Busy P

DJ/producer Pedro Winter (aka Busy P) has been a key player in the French electronic music scene, beginning his career in the mid-’90s as Daft Punk’s first manager before founding the trendsetting Ed Banger Records in 2003. Sporadically releasing his own productions and more frequently remixing songs by other artists, his music, like much of the Ed Banger roster, is a brash, chic mixture of hard-edged electro, house, disco, and hip-hop. His 2007 EP Rainbow Man was one of the biggest hits of the label’s early years, and the 2010s found him branching into soundtracks with 2015′s Gypsy Life, in addition to working with artists such as Thunderbird Gerard and Mayer Hawthorne.
Born Pierre Winter in 1975 in Paris, he became interested in electronic dance music around 1992, and not long thereafter began spinning at clubs and planning parties. As he became increasingly involved with the underground electronic dance music community in Paris, Winter became acquainted with many of the scene’s key participants, including David Guetta, DJ Cam, Dimitri from Paris, and Daft Punk. He met the latter in 1996, when he was a law student; the soon-to-be-famous duo asked him to be their manager and he obliged.
In the wake of Daft Punk’s worldwide success, Winter founded the management company Headbangers Entertainment in 2002 and assumed management duties for other French electronic dance acts such as Cassius, DJ Mehdi, Cosmo Vitelli, and Thomas Winter et Bogue. In 2003 he founded Ed Banger Records, which released music by up-and-coming French electro artists such as Justice, SebastiAn, Uffie, DJ Mehdi, and others. Shortly after founding Ed Banger Records, Winter began producing tracks of his own under the Busy P moniker, beginning in 2004 with the Limit Ed 12″ single featuring the tracks “Colette C’est Chouette” and “Bearbrickdance,” and began employing his remixing ability as well. However, despite some occasional releases on Arcade Mode (e.g., 2005′s “Chop Suey”), his production work was sporadic; for instance, he didn’t get around to releasing another Busy P 12” on Ed Banger until Rainbow Man in 2007. He remained busy, though, especially after the breakthrough success of Justice — and, by association, the Ed Banger brand — in 2007 with “D.A.N.C.E.” In 2008, Ed Banger released the Pedrophilia 12″, which included remixes by Crookers and Mr. Oizo.
Busy P remained a prolific remixer in his own right, reworking tracks by UNKLE, MGMT, and Drop the Lime over the next few years. In 2013, Busy P issued the Still Busy 12”, which featured Thunderbird Gerard, and followed it with the remix collection Reworking Is Not a Crime in 2014. That year, he also contributed to the Vandroid soundtrack, a collection of songs inspired by the comic book that included tracks by Feadz and Mr. Flash. Another soundtrack, 2015′s Gypsy Life, presented selections from Busy P’s music for the full-length skateboarding video of the same name. For 2017′s Genie EP, Winter teamed up with Mayer Hawthorne as well as remixers Joe Goddard and Reckonwrong. He resurfaced in 2021 with a remix of Django Django’s song “Free from Gravity.” ~ Jason Birchmeier