Joachim Garraud

Like fellow Frenchman Laurent Garnier, house DJ Joachim Garraud cut his teeth at Paris nightclub Boy, ground zero for the country’s techno scene. Unlike most DJs, however, he came in with a fully rounded musical background, having spent seven years training at the French Academy of Music Percussion and Piano.

His understandable music snobbishness recently led to a bit of fan-fueled controversy when, during an interview with Belgian webzine Ready2Move, Garraud casually noted he was the arranging and engineering brains behind his early collaborations with David Guetta. To the extent that Guetta “didn’t know how to use a computer” when the two first began collaborating, this was no-harm no-foul truth. But a little heated back-and-forth over the remarks went on last month in the cyber knitting circle NightClubCity.com.

All of this doesn’t amount to a hill of beans in this world, though, what with everything Guetta and Garraud have individually accomplished. And Guetta isn’t the only big name Garraud has worked with: He has remixed, composed for, and/or produced artists such as Jean-Michel Jarre, Paul Johnson, Deep Dish, David Bowie, OMD, Kylie Minogue, and many others. His ecstatic legion of fans shows up in Space Invaders T-shirts, whether in Ibiza, in Miami, or at the gigantic spectacle Garraud once put on at the pyramids of Egypt, which was seen by more than a billion people.