It’s another grey day in London, but you wouldn’t know it judging by the way Enno bounds over to my café table in King’s Cross. Always full of energy, and grinning constantly, Enno a.k.a. ‘bad internet’ has had a busy few months. The DJ, producer and co-founder of record label La Bonne Musique is one of those people who is doing it all: he somehow manages to be in several places at once, but like everything else he is juggling, he throws himself into our afternoon chat with enthusiasm.
“I’ve just been signed to Eminent,” he grins, “which is really exciting.” He’ll be represented by the Bristol-based agency alongside an impressive roster of emerging names in the dance music world. Following a busy summer playing across The Cause, Venue MOT Unit 18, and Covert festival, he has now been hunkering down to finish his upcoming EP. “It’s a completely different style to what I’m usually doing, a new direction,” he says, reflecting on the more playful breakbeats he’s known for. “I think now I’ve got enough tools in music production to be a bit more experimental so I’ve been trying different things out, creating a distorted mixture between techno, electro, and breaks influences as well.” The clipped breaks featuring on his upcoming release will keep your head bobbing, yet paired with dark cavernous melodies and shimmering keys, you’ll find yourself fully immersed in a mysterious multidimensional bliss. “I try and get as distorted as possible… I guess the inspiration was very much in my DJ name, bad internet. I have just tried to make types of broken beats and broken signals and things like that.” Who knew bad internet’s glitching signals could sound so good?
Growing up around Brussels techno culture, the Belgian first fell in love with dance music through his exposure to techno and hardcore. “I’d been growing up listening to techno but it started to develop when we were old enough to go to clubs,” he reflects. “Me a friend would travel to the nearest city every couple of weeks and go out there. And I’d be going to the Netherlands quite often to visit some friends, going to ADE.” Yet upon moving to the UK to study art, he was confronted with a new diversity of genres that weren’t as prevalent on the rest of the continent. “In the UK there’s such a blend, a variety of music,” he says. “In Europe you get fed techno and very often that’s all. But coming to the UK, I was discovering all these different genres that we don’t have that over there.”
That’s not to say that good (or perhaps we should say ‘bonne’) music is necessarily easy to come by in the UK, something Enno, alongside core LBM partners Maeve, Ben and Andy, took into their own hands. “Nothing was happening in Reading,” he says of the first city he moved to. “There was only , which I was looking up to quite a lot. But I’d been thinking that I would love to do something of my own. Anyway, me and Maeve were going out loads, constantly talking about music, so we thought, let’s create a Facebook group and invite people to share tunes with each other.” He nods: “So yeah, we called it La Bonne Musique. Initially there was only about twenty of us, just sharing our tunes that we found on the Internet,” he recalls. “But then the group got bigger and bigger, until rumours started getting out!” La Bonne channelled their newfound network into house parties until people were spilling out of their basement kitchen. “We managed to grow to 700 members!” Enno tells me. “We never expected that. So then we started going to the back room of an old pub, and our first events were sellouts.”
The label, now based out of London, has developed a cult following, hosting popular parties across the city, just as intimate as the early days, and boasting lineups of sought-after DJs including Harrison BDP, Ell Murphy and Nancy June. “I’m a big advocate for supporting my friends,” Enno says. “If there’s any way to do that I will do it, and what goes around comes around! People like Sempra and Scaefa for example are so incredibly talented, and they’re still relatively small but they deserve to be as massive as they can get, and I want to be helping them achieve that.” His approach clearly spearheads the core of La Bonne Musique as a label and collective. “Recently there’s been a lot of new names that are emerging and at La Bonne we’re trying to push them too, like Mixtress, Ian DPM, Soraya, Mia Lily, them lot. I feel like since the pandemic they’ve come out and just risen so high which is so good to see.” LBM now release the work of almost twenty artists across an exciting spectrum of experimental, rave-ready electronic sounds, and host regular charity events, supporting music initiatives and attempting to open up access. “I, and everyone else in the team, genuinely believe in every single artist we release,” he says. “We have no regrets about anything we put out.” That requires a lot of selective planning and curation. “We wanna believe in people’s work 100% or not at all, so sometimes, if we only like a couple of tunes and not all of them we believe there might be other labels out there that like the whole thing. We don’t wanna cut people’s projects short.”