Ines Boullant grew up a drummer. By her early teens she was producing on whatever software she could borrow. By 2019 she had picked an alias, u.r.trax, short for under rave, and bought her first controller. Six years later she sits comfortably among the most interesting techno producers working out of Paris, with releases on Hector Oaks's KAOS, Nina Kraviz's trip and Ellen Allien's BPitch.
Her music is hard to file. Folge Mir, the 2020 KAOS debut, leaned into trippy, weightless techno. Moral Krisis, on the sub-label KAOS-URTRAX, was bonier and meaner. Atom Heart on trip slipped sideways into psychedelia. Br0ken on BPitch sounded almost like a pop song wearing armour. Through all of it she has kept the same description in her bio: immersive music for the mind. It is the right phrase. The records do not want to entertain you. They want to relocate you.
Live she is closer to a sound designer than a selector. Six-hour sets at Bassiani in Tbilisi, last winter, moved through electro, raw techno, dark trance and the kind of backroom psychedelia that only works at four in the morning. She talks about DJing as an improvised dialogue between sound, space and bodies. You can hear her listening for that dialogue in real time. The mixes are not rehearsed. The transitions feel earned.
What sets her apart from the broader Paris scene is the refusal to specialise. She is not chasing one peak-time sound. She is building a vocabulary that travels between fun, beauty and chaos without losing its centre. That patience is rare in club music, where most careers reward a single recognisable trick.
New material is due this year through her own imprint Ultra Rare and a new collaboration on a label she has not yet announced. SHAPE+ has her on its 2025 platform of artists to watch. Rinse FM gives her a regular show. She is, very visibly, the next chapter of European techno.
Start with Br0ken. Then sit with Atom Heart in headphones. Then book the next ticket to a four-deck u.r.trax set you can find.
