Japanese bento restaurant, and began waitering at the famous jazz venue, Duc des Lombards, to help pay rent.
It was at the Cafe du Lombard she met the team behind Sonotown, who were throwing nights around Paris. At that time Marylou’s tastes were still skewed towards the jazz her parents played and the roots reggae she’d heard at clandestine sound system parties as a teen. Attending the Sonotown nights gradually opened her up to club music. “[Sonotown] were the only ones getting DJs from the US, from Detroit, or from Germany to come and play,” she explains. And as a self-proclaimed “hardcore dancer” the atmosphere at Sonotown spoke to Marylou more than the trendiness of nights like ClekClekBoom that were enjoying the peak of their popularity in Paris in the early 2010s. “The experience as a dancer at Sonotown was more authentic and more related to the experience of partying I had had as a child or a teenager.”
Marylou would dance her heart out and talk records with other like minded individuals at Sonotown and soon she began playing out at small venues across Paris. She casually spun at Udo bar – a popular haunt for experimental musicians – and covered for Myako’s residency on Rinse France. “I think people saw that I was so radical with my taste and kind of knew there was something special about me,” she explains. But she still needed a push to play an actual club night, stating how close friends like Luc ‘Voiski’ told her, “No, you have to do this. You have taste!” Her first club gig was for Parisian label Latency’s takeover at Concrete club in 2017, warming up for Shackleton and Yousuke Yukimatsu – the sort of lineup that would make many a DJ green with envy.
Around that time she also started helping her friends Alex and Martin run the Bastion club night, and would invite DJs from all over the world to play. Marylou would cook dinner for everyone which they’d all sit down and enjoy together before the gig. “I was making the posters and discussing the curation as well as doing the cooking for the dinner; we were so bold bringing people over from the US – we lost so much money,” she laughs. “But it was a special moment.”
Like Sonotown, Bastion kept the emphasis on the sort of selectors who would honour house and techno’s origins in Chicago and Detroit. One such selector was Jane Fitz, who Marylou booked to play in 2013. A strong friendship between the two has blossomed ever since: whenever she was in London, Marylou would stay at Fitz’s place, rummage through her record collection and visit the record stores Fitz would list for her. “I think she’s one of my biggest inspirations as a human and the way she approaches DJing. I didn’t imagine you could be so free as a DJ, playing records at the wrong speed, thinking about the crowd but also going wild in whatever direction comes to mind. She is so radical and I love the way she evolved slowly and organically, and always true to herself. I would never have a sound today if our paths had never crossed,” declares Marylou.
Before she met Fitz, Marylou was put off by DJing’s culture of adhering to BPM. She’s since found ways of making time do her bidding. At around 40 minutes into her Groove mix, echoing percussion and bird chirrups ring out from Aria Rostami’s 144 BPM techno track ‘Bolbol’. Marylou pounces upon this moment and loops it before edging up the tempo until the percussion nestles into Siu Mata’s ‘Celsius’ at 210 BPM. It’s the sort of time-stretching blend we’ve come to expect of professional DJs, but Marylou doesn’t conform to such professionalism for too long. Moments later she’s bedding “Celsius” down into a 130 BPM, lurching Ugandan grime rhythm before whipping the covers straight off again with a throbbing 160 BPM footwork tune. This is sawtooth mixing if ever there was such a thing. “I don’t think with BPM; I think with intensity,” she states, before explaining how she colour codes her playlists according to intensity. Such an ‘anti-beatmatching’ approach has landed her plaudits like Lena Wilikens who, “told me I should never learn to beatmatch because otherwise I’ll lose all the magic of my transitions.”
Beatmatching is most DJs bread and butter, and the barometer against which many are judged and subsequently revered. Pop edits are fast becoming another way to woo audiences; but this is also a trend Marylou has steered clear of. Where others might turn to a Charli XCX or a Travis Scott flip for a burst of dancefloor rapture, Marylou sets her mixes ablaze with brutal, polyrhythmic outbursts consisting of little more than some yelling and a few drums . “I like it when chaos is happening,” she smirks, “and it usually happens when I use a drum solo.” Such a moment erupts in the final furlong of her recent Freerotation mix. The crowd reels as an unrelenting scattergun of drums pummels them for a good two minutes.
Marylou’s well of rare and obscure records are to thank for such flourishes – along with her time spent waitering at Duc des Lombards, of course. But besides seeking out the works of modern drum virtuosos like João Pais Felipe and Burnt Friedman, she collects LPs of European medieval music with a capellas she can layer over her mixes to further roughen up the dancefloor. She also turns to folk music from around the world, not just for its polyrhythmic prowess but because it speaks to her idea of what art should be. “I find [folk music] very humble and the purest expression of people’s lives,” she explains, “This is something that’s really important for me. Folk is a craft; it’s not people with ego who are making something and saying, It’s my work. I think this is what I want to achieve in life.”
Like the playlists that colour her USBs, she’s dabbled in folk music from around the world with varying degrees of intensity: she’s had her SWANA region phase – where she even began to learn some Arabic after travelling to Lebanon with her then partner – and she’s had her Amazonian tribes phase as well as long stints with Indonesian gamelan and Japanese folk. She cuts and pastes traditional music into her sets with the abruptness of a collage artist. “As a DJ, I’m completely out of context,” she says. “If you were a real DJ you would create a better evolution through the course of your mix, but I have no respect for that at all.”
This is why parties like Free Movements are the ideal setting for a DJ like Marylou. Besides taking place on a Sunday, its schedule is informed by lunar phases, equinoxes and seasons rather than ticket sales. The trajectory of the event swings back and forth between DJ sets and live electronic music. They serve hearty food throughout the night, and occasionally the promoters’ 10-year-old daughter can be found handing out glittery coupons at the event’s opening. It’s like a very holistic and Gen Z revival of the 90’s Sunday scene, driven by its community and a genuine love for music, things that Marylou has gravitated towards ever since her parents’ parties.
Being a DJ was never the end goal for Marylou. She just kept buying records, talking about them, dancing to them, and sharing them with others. She fell into the role of DJ with no training or practice and, even now, as she returns to her batch cooking, you can tell she sees DJing as just another plate to keep spinning. “I’ve always been way more attracted to the humble side of DJing. I’m way more comfortable when I’m hidden – like a DJ should be.”
Photo credits:
Marylou live at pe:rsona Festival by Romain Guede.
Marylou portrait photos by Daphne Le Jeune.
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