Canson Makes Music for the Space Between the Notes — and Collects Totoro Figures at Home

You know an artist has something when a single set makes an entire room stop and dance. That's what happened at a recent ReSolute party and that was because of a Canson record — the room turned, as rooms do when music arrives that feels both entirely new and somehow already familiar.

Amar Derradj, born and bred in Zurich, has been building that feeling since 1993, through record shops and machine design apprenticeships and a debut under the Anatol moniker that put Swiss minimal on the map. After a decade away, Canson is back — and the rooms are asking questions again.

The techno virus, as Amar Derradj calls it, arrived in 1993. He was seventeen. The synthesizer followed almost immediately — not as aspiration but as necessity, the only logical response to a sound that had already taken hold before he had the vocabulary to describe it. The deep minimalism of Maurizio was the initial gravity: music that communicated by withholding, that trusted the listener to find the space between the elements and live there for a while.

What made Derradj different from the beginning was everything that happened around the music. A machine design apprenticeship. Audio engineering. Six years behind the counter of a record shop — the kind of education in breadth and taste that no curriculum provides. By the time he released his first record on Stattmusik in 2000, under the Anatol moniker with Cosili, the Rohstofflager club in Zurich had already heard what he was building. Robert Johnson in Frankfurt, Batofar in Paris, WMF in Berlin followed. The sound travelled because it had earned the right to.

The Canson name arrived in 2002 with One Call. The response to early releases on his own Handheld label was captured perfectly in a de:bug review reduced to five words: "Oh my god, the Swiss." Releases on Cityfox, GS, Sub Static, Morris Audio. A remix for Mark Henning on TicTacToe in 2010. A chapter, in his own words, written in the books of Swiss minimal history.

Then a decade of quiet. And now, the return — as Anatol, as Canson, newly joined to bar25's booking agency, a family he has been part of since his first release on the label in 2009. Night Train on Cityfox is the horizon. New York, this May, his first US gig. Europe through the summer.

The rooms will ask questions again.

Ask Derradj about his influences and the answer does something interesting. He loves the old Moritz von Oswald records — that thread to Maurizio, to the deep minimalist lineage, is unbroken. But at home he barely listens to dance music. Six years in a record shop will do that: the taste diversifies, the boundaries dissolve, the categories stop meaning what they once did. Radio Dept, Piano Magic, Wechsel Garland. Currently: Sobrenadar and John Maus.

These are not the usual reference points for a techno producer. They are the reference points of someone who has been listening seriously and widely for a very long time, and whose music — kicking and melodic-romantic, as it has been described — carries that breadth without announcing it.

The clubs he gravitates toward tell the same story. Katerholzig in Berlin for the location and the crowd, both perfect for his music. Hamburg with Liebe*Detail and Eminor for the relaxed northern vibe. Cabaret, Hive, Frieda's Büxe in Zurich because the owners are good friends. The pattern is consistent: places built on relationships, communities, the kind of trust that produces the right atmosphere before a record is even played.

And then, at the end of the conversation, the detail that lands differently from everything else.

He collects designer toys. A pretty big collection. His favourite character from Studio Ghibli's animés is Totoro — the enormous, gentle, forest spirit who becomes the unlikely protector of two small children in a strange new world.

For an artist whose music is built on the deep minimalism of space and silence, on melodic romanticism in the middle of a dancefloor, there is something entirely coherent about this. Totoro doesn't explain himself either. He simply appears, enormous and quiet and entirely present, and the room feels different.

Canson is a producer and DJ based in Zurich, represented by bar25 booking. Discover more artists chosen for how they inspire, not just their visibility, at Antakly Projects.