Published on August 29, 2026
ONE BEAT: a journey around the world through electronic music
Can you recognize a city just by listening to its music? Can we include Buenos Aires, Berlin, Rio, Tokyo or Dakar in the same festival without erasing what makes each of these destinations unique?
ONE BEAT was born from this idea: an electronic music album project that could serve as the opening material for a DJ set at a festival in a city.
→ Discover and listen to the ONE BEAT album
The principle seems simple: imagine a fictitious world tour, as if a DJ were touring the biggest festivals on the planet. At each stage, a new piece. Each city has a new musical identity.
But with one constraint: all titles must belong to the same universe.
House. Deep House. Acid House. Progressive rises, breaks, drops and an energy capable of existing on the stage of a major electronic festival.
The beat stays. The world around him is changing.
Welcome to ONE BEAT.
A simple idea: take the same beat around the world
ONE BEAT was not designed as a compilation of traditional music remixed in electro.
The idea is exactly the opposite.
The starting point is always electronic music and festival culture. Each song must be able to function as a title played by a DJ in front of several thousand people.
The destination then contaminates the piece.
The instruments change. The rhythms change. Voices and languages change. The harmonies change. Sometimes even the way of constructing the piece changes.
But its electronic DNA remains present.
This is what gradually led to a very simple production rule:
Festival House first. Local identity as the signature.
In other words: house and acid constitute the driving force of the song. The local musical culture gives it its identity.
The final tracklist allows you to go from Paris to London, then Detroit, Havana, Berlin, Stockholm, Bogotá, Athens... to Zagreb. The album now has 35 musical destinations.
How to make a city “hear”?
This is probably the most interesting question encountered during the creation of ONE BEAT.
How to make Buenos Aires understood without displaying “Argentina” on the screen?
How can we make Rio heard rather than just “South America”?
How to distinguish Kyiv from Moscow?
How can we make people understand Nairobi without simply producing a piece of Afro House?
The answer is rarely a single instrument.
You have to look for a sort of sound imprint.
It can come from a traditional instrument, a rhythm, a way of singing, a language, a local club culture or several of these elements combined.
And sometimes, you have to agree to use well-known cultural markers.
The objective of ONE BEAT is not to carry out an ethnomusicological study. The objective is to provoke an almost immediate sensation in the listener:
“I know where I am. »
Or, when the city name appears:
“But yes, obviously! »
Buenos Aires: when bandoneon meets acid house
Listen to ONE BEAT - Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires was one of the pieces that helped us understand what the project should become.
The bandoneon has an extraordinary advantage: its tone immediately evokes tango and Argentina for a large part of the public.
However, it was not necessary to produce an electronic tango.
The song was to remain a festival title.
The work therefore consisted of confronting the codes of tango with those of house and acid house: bandoneon phrasings, rhythmic tensions and Argentinian sensuality on the one hand; four-on-the-floor kick, electronic basses, synthesizers and 303s on the other.
The bandoneon is no longer just an accompaniment.
It becomes the hook.
And when the 303 begins to take on its motif, the two worlds merge.
This has become one of the recurring principles of ONE BEAT: bringing an emblematic instrument into dialogue with electronic machines.
Rio: from Brazil to Rio de Janeiro
Rio posed another problem.
A first approach made it easy to hear Brazil. But the project is not called ONE BEAT: BRAZIL. You had to hear Rio.
The sound palette was therefore narrowed around markers more specifically associated with the carioca imagination: bateria de samba, surdo, caixa, repinique, tamborim, agogô, cuíca and cavaquinho, with some syncopations inspired by carioca funk.
The cuíca plays a particularly interesting role here.
Many listeners would be unable to give the name of this instrument. However, when they hear it in the middle of a bateria, the association with carnival and Brazil is almost instinctive.
Music can therefore be recognizable without the listener knowing why.
Berlin: sometimes, identity is not folkloric
Berlin represents almost the opposite case.
Definitely looking for a traditional German instrument would probably have distanced the piece from the contemporary city.
Berlin's musical identity is elsewhere: techno, warehouses, minimalism, machines, repetition, underground culture and industrial aesthetic.
The piece therefore becomes colder, more mechanical and darker.
Kick dry. Analog sequences. Metallic percussions. 303 hypnotic. Almost detached German female voice.
In Berlin, it is not a traditional instrument that tells the story of the destination.
It’s the machine.
And this difference is essential in ONE BEAT: the musical identity of a territory is not necessarily linked to its folklore.
Paris: French Touch, elegance and French electronic culture
For Paris, it is impossible to ignore the considerable influence of French Touch on the history of electronic music.
Filters, disco grooves, funky bass, cut samples, bright synthesizers and vocoders help build an immediately different identity of Berlin.
Berlin is raw and industrial.
Paris is more shiny, funky and elegant.
Here again, the objective is not to imitate an existing artist, but to use the codes of a French electronic culture that has become recognizable throughout the world.
Havana: when a few seconds are enough to travel
Some ONE BEAT tracks worked almost immediately.
Havana is one of them.
Cuban percussion, congas, bongos, timpani, clave, montuno piano and Cuban Spanish voice provide an extremely strong identity.
When these elements meet a modern house beat, the contrast immediately works.
We no longer simply listen to an electronic track with some Latin percussion.
We are transported elsewhere.
This is exactly the effect ONE BEAT is looking for.
Dakar: “Africa” is not enough
One of the most important lessons of the project was to see to what extent the term “African music” means almost nothing musically, as the cultures are so different.
For Dakar, the signature was built around the sabar, the tama, the kora, West African polyrhythms and female voices in Wolof with call-and-response games.
The objective was above all not to add a few percussions to a generic Afro House piece, but to look for what could swing the imagination towards Senegal.
And always with the same constraint: keep enough house, bass and acid so that the song belongs to ONE BEAT.
Lisbon: transforming saudade into festival energy
Lisbon presented another challenge.
Certain influences from the contemporary Lisbon electronic scene are exciting, but do not necessarily allow the general public to immediately identify Portugal.
The solution came from the Portuguese guitar and the emotional world of fado.
Its metallic timbre, its arpeggios and its tremolos become electronic elements. They are cut, repeated and filtered until they become house hooks.
The female voice retains a certain expressiveness inspired by fado and saudade.
The desired result is a strange mixture: a piece capable of being euphoric while retaining a form of melancholy.
Reykjavík: when the atmosphere becomes an instrument
Listen to ONE BEAT - Reykjavík
How to recognize Iceland without falling into a Viking caricature?
For Reykjavík, the answer lies much more in the atmosphere.
Ethereal Icelandic female voice, vocal harmonies, glacial textures, wide open spaces, drones, winds, crystalline bells and volcanic rumblings surround a deliberately more progressive electronic production.
Here, the voice almost becomes an instrument.
The words come late.
Silence and space take on more importance.
Reykjavík thus becomes a breathing space in the album, while retaining the build-up and climax necessary for the ONE BEAT universe.
Stockholm: the legacy of Swedish pop and disco
Listen to ONE BEAT - Stockholm
Sweden has a special history with pop.
For Stockholm, the idea was therefore to bring into contemporary house the markers of a bright Scandinavian pop-disco of the 1970s: brilliant piano, disco strings, melodic bass, rhythm guitar and rich female harmonies.
A euphoric music on the surface, but shot through with a slight melancholy.
The 303 gradually disrupts this very melodic universe until disco, house and acid merge in the last drop.
A way of reminding us that the musical identity of a country can also come from its modern popular culture.
Lima: embrace immediately recognizable markers
For Peru, the choice was almost obvious: zampoña, quena, charango and Andean bombo.
The pan flute is probably one of the sound markers most immediately associated with the Andes in the collective imagination.
Rather than avoiding this obvious fact, ONE BEAT embraces it.
But the zampoña should not lead the piece.
She plays a riff.
The 303 answers him.
Then the two end up playing together on top of a huge drop house.
An ancestral instrument and an emblematic synthesizer of acid house can then become partners in the same musical phrase.
Moscow and Kyiv: geographically close, musically different
Creating two pieces dedicated to Moscow and Kyiv posed a particular question: would it be possible to make their identities sufficiently different?
For ONE BEAT - Moscow, the palette is cold and monumental: balalaika, bayan, large bells, mechanical textures and Russian voices.
ONE BEAT - Kyiv deliberately takes another direction: Ukrainian bandura, sopilka, organic percussion and Ukrainian female vocal polyphonies.
Same electronic base.
Two distinct sound palettes.
This opposition ultimately sums up the ONE BEAT experience very well: geographical proximity never means cultural uniformity.
And the journey continues
The destinations obviously do not stop at those described here.
The tracklist also allows you to go through ONE BEAT - Seoul, ONE BEAT - Tokyo, ONE BEAT - Mumbai, ONE BEAT - Cairo, ONE BEAT - Marrakech or even ONE BEAT - Istanbul.
Europe continues with Amsterdam, Brussels, Prague, Budapest, Bucharest, Zagreb, Athens, Rome or Ibiza. In total, the album page currently contains 35 tracks.
→ See all 35 tracks and listen to the ONE BEAT album
Languages are also part of music
Another important decision was not to impose English on the entire album.
Each destination has its own voice.
Brazilian Portuguese in Rio. German in Berlin. Wolof in Dakar. Ukrainian in Kyiv. Russian in Moscow. Icelanders in Reykjavík. Swedes in Stockholm. Hebrew in Tel Aviv.
The lyrics remain deliberately short, simple and repetitive. In a festival piece, their role is not necessarily to tell a complex story.
They themselves become sound material and cultural marker.
A language has its rhythm, its consonants, its vowels, its musicality and its particular way of landing on a beat.
Artificial intelligence as a partner in musical creation
ONE BEAT is also an experiment around musical creation by artificial intelligence.
The album was developed with Suno Studio Pro, a generative AI tool capable of producing music, instrumentation and vocals from text instructions.
But the process is far from being as simple as writing the name of a city and clicking “Generate”.
Each track requires repeated iteration and refinement.
You have to look for the relevant musical markers, choose the instruments, define the electronic structure, write the lyrics, determine the language and character of the voice, generate several versions, listen, identify what doesn't work and then start again.
Sometimes the result is musically successful but geographically too generic.
Sometimes the country is perfectly identifiable but the festival dimension has disappeared.
Sometimes an instrument takes up too much space.
Sometimes, the voice arrives too early and destroys a rise that should have lasted several tens of seconds.
Artificial intelligence generates.
But you always have to choose.
And it is precisely in these successive choices that the artistic direction of the project is constructed.
Moreover, this desire to openly show how generative tools intervene in the process already corresponds to the editorial philosophy of the site: Listen, it presents the studio as a laboratory where AI and new creative tools remain at the service of an idea and an artistic direction.
ONE BEAT: One world. Many cultures. One beat.
ONE BEAT is at the same time an album of electronic music, a sound journey and an experience in modern music creation.
It explores a question that ultimately goes beyond technology: in a world where music travels instantly from one continent to another, what still makes up the sonic identity of a place?
An instrument?
A rhythm?
A language?
A voice?
A musical story?
A club culture?
Probably a bit of all of that.
ONE BEAT tries to bring together these elements without fixing them, by bringing together traditional instruments and machines, local cultures and the global dancefloor.
One city after another.
One country after another.
One festival after another.
One world. Many cultures. One beat.