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The 20 greatest French touch tracks – ranked!
As Cassius’s scene-defining album 1999 turns 25, we revisit the sample-powered, disco-fabulous sound that carried Daft Punk and others to fame
A much more smoothly finessed bit of disco sampling, complete with a brilliant half-second of disco-funkers Dynasty uniting the crowd: “Everybody!” Falcon is French touch’s great minimalist, putting his faith in the quality of his raw materials and the depth of the grooves he subsequently digs out of them; his inspired remix of Cassius’s La Mouche is built entirely from a single bar of the original track. Photograph: Shirlaine Forrest/WireImage If blog house was what French touch became, it originally emerged from a very different style – a kind of lounge-y, Afro-Latin, rare-groove music in the 1990s, with tracks such as Alex Gopher’s The Child, DJ Gregory’s Elle, Pepe Bradock’s Deep Burnt and St Germain’s album Boulevard. Ten seconds of Strokin’ by disco-funk group Dynasty (them again) becomes three-and-a-half of the most unhinged minutes in dance music history, as the late DJ Mehdi burns the sample until it’s collapsing and spitting out sparks, then Bangalter straps a kick drum to it and sends it skyward.
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