As dance music genres like acid house and Detroit techno gained in popularity, French musicians brought a distinctive flavor. Reworking disco, funk and soul samples into a style uniquely their own was something young French musicians excelled at doing.
Pete Heller’s Big Love, for instance, was an almost-ideal example of filter disco that wouldn’t have felt out of place on Roule. Daft Punk and their Ed Banger colleagues also contributed greatly to France’s electronic identity.
St Germain
St Germain is one of the leading names in French electronic music. Based in Paris, this producer blends downtempo and jazz together with various genres to produce his distinctive sound, performing at many renowned venues and festivals worldwide to captivate audiences with his innovative style. Additionally, St Germain has formed successful partnerships with other musicians to produce some of the most inventive electronic and downtempo tunes around.
Ludovic Navarre (aka St Germain) had already established himself as a tastemaker with his brand of Nu Jazz electro music by the time his million-selling debut Boulevard came out in 1995. On the cover of Tourist, he looked like an ambitious missionary striding confidently through traffic wearing white suit and professional-man ponytail, his music matching this confident posture perfectly: Rose Rouge from its first single, as well as Sure Thing off its second LP track Sure Thing were surefire hits that resonated deeply within our minds and three million buyers agreed this masterpiece made of modernity.
While Moby was busy creating car commercial music and Fatboy Slim was producing overproduced dance pop, St Germain took jazz and hip-hop and created something entirely his own with it – gently shaping its sound into deep house with flute and saxophone riffs over rhythmic drumbeats to form an irresistibly funky groove that bridged between dance music’s big beats and genres that had fallen out of favour decades earlier.
As soon as Navarre’s album arrived in 2000, it became an immediate smash success. The title track featured old-school New Orleans piano chords and snaking saxophone, while other tracks sampled vintage blues and Southern soul. Navarre had recruited four young jazz elite players – pianist Alexandre Destrez, trumpeters Pascal Ocse and Malik Mezzadri of Pascal Ocse trumpets and Edouard Labord on sax – who exhibited flawless instrument lines between machine and man alike – making their playing effortless in every regard.
St Germain had been quiet for almost a decade before quietly making a comeback last year through a remix of jazz-man-of-the-moment Gregory Porter’s Musical Genocide single. This single proved that St Germain still possessed his signature sound and was still relevant today.
Motorbass
As London settled into acid house and Detroit techno during the early ’90s, Parisians such as Motorbass duo Philippe Zdar and Etienne de Crecy began exploring uncharted territory. Rave culture quickly replaced clubs as the central focus for club culture; therefore these Paris-based producers (who also formed Cassius) sought harder beats to accompany illegal parties held across Paris. At first this music took the form of space disco music with easy listening strings and hard hitting drum breaks; eventually however due to gradual burnout combined with overzealous law enforcement many ravers switched over to faster sounds associated with Detroit techno and garage house genres.
Motorbass’s transition from Space disco to modern dance music can be heard clearly on tracks such as Les Ondes (Wan Dence). Their use of filtering – later popularised by Daft Punk) indicates how far ahead they were.
Motorbass (later becoming Cassius) expanded their musical reach during the mid 1990s with mixes and productions for rapper MC Solaar, R&B singer Flo Morrissey, French hip-hop act Jess and Crabbe, French hip-hop duo Jess and Crabbe, as well as mixes featuring Notorious BIG’s foulmouthed sample and brilliant rubbery bassline from 1994 album Big Booya single.
Motorbass duo’s final album ‘Pansoul’ stands as one of the landmark releases from French Touch movement. It propelled them into international renown and, alongside St Germain’s ‘Boulevard’, is widely considered as marking its peak. Pansoul takes inspiration from techno’s everlasting Detroit/Chicago axis while rendering it into boulevard jazz and collector’s funk sounds for maximum impact.
Daft Punk’s 1997 breakthrough album Homework signalled the end of French touch’s peak days; artists either transitioned away from it (Larry Garnier switched to minimal electro-house), or completely went silent (St Germain took an indefinite hiatus until 2015). Yet its impact is evident today with Lana Del Rey and Justice both performing again this genre today – proof that dance music remains relevant today.
Fantom
In the 1990s, French electronic music emerged as a global force. More than just an audio phenomenon, French electronic music acted as a cultural catalyst that showcased France’s creativity and innovation. Blending house, techno, and disco sounds together, this genre allowed French artists to dominate dance floors worldwide; many remain influential figures within contemporary music scenes today.
Though electronic dance music (EDM) emerged in the late ’90s, its roots can be traced all the way back to France’s dance scene in the 1980s. At that time, Eden, a low-budget fanzine published by Cosmos Fact and record store TSF at that time, was its go-to publication; Eric Napora made an effort to change that by organizing raves at Cosmos Fact and selling records at TSF; his efforts ultimately paid off and gave rise to EDM as a genre!
In 1998, Claudine and he co-founded Les Inrockuptibles magazine together, quickly becoming an authority on French music and giving birth to new genres. Furthermore, editors for Les Inrockuptibles would often cover up-and-coming artists in its pages.
Though Les Inrockuptibles was successful, Napora wanted to add something different. In 2000 he founded Transmusicales de Paris festival; which soon after proved an incredible success, with performances by such luminaries as Daft Punk, Air and St Germain among many others.
By 2005, France’s electronic scene had flourished immensely. Artists such as DJ Gregory and Pepe Bradock brought tropical touches to French house music while Pascal Arbez amplified it further with his distinctive bombastic funk. But one of the most significant developments occurred through two unintended players in French touch movement: Gaspard Auge and Xavier de Rosnay commonly known as Justice were leading an unlikely movement into it all.
Their debut album CROSS was an innovative work that set new standards in French electronic music, featuring soaring choir samples, phasing effects and relentless kick drum beats – unlike anything before it. As such, it quickly became one of the most beloved albums ever.
Air
Air was a duo composed of Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoit Dunckel that specialized in an eclectic genre of electronic music spanning 70s electropop, easy listening, film soundtracks, psychedelic rock and soft rock to ambient, space pop and downtempo. Their two debut albums “Moon Safari” and “Sexy Boy” set high standards that other contemporary acts found difficult to meet; further challenging stereotypes associated with French music and raising its reputation worldwide.
At the core of it all was their unmatched ability to create mood and soundscapes that instantly engaged their listeners, setting them apart from other bands in this era of French Touch. Their music represented an elegant approach to melody that went far beyond simply sampling disco samples or layering up filters and synths; their style blended classical melodies, heady atmospheres, Serge Gainsbourg elan, a hint of sexiness and more than a trace of sensuality into their repertoire; setting an excellent precedent for generations of magenta-hued chill-out bands to follow them into this genre in its wake.
Premiers Symptomes was their debut EP that showcased early versions of songs that would become essential parts of Moon Safari, their 1998 breakthrough album. Moon Safari was an immaculately produced collection of ambience-pop punctuated by vintage synthesizers, radio-ready singles and collaborations with singer Beth Hirsch; its success helped pave the way for other similar acts like Daft Punk to join it and helped make the 1990s one of its most influential decades.
Talkie Walkie was widely received and heralded as a more mature effort than their earlier works, receiving high critical acclaim and winning them numerous accolades. This record proved their talent at creating harmonic and immersive electronic music with guitars, flute, drums and increased use of vocoders – perfecting their craft even further with subsequent works such as 10 000 Hz Legend, Le voyage dans la Lune Pocket Symphony Love 2 among other.