Jacques Greene - Feel Infinite

Pitchfork 76

Feel Infinite may be the debut Jacques Greene album, but it’s hardly the first we’ve heard from the project’s 27-year-old mastermind, Philippe Aubin-Dionne. Since his breakout single on the 2010 Night Slugs Allstars compilation, the French-Canadian DJ and producer has graduated from throwing parties in his native Montreal to touring the world with a steady stream of singles and EPs on indie dance labels.

It might seem odd to release your debut LP seven years into an ascendant career. However, for a working club DJ, most money is made on the live circuit and most fans are accustomed to getting all their music for free, so it’s considered a luxury to have the time and resources to produce a full-length. Aubin-Dionne’s contemporaries Kaytranada and Kingdom followed this route, making late, full narratives reflective of their identities.

On Jacques Greene’s first LP, the narrative is of an introvert who’s found human connections in the club; he’s found an escape not from reality, but from loneliness. It’s very much of the Montreal scene that birthed his career, one that was inclusive geographically. The Turbo Crunk parties he threw with Rob Squire, Hadji Baraka, and other dance peers were defined by border-busting beats build on Southern bounce, Bay Area hyphy, and Missy Elliott, all laced with a cappella rapping.

The songs on Feel Infinite are colorful and melodic, built on simple structures. He uses a minimalist palette—often just a drum track, synthesizer, and vocal sample. Seemingly rooted in house and techno, and punctuated with R&B vocals, the album plays with the building blocks of UK bass music and gives it his own spin. Feel Infinite is the work of an internet autodidact, one who’s culled his collection from peer-to-peer filesharing and admits it freely; he’s a music nerd who follows rabbit holes on Wikipedia and taught himself modular synthesizers by reading message boards. His crate-digging goes down online, from sampling random strangers’ tunes on YouTube to recording an exotic dancer’s vocals on her smartphone, and those samples are at the heart of Feel Infinite.

From the first deep breaths of opener “Fall” to the warbled wobble of “Afterglow,” voices set the emotional tone for the entire album. Aubin-Dionne is gifted at chopping up R&B vocals on top of dancefloor thumpers, and more than ever, he seems to be aware of its emotional impact. Feel Infinite is an openly tender album, meant to evoke the liberation of sharing music in a communal space even as you listen at home, alone, with headphones. It’s his 11-song love letter to the club, the place he spent his formative years.

Though it’s no longer the premier sales unit it once was—and for dance music DJs, maybe it never was—the full-length album still holds enough cache for Aubin-Dionne to put his touring schedule on hold to hunker down and record it. He tried once before, with the sessions that would ultimately become Phantom Vibrate, but it felt forced, like he was trying too hard to make something serious. That EP felt cold and isolated, most evident in its distant, hollow vocals. He’s escaped that trap by focusing on the self-contained universes in which he’s grown into an adult: the club. Feel Infinite is warm and inviting, a taut mix of R&B love songs to finding your true self on the floor.