BACK IN THE MID-NOUGHTIES, book-ending a night out at London’s The End, Liverpool’s Korova, Manchester’s The Warehouse Project or New York’s The Dark Room, the pre- and after-parties will inevitably have been soundtracked by a compilation CD. And, if your musical tastes were of the then nascent guitar-and-dancefloor crossover type, the chances are it was probably from the label Maison Kitsuné.
Indie Sleaze? Indie-Rave? Electro-rock? Nu-rave? In what’s become a difficult genre retroactively to name – but currently wildly popular to reminisce about on social media – a lot of the roads lead back to Paris, specifically to Maison Kitsuné, a French-Japanese company founded by Gildas Loaëc and Masaya Kuroki 20 years ago.
“We created Kitsuné with the desire to spend our days doing what we loved, and to create a brand that would reflect our passions and, vice versa, that would express our ‘Art de Vivre’,” says Loaëc today.
“Our idea was to do what other music labels weren’t really doing at that time: uniting different artists together on one project around a given theme. Kitsuné Musique was born from the DJ culture that has always generated endless series of compilations, and we wanted to be part of this tradition.”
Thanks to their ear for spotting the most exciting new talent combined a prolific output, it positioned Loaëc and Kuroki as key tastemakers of this scene. The pair met in the orbit of France’s biggest – and greatest – musical export, Daft Punk. Loaëc previously ran his own record store, Street Sound, in Paris, frequented by Daft Punk duo, Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo. He and Kuroki bonded while working on an anime video shoot for the band in Japan. Together, their idea was to create a lifestyle brand, positioning music and club nights alongside fashion and their own clothing collection.
Their first release, for Valentine’s Day 2002, was, a shimmering selection of warm and joyous house, with headnods back to French Touch heritage with a track by the scene’s doyens, Alan Braxe and Fred Falke: in short, if a potential partner presented you with this as a homemade mixtape, you’d marry them, tout de suite. Kitsuné branched out into full studio albums in 2004 with a licence of Hot Chip’s sparky debut, , and Digitalism’s huge in 2007; the lead single of which, ‘Pogo’, is currently still at 23 million streams on Spotify, and counting. However, what Kitsuné really excelled at was the curation of music, which they displayed with skill on their compilations; there are now more than 50 of them on the imprint’s back catalogue, alongside the 2,500 songs released on Kitsuné Musique.
