Dancing Astronaut’s guide to French house
French house doesn’t get a lot of mainstream love these days, but it’s still my favorite flavor of house music. It’s a style that’s all about focusing on a catchy riff (either by sampling or by one’s own creation), adding effects, bending the pitch, and, most commonly, filtering the living daylights out of it (it has been described by some as “filter house,” after all), all while using a variety of looping sequences to keep the groove moving. The French house sound came into maturity at around the same time Daft Punk began to hit their stride; this was in the late ‘90s, during the “Homework” era in Daft Punk chronology. Not to mention that Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo were true titans of the genre as solo artists themselves, using their own platforms (Roulé and Crydamoure, respectively) to dish out quality music with panache.
