Feadz, also known as Fabien Pianta, didn’t release his first album until January 20, 2014. However, the musician had been a pillar of the French scene since the late 1990s, when he emerged at the height of the French Touch movement. Pianta started off as an apprentice DJ, then moved on to scratch. His original goal was to become a hip-hop producer. In 1999, he worked on Quentin Dupieux’s (Mr Oizo) very first album Analog Worms Attack.
In the early 2000s, Pianta became a house DJ at Elysée Montmartre, performing at the legendary Panik parties. He later met Ellen Allien, the owner of the label BPitch Control, the driving force behind the Berlin scene along with Paul Kalkbrenner and later Modeselektor. Pianta released his first maxi-single, High-B EP through the label in 2001. In 2006, he joined Pedro Winter’s Ed Banger label by producing Uffie’s first single, “Pop The Glock.” The song became a major hit for Ed Banger and launched the career of Uffie (his girlfriend at the time). Pianta later released a few maxi-singles and contributed to Uffie’s second album, Sex Dreams And Denim Jeans, under Ed Banger. The record was never as successful as her first single. In 2013, Pianta dropped out of the public eye to finally produce his first album fifteen years after starting with Oizo. In Instant Alpha, the artist paired techno with all of his musical influences, including scattered references ranging from hip-hop and bass music to ghettotech.
The legendary English radio station Rinse founded its first foreign station, Rinse France. While it was first called Radio Paname and managed by DJ Manaré, a member of the record label ClekClekBoom, the Internet radio station was eventually affiliated with Rinse and issued its first broadcast in February.
Laurent Garnier, who hadn’t come out with much since Tales Of A Kleptomaniac in 2009, announced the release of five maxi-singles in 2014. The tracks featured distinct music styles and were released under five different labels, including the techno label Modeselektor, 50Weapons, and the very house-oriented French and German label MCDE.
Two years after their first EP, the Parisian duo Isaac Delusion released an album. Isaac Delusion was the first group discovered by the collective Cracki Records and the first to come out with a long-format release. The album offered a collection of dreamy, melancholic electro-pop songs that was light-years away from the club scene.
A year after its launch, Partyfine, a label founded by Reims-native Yuksek, attracted notice with its first compilation, Partyfine Vol. 1. The record summed up the label’s vision and featured Get A Room, Black Yaya (Herman Düne), Juveniles, and Peter & The Magician (a duo made up of Yuksek and The Magician).
A new edition of Daft Punk : Humains après tout, an in-depth explanation of the Daft Punk phenomenon by journalist Violaine Schütz, was released through Camion Blanc publishing a few years after its first edition. The book was extended to properly address Random Access Memories, which was released after the book was first published.
Astropolis, France’s oldest electronic music festival, celebrated its twentieth anniversary. Based out of the city of Brest, the event invited industry stars to mark the occasion, ranging from the hardcore artists who had always been featured at the festival, which tended towards a harsher sound (Manu Le Malin and Micropoint), to techno legends like Jeff Mills, Derrick May, and LFO as well as contemporary hotshots like Jamie XX.
In a decision demonstrating that electronic music was still not accepted by the authorities, the new administration in Lans-en-Vercors refused to continue hosting the trance festival Hadra. Because City Hall couldn’t cancel the event without signing a big check, the 2014 edition nevertheless took place in August but was cancelled in 2015. Hadra moved to Allier for its 2016 comeback.
Apollonia was extremely popular at clubs throughout the world, including Ibiza, Berlin’s Panorama Bar, and London’s Fabric. The French trio, made up of Shonky, Dan Ghenacia, and Dyed Soundorom, released their first minimal house album in October. The record was mixed by Philippe Zdar, one half of the duo Cassius.
For her fourth film, director Mia Hansen-Løve chose to depict a ten-year span of highs and lows in the life of a French DJ at a time when the electronic scene was growing by leaps and bounds and French Touch was taking the world by storm. Hansen-Løve’s first big break came after the release of her film Tout est pardonné, which earned her the prestigious Louis-Delluc award in 2007. Eden told the history of French Touch through the lens of her brother, Sven Løve, a pioneer of the Parisian garage house music scene. Løve, who was one half of the Cheers duo and a house DJ during the Respect parties, is represented in the film by a character named Paul. At the start of the 1990s, Paul, played by Félix de Givry, who also happened to be a co-founder of the collective Pain Surprises, fell in love with garage music, a derivate of house. The first part of the movie depicted his rise in the Paris party scene as a DJ and event organizer, while the second half showed Paul’s downfall as the frenzy surrounding French Touch started to taper as well as his struggle with returning to the real world at the end of the night.
Many characters in the movie were inspired by real-life figures from the 1990s music scene. The character of Arnaud, played by Vincent Macaigne, was based on the three people who started the Respect parties, David Blot, Fred Agostini, and Jérôme Viger-Kohler. In the movie, Stan was inspired by Greg Gauthier, the other founding member of the Cheers parties. Cyril was based on Mathias Cousin, the late co-author along with David Blot of the comic book Le Chant de la Machine who passed away in 2002. The film is even punctuated by several appearances of Daft Punk at various points in their career. The film’s title, Eden, is inspired by the famous 90s fanzine and also gives a nod to the term “heavenly parties,” which was often used to describe the very first raves. Unfortunately, the film enjoyed only limited success.
Cerrone was a dance music pioneer and one of the first French artists to make music popular in clubs throughout the world. Dimitri From Paris, a famous French Touch producer and one of Cerrone’s worthy successors, remixed “Love In C Minor,” offering a sexy, funky, brazen, and disco-inspired take on Cerrone’s hit song.
