Our story
An idea that had been trotting around my head for years… quite literally
01
A step aside
Years ago I learned ballroom dancing, and even helped keep a dance club alive. I am also a long-time sound enthusiast: I built my first little sound system at sixteen. One day my feet could no longer keep up. The music never left me.
02
An idea on the trot
For a long time a question had been trotting around my head, at foxtrot pace of course: why does so much music "for dancing" drift along the way? A dancer feels at once when the tempo slips. While re-timing a bolero in the autumn of 2026, I realised that today's tools can hold a piece of music to the exact beat, from the first bar to the last.
03
The dream
One night in November 2026 I dreamt of an old-fashioned ballroom, the hall of a local school. A teacher was leading the steps, then a comic-strip character appeared, tangled in his fancy-dress costume, repeating: "But we are dancing, aren't we?" When I woke up, the idea that had been trotting for years had broken into a walk: songs to dance to, in strict tempo, for everyone who still loves to turn around a dance floor.
04
The club is born
That same day the "À l’écoute Dance Club" channel was born, with its golden couple and, as its banner, the exact chart of a quickstep figure, the Forward Lock Step. First tracks: a cha-cha, "Les paras m’attaquent", re-timed to exactly 30 bars per minute, then "Cache-cache avec la lune", a quickstep duet in which the Moon teases the singer in the choruses. Each one has an instrumental version where saxophones, a clarinet or a violin carry the melody, as in the great dance orchestras.
05
Demanding ears
Nothing goes out without being measured beat by beat, then listened to on headphones. A former dance teacher, a musician himself, kindly agreed to lend his ear to the tracks: the best judge there is.
06
Why "À l’écoute"
"À l’écoute" means "listening" in French. Listening is the thread running through everything I do: listening to people, to words, to music. Here it means listening to the tempo, so that your feet can trust it.