From French Touch to Future Funk

The enduring legacy of French filter house and Daft Punk's Discovery

For reasons not entirely clear to myself, I just spent a weekend with Ben Cardew’s book Daft Punk’s Discovery: The Future Unfurled (Velocity Press, 2021).

Everyone with just a remote interest in Daft Punk should read it. It’s well-written in a compelling, unacademic way. I’ve plowed through it on two rainy afternoons.

To be honest, I haven’t given much thought to Daft Punk over the last decade. Like almost everyone I know, I still love some of their music, but I can’t deny that a certain fatigue set in after the monstrous success of Random Access Memories. Probably also a matter of seeing one too many older white dudes move rather awkwardly to “Get Lucky” at the odd music industry event.

At the risk of blasphemy, I want to preface these scattered thoughts by saying that they always seemed a tad bit overrated, having existed almost 30 years and releasing only three good-to-great albums. Again, that’s not to say I didn’t feel strongly about some of their music.

Around the turn of the millennium, when I was in my early 20s, Paris just seemed like the place to be. I’d previously visited the French capital as a teenager on vacation with my parents, but in the summer of ‘99, I first came there by myself. Me and my mate were on our way back from a summer roadtrip through France and Spain when we stayed on a campsite in the Bois de Boulogne, a forest west of Paris, for a prolonged weekend. We’d take the bus into the city in the afternoon and stumble back upon the campsite in the early morning.

During those days, my friend decided to move to Paris. The following year, he found a spare room in a flat in the La Chapelle area, right near Gare du Nord. He lived there with an artist who happened to travel quite a bit for work, so I had the opportunity to stay with him for some weeks in the summer of 2001. I was 23, Paris was burning hot, and we were drinking sparkling wine in the street before going out to posh clubs like Batofar and Le Queen, where they played the popular filter house that would later be dubbed French Touch (I can’t recall anyone calling it that then).

We wouldn’t even drink at the club – it was just too expensive –, and we surely wouldn’t do any drugs. It’s such a cliché at this point, but we were really just getting high off the music. House music, that is, for the most part. During daytime, we listened to a mix of old jazz, Air’s Moon Safari, St. Germain’s Tourist, Cassius’ 1999, Étienne de Crécy’s Super Discount and Tempovision, and, of course, Daft Punk. “One More Time” was just everywhere that summer.

I’d actually bought their debut album Homework (1997) just off the strength of the first single “Da Funk”. I’d seen the brilliant video on MTV; at the time, I was into hip-hop and drum’n’bass and hadn’t spent much time with house. With their thunderous bass lines, synth-heavy melodies and effect-laden vocals, tunes like “Around The World” almost felt like G-funk to me. “Teachers” handed me a convenient record shopping list to catch up on house and techno, and among many legends of electronic music, they mentioned the names of two musicians I already knew and loved dearly: George Clinton and Dr. Dre.

Looking back, I can still see why Homework had such an impact. As much as I loved it then, I don’t go back much to that album though. As Ben Cardew points out in his book, Daft Punk’s early music was still very indebted to their favorite producers from the US. I’m not saying it lacked originality, because they did put a European spin on (African-)American house music, but I agree with Ben in that their sophomore album Discovery (2001) is the real stand-out from their catalogue. That’s the moment when they morphed from purveyors of tasteful club music to cultural mavericks that would alter the course of pop history.

Ben writes about the negative reception to the pre-single “One More Time” mainly from the underground scene. I remember I didn’t immediately fall in love with the tune either. It felt too familiar, in quite the wrong way. Cher had popularized the auto-tune effect on her ‘98 single “Believe”, and Modjo had just landed a mainstream summer smash with their commercial take on filter house, the gorgeous but rather sugary tune “Lady (Hear Me Tonight)”. Daft Punk wasn’t Cher or Modjo though – they were a credible electronic music act, and they had Romanthony on the song, an even more credible house vocalist. What were they thinking putting auto-tune on his trademark vocals?

When Discovery was finally released, I found its focus on rock tropes – particularly that Van Halen style guitar solo in “Aerodynamic” – quite bewildering. Weirdly enough, I grew to love the record rather quickly. It would become one of the defining records of the 2000s, not just for me obviously. Reading Ben’s book rekindled my love for its metallic grandiosity. It very accurately points out the influence it had on so many artists that followed – not just the obvious ones like Kanye West and The Weeknd, but also people like Scottish beatheads Hudson Mohawke and Rustie, who stirred up that global ‘post-dubstep’ / ‘bass music’ scene in the late 2000s, early 2010s.

Let’s just skip over Human After All (2007), Daft Punk’s forgettable third album. After reading his book, I feel that Ben hasn’t got much love for it either. I’ll admit I haven’t listened to it more than twice. When it came out, the French Touch era was definitely over. Ironically, the artists that defined those years were deeply indebted to Daft Punk’s legacy – namely Justice and the Ed Banger label (run by Daft Punk’s former manager Pedro Winter alias Busy P). But while the lineage was obvious, Human After All just didn’t take much of an effort to lure me back into their world.

What’s remarkable is how Daft Punk managed to come back so hard six years later with Random Access Memories (2013). That album, to me, is really their crowning achievement. I’m paraphrasing Ben here but Discovery was more of a simulacrum, two 20-somethings dreaming up the sound of their childhood in the late 1970s and early 1980s, while Random Access Memories was a recreation of the actual, real thing. They’d made the music this time, not in the sense of creatively sampling a bunch of old disco tunes, but in the sense of creating it from scratch, playing it live in the studio. This album is just such a warm, organic, joyful thing – listening back to it this weekend, I was even able to sit through “Get Lucky” again.

While Ben was very thorough and accurate in pointing out the many artists and producers that were deeply inspired by Daft Punk and especially Discovery throughout the 2000s and 2010s, there’s one aspect that I found missing in his analysis. It’s not super important from a wider cultural perspective so its omission is not crucial, but as I’m currently spending a lot of time doing research in that specific area, I felt the urge to point it out – not as a critique of Ben’s book, but maybe as a small addendum, an afterthought of sorts.

In 2013, the same year that Random Access Memories would come out, the future funk movement started bubbling up on the internet as an offshoot of the vaporwave scene. Now vaporwave itself had just been created during the previous two years by a generation of mostly very young producers who’d met on early social media sites and online forums, influenced by the experiments of Daniel Lopatin (alias Oneohtrix Point Never) and James Ferraro. Now a second wave started building on the innovations of the pioneering works by first-wave artists like Vektroid (alias Macintosh Plus) and Internet Club.

One of the new directions was future funk, a style of vaporwave that could be described as a nostalgic reframing of boogie, disco and early house music, quite similar actually to what happened during the French Touch era. These young producers were just using different aesthetic markers. But while most ‘classic’ vaporwave felt rather laid back and sometimes ironic, future funk approached the pre-millennium nostalgia theme with a less intellectual angle and more straight-forward hedonism. This music made clear that it was mainly about having fun.

At the time, mainstream dance music was dominated by harsh basslines, pounding drums and massive drops. We’re talking about the peak years of EDM trap and US dubstep. Future funk provided a counterpoint to those commercial big-room styles – a vintage lo-fi form of dance music with a throwback vibe clearly harking back to the melodic filter house of the late 90s. This music wasn’t made for clubs but for livestreams and dorm room parties. Most of its creators were too young to get into clubs anyway.

The up-and-coming producer Ryan DeRobertis from Long Island, New York, had dabbled in online music scenes since he was a teenager. Between November 2012 and May 2013, he self-released nine albums to the internet under his Saint Pepsi moniker. These were highly acclaimed in the scene and laid the foundation for future funk. (DeRobertis had to drop the Saint Pepsi moniker in 2014 due to an impending cease and desist from the popular soda company. He’s been known as Skylar Spence ever since and pivoting towards more original songwriting, while remaining indebted to future funk’s basic sound world.)

DeRobertis built his early Saint Pepsi tracks out of sloppily chopped loops; he’d take multiple bars of old disco-funk and add vocal cuts and sound effects in a quite anarchic but entertaining way. The best albums from that early stretch – Studio 54 or Hit Vibes – became future funk classics, collections of simple but effective lo-fi disco edits, blended with some slowed down 1980s pop and new wave tracks for the vaporwave heads.

Other artists such as Childhood or Rollergirl! tapped into similarly nostalgic territory. The Business Casual label, founded in 2013 by the vaporwave artist John Zobele alias christtt, was instrumental in further establishing the future funk sound. Vaporwave pioneer Luxury Elite founded the Fortune 500 label around the same time, which would release some important early records of the genre as well.

Macross 82-99 was a young vaporwave producer from Mexico City who released some of his early works on Business Casual and Fortune 500. Having inherited a love of Japanese culture from his father, he added a new musical influence to the disco and boogie roots of future funk: City pop and J-pop. His releases featured bright, colourful artworks inspired by Japanese anime, especially Sailor Moon. In interviews, he’s talked about growing up as a kid in the 2000s on the music of Daft Punk and Justice.

More names like Yung Bae, Mike Tenay, (Luis) Lancaster, Dan Mason and Flamingosis appeared on the map in those years from 2013 to 2015, turning future funk into an actual subgenre of vaporwave with a growing fanbase – among them music fans that weren’t into regular vaporwave at all, but came flocking in from the synthwave/retrowave community, another online music scene which had developed in France in the mid-2000s, right after the French touch era had cooled down.

As an instrumental form of electronic music deeply influenced by 1980s synth pop and soundtracks, synthwave achieved a popularity boost in the early to mid-2010s, around the same time that vaporwave and future funk arose. Though vaporwave and synthwave are distinct communities, there’s always been some overlap, and the lines remain slightly blurry to an extent – on the side of artists and labels, but even more so on the listener side. Synthwave would have its mainstream moment later in the decade, with the Stranger Things soundtracks and The Weeknd’s hit “Blinding Lights” (2019), a Max Martin production based on tropes of the genre.

Doing my Vapor Talks, I’ve been conversing with more than 30 vaporwave and synthwave producers over the last few months. What I found striking is how many of them – and clearly not just future funksters – were mentioning Daft Punk as a key musical influence. Reading Ben Cardew’s book and thinking more deeply about it, that throughline started to become much clearer to me.

For the vaporwave generation and their offspring, mostly young Millennials and older Zoomers, I’d imagine that records like Discovery were what their parents listened to in the car when they were kids. Particularly on this album, Daft Punk re-established ‘cheesy’ 1980s soft rock and classic AOR as styles of music you wouldn’t need to be ashamed of liking anymore. Their anonymous ‘robot’ image was another alluring aspect for up-and-coming internet artists who didn’t feel like putting their name and face out there like that, for various reasons.

Not that it matters much in the grand scheme of things, but to me, the influence of Daft Punk and particularly Discovery on vaporwave and future funk is undeniable. Along the way, I’ve also found another reason why I’m into those styles of music so much – they’re harking back to a sound world that played an important role for me since my late teens and early twens, ever since those glorious days in Paris.

main source: Ben Cardew on Daft Punk’s Discovery (Velocity Press, 2021)