Laurent Garnier: Off the Record – a reminder of dance music’s universal power

“My bedroom became a club,” veteran DJ Laurent Garnier tells us as he describes the time he was given a mirror ball as a child. “You can’t imagine how long I spent playing records and watching those lights spin around the room.” Just like the disco ball, Garnier has witnessed countless dance trends come and go, which might explain why French director Gabin Rivoire partnered with him to make a film about the rise of acid house and techno.

Blurring the line between biography and social history, Laurent Garnier: Off the Record combines interviews with DJs like Carl Cox, Peggy Gou and the Blessed Madonna with archive footage of Garnier’s meteoric rise, from performing at the Haçienda during the ‘second summer of love’ to headlining festivals around the world. A collaborative project initiated by Garnier himself, Rivoire’s film skirts dangerously close to hagiography, but there’s an ostensible humility to Garnier that makes him hard to resist.

With their propulsive beats and futuristic soundscapes, techno and acid house have always been forward-looking genres. However, this means their roots in the African-American working-class experience and the role LGBT+ clubs played in cultivating their sound are often forgotten. Trying to avoid this pitfall, Rivoire has gathered an ensemble of guests to discuss the role dance music has played in the lives of those living at the intersection of blackness and queer identity. DJ Pierre talks us through how he helped develop Chicago acid house, while techno heavyweights Jeff Mills and Derrick May explain how the abandoned warehouses and defunct assembly lines of Detroit’s auto industry inspired their sound. As commendable as these efforts are, at a time when social experiments like Rave Reparations and projects like Make Techno Black Again exist to highlight the disinheritance of blackness from contemporary dance culture, it raises the question of why anyone would choose to tell this story through a white European lens.

These frustrations aside, Laurent Garnier: Off the Record succeeds as a powerful reminder of how dance music has the ability to mobilise people around shared values of tolerance and inclusion. After performing in Tbilisi’s Bassiani club, which has become a beacon of queer visibility in ultra-conservative Georgia, Garnier and his fellow DJs discuss the future of electronic music. No one knows exactly how it will sound, but they all agree that even in this age of algorithms, streaming services and new technological developments like cloud DJing, the communal experience will always remain an integral part of dance culture. It’s inspiring to hear: even after three decades behind the decks, Garnier is still enthralled by the unifying power of the dancefloor.

► Laurent Garnier: Off the Record is in UK cinemas now.