French House

mid 1990s · Paris, France

Filtered, disco-sampling house from mid-1990s Paris, also called French touch or filter house (Wikipedia).

The sound

A four-on-the-floor kick under a looped 1970s disco or funk sample, swept by filters and pumped by kick-triggered sidechain compression.

Listen for: The disco loop breathing open and closed under the filter, and the whole track pumping against the kick. The loop is the song; the filter is the arrangement.

Things to know

  1. French house came out of mid-1990s Paris, where producers like Daft Punk, Cassius, and Alan Braxe looped their parents' disco records over house drums. The press called it the French touch.

  2. French house's pumping groove comes from sidechain compression: a compressor triggered by the kick drum ducks the whole track on every beat, so the music surges back between kicks.

  3. Stardust, the trio of Thomas Bangalter, Alan Braxe, and singer Benjamin Diamond, released exactly one track: "Music Sounds Better With You" (1998), one of the genre's defining records.

  4. Modjo's "Lady (Hear Me Tonight)" (2000), built on a Chic sample, was the first single by a French group to debut at number one on the UK chart.

  5. Daft Punk closed the loop in 2013: instead of sampling disco, Random Access Memories hired the original disco musicians, Nile Rodgers included, and won the Grammy for Album of the Year.

Key tracks

Family tree

  • House: French house is Chicago house rebuilt in Paris. The drums and the four-on-the-floor pulse came straight from the American records; the French twist was making the sampled disco loop the star and animating it with filters and compression.
  • Disco: French house is built literally out of disco: two golden bars of a 1970s record, looped and filtered until they become a new song. Twenty years after Disco Demolition Night, Paris made the discarded records the most fashionable sound on Earth.

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