Tour-Maubourg

Brussels drums, a Paris move

Tour-Maubourg is Pierre d'Estienne d'Orves, born in Brussels and playing drums from the age of eight. He picked up a guitar at thirteen, and it was hip-hop and the habit of digging for samples that led him backwards into jazz rather than any conservatoire route. He began producing in 2011, entirely inside a computer, with no hardware to speak of.

In 2013 he left Belgium for Paris to make music his job. The records he cites as formative are a specific set: St Germain's Tourist, Shazz, Pépé Bradock, Nicolas Jaar and Moodymann — French house that treats jazz as source material rather than decoration, plus two Americans who built tracks out of soul records. That lineage is audible in almost everything he has released since.

A cold email to Pont Neuf

The break came from an unsolicited demo sent by email to Pont Neuf Records, the Paris label he has been attached to since its early days. His first release for the label, "Déclaration préalable à l'embauche", landed in 2017 and drew a line from Trax magazine describing him as the new hope of Parisian house. The same year he put out Indulgent Harmonies on FHUO Records.

A run of EPs followed — Solitude Collective in 2018, Allégresse in 2019, Duophonie in 2020 — built on Ableton and an MPC, with samples lifted from jazz players including Joe Henderson and Dexter Gordon. The template was deep house tempo and broken-beat drums with a horn line or a piano voicing doing the work a vocal hook would normally do. Tracks such as "Ode To Love", "Manhattan To Brooklyn" and "Artifice" are the ones that carried furthest on streaming; his booking agency now puts the cumulative figure above 40 million plays.

Two albums, the second one about tinnitus

Paradis Artificiels arrived on Pont Neuf in 2020, taking its title and its shape from Baudelaire. It was the record that moved him from twelve-inch producer to album artist, and it has been repressed more than once since.

The second album, Spaces of Silence, came out on 27 January 2023. He wrote it after going back to Belgium for a year of relative isolation, and it runs to fourteen tracks including an intro, an outro and two interludes — closer to a sequenced listening record than a club tool. The title is literal. He has explained that it refers to the tinnitus he has had permanently since 2018, and that music is where he paradoxically finds silence, because it is the one state in which he does not hear the ringing.

The credits show how far he had moved from solo laptop work: co-composition from Maxence Robinet, Mathieu Berthet and Adrien Erra, saxophone from Ismael Ndir on "You" and "Grief", mastering by Sébastien Petit at Sodasound. The album also brought a European touring run, including a slot at Cabourg Mon Amour.

Handing the tracks to a band

The working relationship with Ndir began at a Club Croissant radio session and changed how the material was arranged. In a September 2023 interview he described spending a month in a Paris studio complex with musicians, rebuilding the songs one at a time and moving between rooms to break habits. The shift was from a fully pre-programmed electronic set to something he could steer: his description was of following the performance as a participant in it, able to stop when he wanted and talk to the room.

That became The Panorama Sessions, four tracks taken from live performances, rearranged with Ndir and recorded at Panorama Studio in Brussels. A second volume followed under the Tour-Maubourg Ensemble name on 25 March 2025, with Ndir on saxophone, Fréjus Méa on drums and Teuteu adding keys, mixed and mastered by Benoit Daudin. Reviewing it, the site o sótão wrote that the ensemble delivers live takes of his best tracks with added layers of what it called human-touch-groove, and credited the record with balancing rawness and controlled precision. It reads as the point where the live project stopped being a side venture and started feeding the discography.

Dreams, and a return to the floor

Floating on Silence, with its remix package, shipped on 30 August 2024 and closed out the quieter phase. The current record is the Dreams EP, released on 27 March 2026 by the French deep-house label Noire & Blanche — his first for them in close to four years. It runs six tracks: "Dreams", "Falling" with Nic Hanson, "Johanna's Blues" with Cyan Lu, "Feel Inside", "Only Love Is Real" and "Things" with the American producer Kareem Ali. The limited twelve-inch pre-order sold out.

His agency framed the release as a deliberate move back towards house after the album work, with two EPs planned across the first half of 2026 and studio time booked for a third album. Dreams is the one that has arrived; he has described the intention as blurring the line between jazz and house so the same tracks function at home and at four in the morning.

The summer of 2026 was spent mostly in France: La Citadelle de Marseille on 7 August, the outdoor Virage site in Paris on 29 August, and Cabaret Sauvage in Paris on 19 September, one of thirty-nine shows he has played in the city.

Where he is now

As of late September 2026 the only dates on sale are an Australian run, and it is his first listed touring outside Europe in the current cycle: The Rechabite in Perth on 15 October, Civic Underground in Sydney on 16 October, and The Night Cat in Fitzroy, Melbourne, on 17 October. Three rooms, three nights, all of them small.

The two formats he works in are distinct and worth separating. The club booking is a DJ set — the Ninety One Living Room date on Brick Lane in London, for instance, was doors at ten and no support billed, sold on the promise of jazz, house and whatever sits between them. The Ensemble show is the other thing entirely, and the one the Panorama records document.