{"id":360,"date":"2023-09-25T16:46:07","date_gmt":"2023-09-25T16:46:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musictechnicsandculture.com\/?p=360"},"modified":"2023-10-04T18:33:49","modified_gmt":"2023-10-04T18:33:49","slug":"french-connections-from-discotheque-to-daft-punk-the-birth-of-french-touch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musictechnicsandculture.com\/index.php\/2023\/09\/25\/french-connections-from-discotheque-to-daft-punk-the-birth-of-french-touch\/","title":{"rendered":"French Connections From Discotheque to Daft Punk: The Birth of French Touch by James (2003)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>The book <em>French Connections<\/em> provides a comprehensive look at the French dance culture in its making. The empirical data of the book is comprised of interviews with important figures in French electronic music history and a range of sources as well as Martin James\u2019 own experiences as an insider of the French dance music scenes. He himself coined the term \u201cFrench Touch,\u201d which is not only a genre-like definition of French dance music emerging in the second half of the 1990s but also an allusion to the rising French impact on the international dance music culture. Whereas artists like Daft Punk, Air, and Bob Sinclair were the main actors behind French Touch, James acknowledges that their music was the result of the experiments in the electronic music production of preceding decades.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The train of time that leads us to French Touch has many stops: From discotheque culture to musique concrete; from experiments with Ondioline and Moog to rave culture and techno parades. Every stop has its own places to visit and songs to hear, sometimes with their makers narrating their own journeys.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>While the discotheques of the Second World War provide the historical context of the French relation to dance music, musique concrete acts as a source of a new sound aesthetic achieved by imaginative musical structuring and tape editing. Musique Concrete\u2019s experiments with recorded sound, then, evolve into electro-pop, especially when Jean-Jacques Perrey combines the found sound with the Ondioline and the Moog synthesizers and \u201cpushes the boundaries of electronic music for over four decades.\u201d The way leading to the current electronic music scene in France branches off when it comes to techno, rave, and what Martin calls the French Touch. Defined as the French version of house music, French Touch blossoms at the backdrop of the government\u2019s condemnation of the raves and as a closer relative to indie and hip hop cultures than rave and techno.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Spotify Playlist<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-spotify wp-block-embed-spotify wp-embed-aspect-21-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe title=\"Spotify Embed: French Connections | Book by Martin James\" style=\"border-radius: 12px\" width=\"100%\" height=\"352\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen allow=\"autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; fullscreen; picture-in-picture\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/embed\/playlist\/4iWYbPyRuArm7nL2tO8jO3?si=9210a17b3db04cae&#038;utm_source=oembed\"><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Excerpts from the Book <\/h3>\n\n\n\n<h4 class=\"wp-block-heading\">French Hiphop &amp; Techno&nbsp;<\/h4>\n\n\n\n<p>Nowhere was this more evident than in Paris, where the city\u2019s urban projects were quickly turned into ghettos that seemed a million miles removed from the bourgeois affluence of Versailles. Surprisingly a government directive also aided the growth of hip hop in France. In a move aimed at slowing down the cultural homogenisation created by the spread of US concerns like McDonald\u2019s, the French government imposed a limit on the amount of non-French language music allowed to be played on the radio. Although French pop quickly fit into this, airplay was also accessible to hip hop artists rapping in French. As a result, the words of artists like MC Solaar, NTM and Iam were quickly spread throughout the country. Philippe Zdar, who worked extensively with MC Solaar at this time, considers this to be the most important turning point for French music culture. \u201cHip hop was the key thing in French Touch because when NTM, Solaar, Iam, the other first bands who were successful, came up, it changed everything,\u201d he explained. \u201cIn England, you were OK because you\u2019d always had a lot of bands, but in France there was nothing. Just pop music for years and years. A few good ones, OK, but a lot of shit. So with hip hop, it was the first time that music was done by kids in France. \u201cHip hop was a great emancipation in music. It was the first time that people were able to make music in small studios and put it out on small labels. Suddenly kids were getting samplers and they could do it for themselves. And at the same time, the kids from the suburbs could speak about their lives with the rapping.\u201d The success of hip hop in France was unparalleled in any other country in the world. With other territories unable to find their own voices in the face of American domination, the French rappers went beyond simply rhyming in their own language; they invented dialects and words which remain unique to the French scene. \u201cIn the UK, you had the weight of American hip hop to live up to,\u201d explains Zdar. \u201cBut here, people didn\u2019t speak English, so naturally they rapped in French. If you go to a kid here who\u2019s into hip hop, he\u2019ll listen to 85% of French stuff. They have their own style, own language, everything.\u201d The French hip hop scene may have introduced the cheap production methods which would fuel the French dance artists, but the direct link comes with three people who all worked at the same studios together \u2013 Philippe Zdar, Hubert \u2018Boombass\u2019 Blanc-Farancard and Etienne de Crecy. A trio who, in various combinations, would produce some of the most influential records. Pioneering releases that heralded the arrival of French Touch \u2013 La Funk Mob and Motorbass. The common figure in both outfits was Philippe Zdar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h4 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Musique Concrete<\/h4>\n\n\n\n<p>An approach to music that would hugely influence the sampling generation and how they perceived music. Just as many people claim that everything is art, the musique concrete school believed everything to be a source of music. Through a combination of brilliant tape editing and imaginative musical structuring, these composers would create stunning pieces from the most wayward of sound<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The concrete sounds they use are sounds from nature, industrial sounds, animal sounds etc., as well as strange sounds made by original synthesisers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>A style in which composition was based upon the acoustic manipulation of found sounds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>it was one music containing everything but, naturally, having recording as a medium. That is to say, music that will not be played but which will be inscribed on a medium. Recording is indispensable. I do not compose to be played; I compose in order to record and diffuse the music myself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrete created many of the recording techniques that would be adopted by rock musicians in search of the avant-garde sometime later. These included the Beatles, whose \u2018Revolution #9\u2019 from The White Album experimented greatly with cuts and loops. In the book Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now, John Lennon describes the creation of \u2018Revolution #9\u2019. \u201cIt has the basic rhythm of the original \u2018Revolution\u2019 going on with some twenty loops we put on, things from the archives of EMI. We were cutting up classical music and making different size loops, and then I got an engineer tape on which some test engineer was saying, \u2018Number nine, number nine, number nine.\u2019 all those different bits of sound and noises are all compiled. There were about ten machines with people holding pencils on the loops \u2013 some only inches long and some a yard long. I fed them all in and mixed them live<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In the years that followed, Henry pioneered the use of the synthesizer (his first entirely synthesized project Le Voyage came in 1962), while also marrying the synth with a combination with found sounds and tape editing. Henry\u2019s first major commercial success arrived in 1964 with his album Jerks Electronique which sold over 150,000 copies. In 1967 Henry combined forces with Michel Colombier to compose a piece entitled Messe Pour Le Temps Present for a ballet by Maurice Bejart. Henry commissioned Colombier \u201cto recreate the sound textures and violent atmosphere of certain American films.\u201d The resulting combination of Colombier\u2019s psychedelic rock and Henry\u2019s additional off-the-wall electronic effects has subsequently achieved legendary status and has been sampled heavily in recent years. The album has been described as a beat-heavy Moog masterpiece.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The legacy of the musique concrete and electroacoustic schools \u2013 both in the serious works of Schaeffer and Henry and in the humorous style of Perrey \u2013 is hugely important to all contemporary electronic and sampling artists. Not least of all in their home country where producers have taken many of the techniques and translated them to the contemporary setting. The editing systems are of particular note as they allowed people to understand the possibilities of manipulating sound sources. This translated to the sampling and sequencing technology as producers wilfully overrode certain limitations of the programme to forge new sounds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h4 class=\"wp-block-heading\">French Touch<\/h4>\n\n\n\n<p>At this time, the first wave of the French Touch was also met with the media\u2019s hunger for hype. And it was one press and promotions office that sold the hype to the editors \u2013 POP Promotions. They represented Motorbass, Dimitri from Paris (and the rest of Yellow Productions), Source Lab, Artefact, Pro-Zak Trax, and Versatile. Realising that most of their artists wouldn\u2019t get column inches alone, the PR company started to sell Paris rather than the artists. The media bit and suddenly, journalists were hopping the channel to check out this new scene. Interest was subsequently high enough for other artists to get caught up in the growing hype. This coincided with a major change in the transport system that would have an enormous impact on the lives of English and French youth \u2013 the Eurostar. \u201cI\u2019m sure that Eurostar is a big part of the French Touch story,\u201d confirms Pedro Winter. \u201cThe DJs started to go to London on Eurostar to buy records from Black Market and, in 1996, all of the record industry was chasing Daft Punk, meeting them in their offices. It meant that the industry was taking the Eurostar to talk about Frenchy music.\u201d The next event was possibly the most important. Three excellent albums came out of Paris in two months: Motorbass\u2019 Pansoul, Dimitri from Paris\u2019 Sacrebleu and the Source Lab 2 compilation. Amazingly, all three albums were given the Album of the Month spot in Muzik. First came Dimitri from Paris and Source Lab in the same month, and then Motorbass. As a triumvirate, the albums suggested France was a hotbed of undiscovered talent. Suddenly the entire UK music industry went looking around the studios of Paris for their own slice of the hype. As these three were followed by similarly strong releases from Super Discount and producers like I:Cube, it then seemed impossible to avoid the French scene. As has been pointed out to me by numerous French producers, the UK press always referred to Paris as being France. With this hype came the major label interest, which brought a certain amount of power for the artists who were subsequently signed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If the French Touch had had a positive effect on some people, it was perhaps predictable that techno DJ and producer Manu le Malin wasn\u2019t enthused about it. \u201cWhen French Touch came out, France was suddenly considered a house country, but this wasn\u2019t really true,\u201d he argued. \u201cPeople thought we were all into filtered disco, but that was fucking rubbish. Laurent Garnier never did a filtered house track; he never played it. Ever. Fifteen years after he started and he\u2019s still packing the Rex Club and he only plays serious music. No, the problem with that French Touch thing is that everyone outside of France thought that we were a house country. It took about a year and a half to get rid of the hype. \u201cAlso, because of the French Touch, some people were forced to go to Germany,\u201d he added. \u201cPeople like The Hacker, or Vitalic who would blow you away, man. He did a remix of one of my tracks because he wanted to do a hard track rather than a house track. And he made a fantastic tune for my label. Because there are the techno artists getting attention, all of a sudden, French Touch just disappeared. Now it\u2019s just French artists. But they were forced to go to Germany to get noticed because no label would touch them here.\u201d Ironically Manu\u2019s last point may actually turn out to be one of the more positive aspects of the French Touch. It created a reaction among the more underground artists to forge a new sound. This would create the next wave of French electronic music.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The book French Connections provides a comprehensive look at the French dance culture in its making. The empirical data of the book is comprised of interviews with important figures in French electronic music history and a range of sources as well as Martin James\u2019 own experiences as an insider of the French dance music scenes. 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