This story originally appeared in i-D’s The New Wave Issue, no. 373, Fall/Winter 2023. Order your copy here.
If you counted yourself a fan of Christelle Oyiri — better known by her stage moniker Crystallmess — before April this year, you may applaud yourself for your astute musical taste. Though hardly a total inconnu prior to then (indeed, the 31-year-old DJ, producer, writer and interdisciplinary artist is a longstanding stalwart of the Parisian underground) it wasn’t until she appeared behind a set of Virgil Abloh’s transparent decks during an interlude in Frank Ocean’s Coachella headline set that she first came to mainstream attention. While the main event — which those not physically present could only tune into via grainy TikTok live streams — was hotly debated, Christelle’s ten-or-so minute, clubby mash-up of Frank Ocean’s hits with snippets of 90s UK techno classic “Born Slippy” by Underworld and Ice Spice’s “In Ha Mood” was received as an indisputable highlight.
What the plethora of Frank Ocean-dedicated Reddit channels clamouring to identify Christelle were drawn to is what had already earned her a global throng of disciples in below-the-surface electronic music circles, who religiously stream her radio episodes on NTS Radio, Rinse France or FACT, and flock to venues from Berlin’s Berghain to Primavera São Paulo to witness her sets first-hand. ‘Esoteric’ and ‘eclectic’ are two of the only words that can encapsulate the expansive nature of her approach to her craft, delivering infectiously dancey sets that intuitively mesh four-to-the- floor techno and syncopated kuduro, squeaky pop vocal loops and jangly, percussive jungle, the warm, synth-like blare of Chicago house with the hip-swaggering bounce of Ivorian coupé-décalé—all within just an hour or two.
The eclecticism that defines Christelle’s sound is located in her upbringing. Born and raised in the suburbs of Paris as the youngest sibling, she credits the refusal of her Ivorian-Guadaloupean parents and far-older siblings (from whom she’s separated by a fifteen-year age gap) to mollycoddle her as a child. “They were not trying to baby me. My siblings were very much like, ‘okay, you’re cute, but what do you have to bring to the table?’” she lightly chuckles, “and my parents didn’t stop partying just because I was there. They were like, ‘Listen, we need to have fun, so you come with us’,” she says. Christelle recalls early — and in hindsight, deeply formative — memories of time spent atop her father’s shoulders amid the thunderous sound systems at Notting Hill Carnival, which she’d attend with her parents each year. “That has to be my earliest memory of what a big party looked like — this memory of my mum and dad raving has never left me, and I don’t think I would be a DJ if it wasn’t for that.”
Regarding her siblings, the most formative mark that their musical inclinations left on Christelle is her ardent love for hip-hop, which can be traced all the way back to when she was about five, she says. “When you’re around older folks, you just listen to whatever they listen to, and back then was when the genre was booming.” While she was an instant convert, her passion wasn’t necessarily matched by her peers in mid-90s Paris particularly when she would crack out the more eccentric tracks from her then-burgeoning musical repertoire, noting a time when she chose to introduce the audience at a children’s birthday party to Wu-Tang Clan. “In hindsight, it’s like: ‘Why are you playing “36 Chambers” at a birthday party, and then complaining that you don’t have any friends?’ I mean, that shit’s great, but it’s also a very conceptual, weird ass album—even for adults—with grown Black men talking about kung fu,” she says. “And also, these are French kids, so they don’t even understand anything — and I didn’t at the time either!”
It wasn’t until her teens, though, that her sonic precociousness blossomed into a more active pursuit. With the Val-de-Marne neighbourhood she grew up in blighted by violent crime in the mid-to-late 00s, her parents opted to move her to a junior high school in a neighbouring municipality. While it was a decision taken with a young Christelle’s best interests at heart, it confronted her with feelings of isolation and alienation — themes that colour her creative output across the gamut of mediums she works in today — on account of her being one of two Black girls in her entire school. “It was very complicated to connect with the other kids — to not feel rejected, and also to not experience immense racist aggression, to be honest,” she shares. “It was pretty violent and alienating. I’m not mad at my parents for choosing to get me a better education, but it was also detrimental to my mental health.” While a troubling experience, it spurred her to seek out new forms of community by way of the internet, then dominated by chat rooms, shifty dial-up connections and MSN Messenger. Naturally, for Christelle, music became the fulcrum around which her online connections would pivot. “I’d go on forums, make loads of digital friends and share and download shit tons of music, really diving into what would constitute my identity years and years later,” she says. “Finding my community online was a huge part of my teenagehood. It was less based on looks, followers and social capital and more on shared interests.”
Christelle’s arrival at a new high school brought about a consequent shift, hailing her immersion into the nighttime scenes of which she is now a totemic figure. During what she calls her “angry teenager phase” around the age of thirteen or fourteen, she was an online acolyte of Peaches’ riotous, raunchy electro-grunge and the white hot sounds of Ed Banger crew — arguably the most eminent musical export from mid-late 00s France, bringing DJs and producers like SebastiAn, Busy P, Uffie and Mr. Oizo to the fore. It was then that she first stepped out into Paris’ clubscape, facilitated by a helping hand from an older cousin and an appearance that was, at the time, years beyond her age. “I was like 5’8″, and in France, you weren’t really required to have an ID — you just had to look the part.”
“As a woman DJ, and especially as a Black woman DJ, you’re judged differently. You have to deliver.”
Time spent partying naturally translated to time spent with DJs, in particular Ed Banger-affiliated DJ Feadz, who’s perhaps best known as the producer behind Uffie. “We were hanging out a lot, just nerding out about music,” Christelle says. It was at his suggestion that she first thought to try her hands on the decks — well, almost. “At the time, I basically didn’t have the money to do that, so I would burn CDs, and [was] mostly DJing on my computer in my room for years.” During her time at college, her commitment was formalised. She was, at one point, working three jobs in order to build the funds required to purchase a MacBook and her first proper set of decks. “Once I had my gear, I was like, ‘Yep, I’m never going out this house!’ — I ghosted,” she says, quickly retracting. “Well, not ghosted, but I wasn’t out as much as I was because I was practising to be a DJ.” This reclusive practise phase in Christelle’s journey lasted over a year, with her compulsion to hone her craft behind closed doors largely down to a desire to “compete with the big dogs” straight out the door. That was in no small part aided by the generosity of established DJ peers who’d let her digitise wax from their physical record collection. “It really did help having rich friends,” she quips, stressing the exorbitant costs associated with building a robust vinyl collection of one’s own. “It allowed me to access shit that nobody else could because it’s vinyl-only. It allowed me to put myself in direct competition with the people that I admire.”
More than just a fierce competitive streak, though, Christelle’s ardent pursuit of self-improvement was also a product of her awareness of the space she was entering — namely, one that was near-exclusively dominated by straight, white men, the majority of whom were still spinning straight- up, electro-derived sounds. “It sounds corny as fuck, but at the time, especially in France, there were no Black women DJs. It really wasn’t a thing,” she says, noting the pressure that she felt when stepping into the field. “As a woman DJ, and especially as a Black woman DJ, you’re judged differently. You have to deliver — your skills need to be up to par.”
They were. Rapidly, loyal audiences congregated around the sets she began delivering on sceney London radio stations, the most notable of which being NTS, where she has held a monthly residency since 2019. Her swiftly accrued success on the airwaves bolstered her confidence to take to the dancefloor soon after.
The trajectory which has unfolded since has seen Christelle travel the world to play some of the globe’s most revered booths and, consequently, garner the attention of some of the most astute voices in contemporary fashion, art and culture. She has collaborated with Telfar and Marni’s Francesco Risso on custom sonic productions for their respective collection presentations, and played at parties hosted by the likes of Bottega Veneta and Courrèges. Through her fine art practice, which has boomed in step with her music career, she’s presented work at Paris’ esteemed Lafayette Anticipations and staged a solo show at Glasgow’s Tramway, exploring the legacy of the 2002 Côte d’Ivoire military coup through objects and sound. Later this year, she’ll give a live performance at the Lina Ghotmeh-designed pavilion at London’s Serpentine Gallery and open another solo show in Zürich.
All this goes to say that it should have come as no surprise when, a year or so ago, Christelle received a message from Frank Ocean’s team, inviting her to curate the inaugural mix for the prolific artist’s new Apple-backed radio show, Homer Radio. But it did. “I would say that I was definitely shocked because, I don’t know, I feel like [I was] pretty low-key, and pretty unknown at that time,” she says. “I was just doing my thing. Some people knew me, some people didn’t.” That sense of shock was compounded when Frank’s team circled back to invite Christelle to be a part of his headlining Coachella performance, easily one of the most anticipated performances of the year.
Her initial surprise subsided, though, on learning more about Frank’s deeply felt passion for club music—as attested by his short-lived party series, PrEP+. “I also realised that he’s been really supportive of underground electronic musicians for years now. It’s really nothing new, to be honest,” Christelle says, “and I guess for me, I was excited that he was taking his love for music down another route.”
Judging by the countless forum threads dedicated to “the DJ that played a little Homer set”, with some attempting to track her down to see when she’ll next be stopping by their city, and others collating fan-produced dupes of her set, Frank set Christelle stratospheric. Still, looking back on what will, with greater perspective, become a key inflection point in her career trajectory, she maintains a cool, albeit decidedly humble, nonchalance. “To be honest, I was just happy to be there,” she says. “I come from a small hood south of Paris, it was a long way from home. It was one of the biggest spectacles and festivals in the world, so I’m definitely aware that it has shifted stuff for me, but I’m also certainly still the same person and operating from the same place of generosity.”
Credits
Photography Bolade Banjo
Fashion Dan Sablon
Hair Aude Andrea
Make-up Maelys Jallali
Nail Technician Saloua Derbal
Set Design David Dequevedo
Photography Assistance Alexis Parrenin and Michal Czech
Fashion Assistance Ismène Duprat
Make-up Assistance Camille Lam
Nail Assistance Mia Radford
Production Zoé Arich
Production Assistance Mégane De Araujo and Julia Marroni
Casting Director Samuel Ellis Scheinman for DMCASTING