Dominique Dalcan

Dominique Dalcan (a.k.a. Snooze) is a French electronic musician and film composer. He is the winner of the "victoires de la musique" in 2018 in the category "electronic album". Dominique Dalcan spent his childhood and adolescence in Noisy-le-Grand, a suburb of Paris. He receives no real musical education. However, he began composing pieces on the piano as an autodidact, then worked for a while with the Rennes-based group Complot Bronswick.

He is influenced by the composers Harold Budd and Brian Eno. In 1992 he released his first album Entre l'étoile & le carré on Crammed Discs. He made his first concert at the Transmusicales festival in Rennes in 1991. His collaboration with Marc Hollander, the founder of this Belgian label, will last a decade. The album is described as a "miracle" of pop music.

Dalcan is considered as a precursor of the new pop song made in France by mixing electronic and acoustic music. In 1994, Dominique returns with the album Cannibale from which are extracted Le danseur de Java and Brian. The album is influenced by orchestrations from Anglophone music. He surrounds himself with the arranger David Whitaker and the musician Bertrand Burgalat.

When the album was released, Dominique went on a tour in France with various groups and ended up on the main stage of the Francofolies festival in La Rochelle in 1995. In 1996, Dalcan sets up a parallel musical project: Snooze. We don't talk about French touch yet but Dominique is quoted in the English press with Laurent Garnier, Air, Daft Punk or Motorbass.

Initially instrumental, The Man in the Shadow will be his first album under the name Snooze. The sound mixes dub, jazz, hip hop and drum and bass. In 1997, he released the album Ostinato. Dominique records with Brazilian musicians such as Vinicius Cantuaria, collaborator of Arto Lindsay and Caetano Veloso, Paolo Braga and Cyro Baptista as well as the conductor Clare Fischer, arranger of Prince and João Gilberto among others.

The singles of the album are: L'air de rien a duet with the singer Nancy Danino (already present on The Man in the Shadow, Snooze's first album in 1996), Individualistic and Plus loin mais jusqu'où. The following year, Dalcan worked for the cinema with Alain Berliner's Ma vie en rose (Golden Globe for best foreign film and a nomination for music victories for Dominique).

He returns to electronic music under the pseudonym Snooze with Goingmobile in 2001. Three singers are featured on this album: Nancy Danino, American Nicole Graham, and Deborah Brown. Collaborations are multiplying with mixers such as Autechre, Uwe Schmidt with Señor Coconut and Isolée. After two years of writing, Snooze's third album entitled Americana was released in January 2005.

Snooze's third album but the first on her own label Ostinato. In 2006, Dominique Dalcan released on his label, the Best of entitled Music hall which gathers his greatest pop songs with also some unreleased ones. It is consecrated by the daily newspaper Le Monde as "the pioneer of French pop". The same year, he will be victim of a heart attack. Dominique then moved away from music for two years.

... Source: Article "Dominique Dalcan" from Wikipedia in English, licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.