Most producers learn about music-making from online tutorials and bedroom trial and error. Tatyana Jane got private lessons from Skrillex.
“I was at his house every morning at 7:00, and I’d stay until 10:00 p.m.,” she says. “When you have the chance to be alongside a very talented person like Sonny, you don’t want to miss one second.”
Jane, in Los Angeles from Paris where she resides, had loads of prior production experience, but during these sessions learned the foundations of how to make bangers. “He told me, ‘I know you are very good producer, but sometimes we have to start at the at the beginning, so we’re going to learn how to build a track step by step, because every step is very important.’”
There were lessons in programming, in designing sound with Serum, in arrangement and other various pro tips about building percussion and bass. These sessions happened in late 2024, and when Jane returned to Paris “I felt so much creativity,” she says. “He unlocked something in my music.” She arrived home and made 50 new tracks.
Some of these can be heard on Jane’s latest EP Discordia, released last month by Paris’ cult of cool label Ed Banger Records. The project arrives after slots opening for Justice in Paris in 2024, an appearance during the closing ceremony of the 2024 Summer Olympics, a buzzy b2b with Skrillex at Berghain in Berlin and a major run of shows this summer that have included Paris’ We Love Green and this month’s influential Kappa Futurfestival in Turin, Italy.
A French Touch acolyte since she was a child growing up in her native Cameroon, releasing music on Ed Banger had been a dream that became more real when Jane crossed paths with label founder Pedro Winter while she was out DJing in Paris. She told Winter that she also produced music and asked for his contact info, thinking she’d send him some of her stuff.
He gave her his number and email, but “I didn’t contact him for like, two years,” Jane recalls, “because I was like, ‘Pedro is a very big guy in Paris, in France, in the world, and I have to improve my music and my skills before I send him anything.” While also balancing her life the mom of a now-three-year-old boy (who appears on camera several times to say hello while Jane chats with Billboard over Zoom) she started working on productions every day, creating discipline around her process in the hopes of making something that slapped hard enough to send.
In a way, Jane had been working towards this opportunity since she started making music at age 17, having by this time moved from Cameroon to Montpellier, in the South of France. As a kid, her first exposure to music was via the sounds of West Africa, and she built her ears on the region’s rich percussions and polyrhythm. When she started producing as a teenager, she mostly made trap and rap beats, which she’d sing and rap over with friends. Over time, her sound drifted towards electronic music, which she’d been a major fan of since childhood, growing up on French Touch after discovering the genre as an eight-year-old.
“I was like, ‘Okay, who’s this group Justice, this guy Sebastian, these guys Martin Solveig, Daft Punk — and a bit later, David Guetta, Benny Benassi and Bloody Beetroots?” she says. “The French culture is very present in West Africa, because we speak the same language, and the French music was very, very important in Cameroon.”
While music was always her passion, she eventually became a data analyst in Paris. This position delivered her, she says, to “a big burnout. I was like, ‘I’m not feeling in a good place, so I’m going to change everything.’ At that moment I was like, ‘I think I’m going to do music. It’s the only thing I can do every day with joy.’”
Why Tatyana Jane Is an Up-and-Coming Dance Artist
Her first official release was 2021’s “Good Bye Summer,” which was followed by three additional singles in 2022 and the release of her first EP, Clavaria Formosa, in 2023. She met Winter around this time, and it was he who brought Skrillex to her set at 2023’s We Love Green festival in Paris. After her set finished, Skrillex started playing on the stage for a b2b2b2b with her and various other DJs.
“I was like, ‘Oh my f–king God, what’s happening?’” she recalls. “I remember that they had a lot of guys, and I was the only girl, and it was a lot of stress — but it was a dream for me, because I really love Skrillex and all the music he does.” Eventually Winter told her to plug in her USB and start playing. Her Instagram now displays a video from this set of Skrillex dancing and touching his heart as she mixes, in what can only be interpreted as a stamp of approval.
Released on June 4, the six-track Discordia is Jane’s biggest project to date, and is heavily percussion-forward, made from hard-edged beats, ominous glitch and wavy low end. Experimental but accessible, the EP is a crucial listen for anyone interested in futuristic bass.
This project is the latest step of a rise that’s already included nothing less than the world stage provided by the Closing Ceremony of the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris. Happening August 11 of that year, this ceremony featured various legends of French electronic music including Jean-Michel Jarre, Winter (playing under his DJ name Busy P), Martin Solveig, Kavinsky (who very sadly died earlier this week at the age of 50), Air, Phoenix and other icons. Jane got a call from the ceremony’s musical director Victor Le Masne, who told her he was designing the show to celebrate all kinds of French electronic music, and that he wanted her to play in the show’s middle section, designed to spotlight the new generation of artists.
“I was like, ‘Are you sure? These are very trap/bass beats,’” she recalls of the request to play music from her own catalog. “He like, ‘We are very sure. Please be sure the sample is cleared.’ It was like, ‘Okay this is not real,’ but it’s became real very quickly.” Her set filled the Stade de France with ominous, stuttering bass beats during a performance she eventually called “one of the greatest nights of my life.” Later that year, she was further enveloped into the crew when she opened for Justice during the duo’s December 2024 homecoming shows at Paris’ Accord Arena during the Hyperdrama tour, a relationship that further strengthened this year when Jane remixed “What You Want,” Justice’s 2026 track with Angèle.
Best Songs to Start With
Jane’s first track, released in 2021.
The lead track from Jane’s debut EP, 2023’s Clavaria Formosa.
A standout from Jane’s June EP, Discordia.
What’s Next for Jane
Now working with a manager who also works with Cobrah and Shygirl, Jane is focused on making more music, getting even more comfortable with production and readying her next releases. She has a lot of new tracks ready to go and is aiming to next work on a larger project, like a 10-track mixtape. She says the big idea is to “reappropriate the code of French electronic music” and imagines amalgamating all of her influences into a new genre she’ll call Afroclash. She’s also currently working on securing the visa that will allow her to play and tour in the U.S.
With cosigns many rising producers would dream of, Jane is intent on using her momentum and talent to make something that fits within the ecosystem that inspired her and in which she now resides, but which is simultaneously all her own.
“I really want to make music where one day people say, ‘This is the sound of Tatyana Jane.’”
Past Billboard Up-and-Coming Dance Artists of the Month
