Flox

Square represents a major turning point in the career of the pioneer of nu reggae. An extraordinary architect of studio production and multi-instrumentalist who records, mixes and produces but also, for several years, performs on stage with his musicians. After recording Square, he started touring alone, equipped with a machine he designed and built with Midi controllers to launch original samples and loops - an autarky assumed from one end of the process to the other. “You have to master all the tools to deliver what you want”, he has been saying for years...
Yet, this Square is wide open: old school rhythms or techno-like approaches, vintage dub or futuristic take offs, thick sound basses and melodies, scraped to the bone...
All this is Flox, a solid innovator who never stops renewing his nu reggae, a maniacal craftsman who regulates, to the micron, tracks of perfect simplicity of access. His trademark is this highly spatialized form of reggae, with an enveloping sound, which seems to take the artist and the listener into a shared bubble; as padded as tense.

A know-how? This gentle, smooth-headed Franco-British man in his early fties smiles, gently mocking: “There are so many easy ways of producing music nowadays that you might release an album not knowing that you are still learning or assimilating... Many burn their wings” He practices the expert level in all areas of the game...
Flox knows so well how much patience, precision and passion his path has required. A few decades ago, he graduated in bookbinding from his ve years studying at the École Estienne. He was in the middle of his punk period and could not see himself working for the old bourgeois clients of bookbinding. So he took a job in an American computer company based in France and his rst salary was used to borrow 25 000 Francs to buy a 12 track analog multi recorded.
After all, Florian Gratton has never lacked determination and knows how to make clear-cut decisions. Before him, his half-Kabyle, half-French mother escaped to Britain as a teenager, met a half-English, half-Irish actor and only returned to France after Mitterrand’s victory in the 1981 presidential election. At that time, Florian at the age of eleven years old, started playing the drums, his rst instrument. Step by step, he learns a bit of every instrument he comes upon. “I’m more curious than really multi-instrumentalist. I only learn from each instrument what I need to make the music I want. It’s a focused learning process.“
Don’t expect a classic reggaeman’s route. His introduction to Jamaican music was rstly British with the Police, before the shock of Linton Kwesi Johnson’s dub poetry. “Apart from that, I was enriched as much by Bob Marley as I was Pink Floyd”. At the age of twenty, the time of the bands begins. At the age of thirty, he led a batucada of thirty percussionists, but he had already set himself the goal of making his rst album before the age of thirty- ve. Take My time.

Ten tracks conceived and recorded with all the seriousness of a square. But no record label want’s it, until Maxime Péron, co-founder of Underdog Records, found Flox’s demo at the bottom of a box in the of ce of another record company. And this totally unexpected nu reggae starts, the same week, to be diffused by Nova, France Inter and FIP - “the radios I listen to”.

Since then, Flox has become a crossroad of musical cultures and experiences. He has almost a thousand tracks registered at the Sacem between the advertising years and musical productions, he in in the process of producing Vanupié and Jason Mist... As for his own productions, “I have to hear something. It can be a bass line, a bird, someone whistling in the street, a phrase on the radio - there are no rules.” And so, he patiently builds up his tracks in his studio, willingly reworking them for his live performances. The most important thing is simplicity, clarity and ef ciency. That each sensation is huge.
Square like.