French Electronic Music: The French Touch that Redefined Club Music (1993–2021)

It was the quietest and most elegant ending possible for the most influential career in European electronic music. And it was, in a certain way, completely coherent with how they had started: in 1993, two high school students from Paris — Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo — decided to make electronic music and simultaneously decided that no one would know who they were. The helmets, the robot identity, the absolute mystery: it was all a design from the beginning, a way to make the music matter more than the people making it.

What they built over twenty-eight years was the most consistent and most influential career in the electronic music of their era. And they did it from Paris, in the context of a movement — the French Touch — that proved Europe could export dance music to the English-speaking world with the same conviction with which the English-speaking world exported everything else.

The French Touch: When Paris Reinvented House

House music was born in Chicago in the early eighties — in the South Side clubs where Frankie Knuckles blended seventies disco with eighties synthesizers to create something that had never existed before. Techno was born in Detroit almost simultaneously. By the nineties, both genres had crossed the Atlantic and reached Europe, where the scenes in Manchester, Berlin, and Amsterdam developed them with the specific intensity of their local contexts.

Paris came to the genre from a different angle. What the French producers and DJs who emerged in the mid-nineties — Daft Punk, Cassius, Air, Étienne de Crécy, Motorbass — added to Anglo-Saxon house was a layer of funky warmth and melodic elegance that came directly from the French musical tradition: more color, more groove, more humor, less darkness than German techno and less rawness than Chicago house.

The term French Touch was coined by the British music press to describe that specific sound: house made by French people that inevitably sounded French, even though no one could define exactly what made something sound French. It was the same question critics had asked about Debussy and Piaf: there is something in French musical culture that produces sounds identifiable as its own.

Daft Punk: The Robots Who Made History

Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo met at the lycée Carnot in Paris in the early nineties. They first formed a rock band — Darlin' — which received a review in the British music press describing them as "daft punky trash." They took the insult, shortened it, and adopted it as the name of their new electronic project: Daft Punk.

Their first single, "The New Wave" (1994), came out through the Scottish label Soma Quality Recordings. "Da Funk" (1995) began playing in clubs across Europe. And in January 1997 they released Homework — their debut album, recorded in their Parisian apartment they called "Daft House" — which redefined what dance music could be: house blended with seventies funk, disco, techno, and a production that sounded simultaneously classic and completely new.

"Around the World" (1997) — seven minutes of a single repeated bass riff with synthesizer variations, whose video by Michel Gondry featured different characters dancing in concentric circles — reached number one on the dance charts in the United States, Canada, Spain, and the United Kingdom. It was the first time a French electronic music duo had broken into the Anglo-Saxon charts with an identifiably French sound.

Discovery (2001) — their second album — was the definitive leap into the global mainstream: "One More Time," "Digital Love," "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" — songs that used samples of seventies funk and disco, vocoders and synthesizers to create something that sounded simultaneously old and futuristic. Kanye West would sample "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" for "Stronger" (2007) — the link between French Touch and the most influential American hip-hop of the decade.

In 2006 they performed at Coachella from inside a neon pyramid that became one of the most memorable live performances in the festival's history. They did not show their faces. The helmets were enough.

Random Access Memories (2013) was their masterpiece and most ambitious artistic farewell: an album recorded with live musicians instead of digital samples, featuring Nile Rodgers (guitarist of Chic) on guitar, Pharrell Williams and Julian Casablancas on vocals, and legendary disco producer Giorgio Moroder narrating his own story on one of the tracks. The result was an album that sounded as if the golden age of seventies funk and disco had found the future it deserved.

"Get Lucky" — the single featuring Pharrell and Nile Rodgers — reached number 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 and was the most ubiquitous hit of 2013 in virtually every market in the world. At the 2014 Grammy Awards ceremony, Random Access Memories won Album of the Year — the first time an electronic music artist had won that award — as well as Record of the Year, Best Dance/Electronic Album and Best Pop Duo/Group Performance. Four Grammys in one night.

They split in February 2021. They gave no explanation. The video for "Touch" was their farewell.

Air: The Most Atmospheric French Touch

While Daft Punk was building the central edifice of French Touch, Air — Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunckel — built its most contemplative wing. Their debut album, Moon Safari (1998), is one of the most beautiful recordings in nineties electronic music: a downtempo and ambient pop album that combined analogue synthesizers from the seventies with whispered vocal melodies and a lucid-dream atmosphere that sounded like no other record of its time.

"Sexy Boy", "All I Need", "Kelly Watch the Stars": songs that could be played in a club or in an apartment at three in the morning with the same effect. Sophia Coppola chose them for the soundtrack of The Virgin Suicides (1999) — the first collaboration between Air and cinema, which established their aesthetic as the quintessential film music.

Justice and the Second Generation

Gaspard Augé and Xavier de Rosnay — Justice — arrived a decade late but with a completely their own sound: rock and metal filtered through electronic music, with distortion and aggression that the original French Touch had never explored. Their debut album † (Cross, 2007) was one of the most influential electronic records of the second half of the 2000s: "D.A.N.C.E." — with its choir of children's voices and its irresistible groove — was the European summer hit of that year. "DVNO" with its distorted bassline anticipated what electronic music would do in the years that followed.

Justice was also the first act on the label Ed Banger Records — the record label founded by Pedro Winter ("Busy P"), Daft Punk's manager — which became the new center of French Touch for the next generation.

The Legacy

French Touch did not only produce music: it produced a way of understanding electronic music that influenced everything that came after. The idea that electronic music could be warm, melodic, funky — that it did not have to be cold and minimalist like German techno or aggressive like British rave — changed what producers around the world thought was possible to do with synthesizers and computers.

Kanye West would sample Daft Punk. Pharrell Williams would collaborate with them. The Weeknd would record with them. The influence of French Touch on mainstream pop in the 2000s and 2010s is so extensive that it is impossible to measure: it lives in the texture of the sound, in the way that funk and disco from the seventies became a reference point for a generation that had never lived through them.

And at the center of it all, two French robots who never showed their faces.

Editorial note: Thomas Bangalter once explained why Daft Punk refused to be nominated for the Victoires de la musique française — the musical establishment awards of their own country — while accepting American Grammys. The answer was about mystery: "The moment you define who you are and where you come from, the mystery disappears." They wanted to be robots, not French. They wanted to be music, not biography. In that, they were more faithful to the tradition of Debussy — who rejected being called an Impressionist — and of Ravel — who rejected the Légion d'honneur — than to any trend in contemporary pop. French artists have a long history of rejecting the labels others place on them. Daft Punk simply did it wearing robot helmets.

10 · 3 en DoReSol

Top 10 of French Electronic Music

#CanciónArtista

01

One More Time

Daft Punk · 2000

The most euphoric house of the millennium turn. The vocoder singing "one more time / we're gonna celebrate" as if it were a prayer. The song that brought French Touch to the global mainstream in a definitive way.

Canción5:2002

Get Lucky

Daft Punk · 2013

The most ubiquitous hit of 2013. Grammy for Record of the Year. Nile Rodgers playing the funk guitar that redefined the seventies, Pharrell singing about being lucky, the robots producing the bridge between eras.

Canción6:0703

Around the World

Daft Punk · 1997

The number one in four countries that announced to the world that something new was happening in Paris. Seven minutes of a single repeated riff that proves that repetition, well crafted, is art.

Canción

04

Sexy Boy

Air · 1998

French downtempo in its most hypnotic form. The French Touch in its most contemplative and cinematic dimension. The song Sofia Coppola chose for her films.

Pendiente

05

Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger

Daft Punk · 2001

The robotic manifesto of electronic pop. Sampled by Kanye West in "Stronger" (2007) — the link between the French Touch and American hip-hop.

Pendiente

06

D.A.N.C.E.

Justice · 2007

The children's choir and the distorted groove of the French Touch's second generation. Justice pushing the Parisian sound toward rock with the conviction of those who know that genre boundaries are mere conventions.

Pendiente

07

Da Funk

Daft Punk · 1995

Daft Punk's first major hit and the announcement of the French Touch as a musical phenomenon. American funk from the seventies passed through the Parisian filter of the nineties.

Pendiente

08

All I Need

Air · 1998

The most delicate electronic ballad of French Touch. Beth Hirsch's voice over Air's analog synthesizers: human warmth inside the machine.

Pendiente

09

Music Sounds Better With You

Stardust · 1998

Thomas Bangalter's ephemeral project with Alan Braxe and Benjamin Diamond. A single, perfect song that defines better than any other what French Touch wanted to be: the pure joy of dancing turned into music.

Pendiente

10

Digital Love

Daft Punk · 2001

Love in the digital age in its most pop and most direct form. Chic's guitar solo sampled within an electronic production: the history of popular music condensed into four minutes.

Pendiente

Next and final chapter — France Series: French Hip-Hop and the 21st Century — NTM, IAM, MC Solaar, Stromae and the contemporary French scene that speaks of identity, immigration and Europe.