Former Concrete collaborators Brice Coudert, Jonathan Malaisé, and Antoine Hernandez have teamed up on a new Paris club called ESSAIM.
Come October 31, Paris will be the home of a new nightclub called ESSAIM.
Early photos from inside the space between Gare du Nord and Gare de l’Est show simple white tile decor a la Berlin broadcasting space HÖR courtesy of architect Dorothée Hachiken. Programming in the roughly 400-capacity club will focus on “electronic music for keen and/or curious ears,” and offer an L-Acoustics sound system that will result in “a matte, uniform sound, without dead spots.” Its DJ booth will sit at the ground level, and the club will not offer a VIP section.
That is, according to ESSAIM collaborators Brice Coudert and Antoine Hernandez, who formerly worked together on Paris club Concrete. The latter also helps curate French festival Positive Education. Joining them in the endeavor is Jonathan Malaisé, formerly the technical and production director of Concrete.
Many frame ESSAIM as the spiritual successor of Concrete. During its seven-year run, nights like Odd People, Antiverse, and Mutant cemented its reputation as “the club that reinvented the Parisian nightlife,” according to Le Monde. French techno figurehead Laurent Garnier even once told Mixmag, “When we’ll look back on the history of French electronic music in twenty years, we’ll have to include Concrete.”
The club was evicted from its barge on the river Seine after the building’s owners refused to renew its license in 2019. In a statement announcing the closure, Coudert said that he was “already looking to the future, to come back stronger, with the same values, and put our experience and know-how in an even more ambitious project.”
ESSAIM will operate every weekend, but no artists have been announced for its grand opening events at the time of writing.
