When he was six years old, the artist now known as Swimming Paul was on vacation with his family in the French Riviera. Despite the fact that he was, the French artist says now, “super bad at swimming,” he was splashing around in the hotel pool. Splashing around became flailing, which become sinking.
“A guy named Paul saved me,” he says. “He took me in his arms and put me back on the ground.” Years later, when he was starting to make electronic music and needed an artist name, he thought of the man who’d once saved him from drowning and christened himself Swimming Paul.
The stutter house producer, who only goes by his artist name has yet to reveal his face in press photos or on social media, is now swimming laps through the dance scene with upcoming U.S. festival plays at Day Trip, Electric Forest, Beyond Wonderland, Arc Music Festival and Breakaway Philadelphia, with just-announced headlining dates across North America and in Mexico City happening this fall and a flurry of summer festivals in Europe also in the mix.
Paul grew up in Paris in a family that listened to artists like The Prodigy, Fatboy Slim and Moby, and he started making electronic music himself when he was a teenager, taking inspiration from fellow countrymen like Daft Punk and Justice ,who were then dominating the global scene. “Young people were listening to this music,” he recalls, “and it was starting to be not super expensive to create music.”
