Not Daft, not Punk - Best of the French Touch underground, from 1995 to 2000
It sometimes feels as if Daft Punk have swallowed the French Touch whole, as if the entire generation of electronic music made in France between 1995 and 2000, has been reduced to its role in the rise, further rise and even more rise of the Parisian duo.
Having written a book about Daft Punk I am as guilty as anyone in this. Perhaps more so. So it’s time to redress the balance a little. This is nothing against Daft Punk, of course - I adore them - but it’s worth remembering that the French Touch was wider in scope and deeper in sound than many Daft Punk fans would have you believe.
(And just a reminder: French Touch ≠ French House. I’ve written about this before. French Touch includes a lot of French House. But it also includes DJ Cam’s jazzy trip hop, Air’s lush ambience, Dimitri from Paris’s sampledelic collages, Phoenix’s disco rock and more.)
So today I present to you my 10 best songs from the French Touch underground, from 1995 to 2000. My rules are: nothing Daft Punk, nothing too obvious and nothing I have covered at length on this Substack before. Hence no Dimitri from Paris, Le Tone or The Micronauts.
I hope you enjoy it. I hope it opens your mind. And do let me know your favourites.
Alëem - Why Hawaii? (Original Formula mix)
Alëem’s Why Hawaii? is clinging to the edges of the French Touch for its very life. The song sounds, bizarrely, like early Big Beat and was, in fact, later reissued by über-Big Beat label Concrete, home to Death in Vegas.
And yet there feels something very French in its combination of smoothly twanging Patsy Cline sample (from Walking After Midnight), improbable hoover synth line and snatches of reggae vocal. It’s kind of stupid but also pretty sophisticated - and a lot of fun; French Touch on swimming pool cleaner and lots of cheap wine. Plus, the song was released on Pro-Zak Trax, a label founded in Paris by Barcelona DJ / producer Cesar de Melero, that would later carve out a corner of the French Touch market for incredibly obvious but very enjoyable filter house records from the likes of Kojak and De Pompidou. So Why Hawaii? (high) passes. (Yes, that’s my attempt at a filter joke. Not great, was it?)
DJ Cam - Dieu Reconnaitra Les Siens
The filter house sound was the most prominent strand of the French Touch. But second to it was a cinematic instrumental hip hop embodied by DJ Cam and Kid Loco.
Dieu Reconnaîtra Les Siens, from Cam’s 1995 debut album Underground Vibes, is an especially gorgeous take on the genre, a collection of samples - some relatively obvious, some less so - stitched together in a very chic way to create music that sounds sophisticated and natural, as if all these various sample sources were just waiting for someone to join them together. It’s very 90s, very trip hop and also very Parisian jazz club (of your dreams).
Cam - AKA Laurent Daumail - would later dabble in jungle but he remains wedded to the ambient hip hop sound. His most recent single, Wake Up, released in July 2026, is pure Underground Vibes.
Shazz + St. Germain feat. Derek Bays - Muse Q The Music
The French Touch wasn’t all French House. But sometimes it was - and in the most glorious fashion.
Admittedly, Muse Q The Music, by Parisian house producer St. German, his mate Shazz (an excellent producer in his own right - see La Seine for evidence) and vocalist Derek Bays, isn’t what most people think of when they imagine French House.
Rather than disco loops and filters, the song comprises a minimal organ melody, a shuffling, but not overly busy, beat and four-note bass line, which provide the bed for Derek Bays to sing his broken heart out. And it’s all basically perfect, one of those alchemical house tunes where every little part is perfectly calibrated and it all fits together like a Swiss watch.
Dirty Jesus - Don’t F*ck With My Shit (Late Night Cruising Mix)
… and talking of perfect house tunes.
Dirty Jesus was Erik Rug, a prominent Paris DJ, and Marc Collin, who would later release the wonderfully whistling classic Les Kidnappeurs (Main Theme) and co-found Nouvelle Vague. Together they released two 12 inches on Manchester house label extraordinaire Paper, Cut A Rug in 1996 and Don’t F*ck With My Shit in 1997.
The Late Night Cruising Mix of the latter is like a night-time ride around Paris in an expensive sports car, the top down and the smell of luxury perfume in your nostrils, 10 minutes of melodic, moody, cinematic house that I once heard Rug play at Paris’s Rex club and never forgot.
The song also was track one, side one, of French Fried Funk, a compilation I bought in 1997 that has pride of place in my collection today, run through with sweet quality like a stick of Brighton Rock.
Also on the same compilation were Trankilou, a duo that featured Guillaume Berroyer aka Ark and Julien Auger, later to become far better known as Pepe Bradock.
The moody, down-tempo and deceptively complex hip hop of Chicago Babe, taken from the duo’s debut EP St Glin-Glin, is what appears on French Fried Funk. But Trankilou’s greatest song was Atom Funk, an irresistibly guitar-twitching, cow-bell funking, loop filtering slice of house music that is just strange enough to suggest the weird alleys that Auger would later stumble down in his Bradock days, without ever losing its laser focus.
Atom Funk, incidentally, was later compiled on Pepe Bradock’s 1998 album Synthèse.
Drum & bass didn’t play much of a role in the French Touch. But the music had its fans among French producers of the 90s and did occasionally surface around Paris.
Besides, anything Gilb’r - AKA Gilbert Cohen, boss of none-more-French Touch label Versatile, half of Château Flight with I:Cube, DJ and man about town - did is French Touch lore and what he says, goes.
What’s more Pressure, which Gilb’r released in 1997, suggests a French-Touched strand of drum & bass, with its airy synth sweeps and a playfully funky bass line that is more P-Funk than Photek.
For a certain type of artist - and indie artist, say, with an interest in French pop and film soundtracks - the only place to go for a remix in the mid to late 1990s was the house of Jean-Yves Prieur, aka Kid Loco, who turned songs by Pulp, Saint Etienne, The Pastels, Mogwai and more into cinematic dreams so sophisticated you entirely forget they came from eg a shambling Glasgow guitar band. The best of these are collected on his Jesus Life For Children Under 12 Inches compilation, which I advise you buy on site.
His own music perhaps lacks a little something in comparison, as if Prieur needs something to rub against to create a spark. Although A Grand Love Theme, which opens his 1997 debut album A Grand Love Story, is unbelievable lush and buoyant, like hot air ballooning over a Parisian sun set with the love of your life.
Femi Kuti - Truth Don Die (Jackson's Rhum Gingembre)
Femi Kuti isn't French. But Jackson - later Jackson & His Computer Band - is. And it is his Rhum Gingembre remix from 1999 that gives Truth Don Die a place in this list.
This is to take nothing away from Femi and band, who cook up a defiant Afrobeat storm on the song. But Jackson takes these elements and crafts a remix that not only sits finely balanced between the original Afrobeat vibe and his French filter house, but also shows where filter house could perhaps have gone with a bit more forward thinking.
Jackson started his music career making fairly straightforward house music - see, for example My Kind Of... (Chicago) on his The Edits EP. Later on, when he signed to Warp, he started to make hyper-fractured future-glancing IDM.
His storming remix of Truth Don Die is closer to the former. But it has shades of the oddness he is soon to embrace, with a jaggedness to the beats, like Todd Edwards picking his tentative way through broken glass. This is fascinating - and all the more so because it is employed without ever breaking the song's infectious groove.
Filter house didn't really evolve - as Modjo et al would attest. But this is to take nothing away from this overlooked French Touch classic.
Le Peuple de l’Herbe - PH Theme (feat. Sir Jean)
I don’t think Le Peuple de l’Herbe ever get mentioned in French Touch round ups, probably because they are from unfashionable Lyon and dabbled in the very un-French Touch world of ragga.
PH Theme, however, was all over influential Parisian radio station Nova in 2000 and fits with the downbeat world of Kid Loco and DJ Cam, thanks to its avian scratches, sample collages, rolling Gil Scott Heron bass line and vaguely melancholic air. The addition of rapping in Wolof is inspired, blasting off PH Theme into its own wonderful world of adventure.
Lake Soul Feat. Mathilde - Autour De Toi
Lake Soul’s Autour De Toi follows a similar history. Lake Soul are from the alpine town of Annecy - far from a musical strong hold - and got massive airplay on Radio Nova in the year 2000.
Their music, however, is very different to PH Theme, a tough, minimal house beat and psychedelic synth traces à la Isolée wrapped around a stupidly catchy vocal from Mathilde, where strangeness pulls at gridded rhythm and the scratchy synth sound battles the hypnotic vocal line, with the result being we all win.
Bonus track (because I forgot I had written about it before)
Julien Jabre & DJ Gregory Present Soha - Amour
Julien Jabre and DJ Gregory were French House royalty, having composed the anthemic Faithfull by Fantom in 1997. Later - after Gregory had returned to Paris from New York - they combined again as Soha, a relatively short-lived collaboration that nevertheless threw up several classic songs, including their debut Amour.
Amour provides a neat through line from Muse Q The Music four years earlier; they don’t really sound alike but both songs show off a graceful minimalism where a handful of the right elements are set to play, creating music so ridden with space you could drive a cheval through it.
I also love the way the (nameless) vocalist on Amour appears to be basically feeling her way around the song as it was recorded, as if she had simply wandered in off the Parisian street
With apologies to:
Le Tone - Joli Dragon
Dimitri from Paris - Sacré Français
Demon - You Are My High
La Funk Mob - Ravers Suck Our Sound
Michel Houellebecq - Célibataires
Cosmo Vitelli - We Don't Need No Smurf Here
Alex Gopher - Gordini Mix
Some listening
Zora Jones’ Ultrafreak contains a drum part so sharply sculpted it will take the top off your head. It’s pure percussive filth and the rest of Ultrafreak - an avant R&B / club / rap number with elaborate swagger - only drags your further into the gutter. And I mean that in a good way. So many hooks you could use it as a cloakroom.
Danny L Harle & Doss & MNEK feat. oklou - Dumb Luck
It’s been a shame to see wimpy and wonderful Danny L Harle - see: Broken Flowers - be edged out of the public eye by donk Danny over the past few years.
Dumb Luck, from the Crystallise Divergence EP, in which Doss plays merry hell with Danny’s Crystallise My Tears, feels like a return to those gentler days, however, with a synth line that flutters like a butterfly and a silky vocal hook from oklou. Underpinning it all is a huge (Danny) bass line that is finely poised between gnarled and warming. More of this please.
Cassius - Feelings For You (FCUKERS & Junior Sanchez remix)
How do you remix a song as perfectly simply as Cassius’ Feelings For You? FCUKERS and Junior Sanchez take the intelligent decision to keep the essentials of the track complete, while upping the tempo and throwing a few sparkling jewels at it. The result is Feelings For You as rendered by a hyperactive child with a deep respect for French House history. The new organ line, in particular, is lovely.
In summer 2026 the expanded Stereolab universe brings you Diagonals, a collaborations between Oakland’s Nick Daly, Stereolab drummer Andy Ramsay and Stereolab EVERYTHING (apart from actual member) Sean O’Hagan.
And guess who they sound like? Bozeman’s Simplex - which could be taken from one of those fake Stereolab song name websites I love so - is drift jazz with a light funk frosting and spy theme shards, all sad, mysterious and far more Rive Gauche than you could ever aspire be. To this, sometime Laetitia Sadier Source Ensemble vocalist Nina Savary adds a wonderfully casually vocal, like she’s blowing bubbles in the park.
Some watching (an infrequent TV column)
The Dark Wizard (HBO Max)
What makes a person want to free solo climb? To ascend mountains hundreds of metres tall, with no climbing equipment other than your own hands, feet and mind and nothing to catch you if you fall? And what happens then, when you reach the pinnacle of free solo climbing and someone comes along who is better than you at it?
These are the two questions asked - and to an extent answered - by The Dark Wizard, a four-part documentary series on HBO Max that premiered in April 2026. It looks at the life of Dean Potter, one of the greatest free solo climbers of all time, a pioneer of BASE jumping, the inventor of the unfortunately named FreeBASE, which combines the two practices, and a world-class highliner.
He’s also a pretty complex character, driven by a dream of flying, a love of ravens, severe depression and the kind of world-beating ego you need to walk a tightrope line strung between two mountains, as those who love you watch on.
It’s the kind of story that really lends itself to a documentary, all staggering highs, churning stomachs, passion and betrayal. The climbing footage is immaculate, too, a reminder that climbing is, for Potter, a way to connect with nature. The documentary makers don’t whitewash Potter’s character, either. He may be inspirational in many ways and his athletic feats incredible - but Potter frequently comes across as unpldasant, totally selfish and quick to cast aside friends for perceived slights.
What most intrigued me, though, is his tangled relationship with Alex Honnold, a free solo climber who seemed to delight in breaking Potter’s various records and getting in his way. The two are chalk and cheese: Potter driven by an almost spiritual need to climb that leads to him dynamiting various commercial partnerships, while Honnold - who is interviewed at length - sees everything in far more mundane terms, at one point embarking on a record-breaking climb because he needed to film a Squarespace advert. (This, any way, is how the documentary explains it.) The problem, though, is, for all Potter’s vision and drive, Honnold is simply better at climbing. And Potter knows it…
This is just one of the threads in this fascinating documentary, which takes in everything from park ranger politics to Potter’s relationship with his dog, the tension ratcheting up almost unbearably over the four episodes as Potter looks - literally and figuratively - deep into the void. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll watch through your fingers and you’ll go to incredible lengths to avoid Wikipedia spoiling the ending, which, when it comes, is magical.
Things I’ve done
Line Noise podcast - With u.r.trax
Inès Boullant - better known as French dance destroyer u.r.trax - came to the RPS studio at Primavera Sound ahead of her first live festival gig to talk sneaking into clubs at 14, annoying her Parisian neighbours, blowing up during Covid and “anti club music”.
The playlists
Apple Music: The newest and bestest 2026
Spotify: the newest and bestest 2026
Apple Music: The newest and the bestest
Spotify: The newest and the bestest
