To me, French Touch isn’t just a genre—it’s a cultural artifact born from a very specific time and place: France in the late ’70s and ’80s. Its distinct sound is the product of a generation raised on analog dreams of the digital future.
These artists—Daft Punk, Justice, Kavinsky, and others—grew up immersed in a bizarre and colorful media landscape. Japanese TV shows like X-OR, Sankukai, and Albator 84 filled French screens with space corsairs, robotic heroes, and mythological remixes set in futuristic worlds. Their themes were packed with synths, arpeggiators, and digitized voices—sounds that now echo, with a grown-up edge, in the textures of French Touch music.
At the same time, France was pushing into the future: science museums, open-air electronic concerts by pioneers like Jean-Michel Jarre, and a sense that the 21st century was just around the corner. Yet beneath that techno-utopian veneer, cities like Paris remained gritty and raw. That tension—between the shiny and the grimy—runs deep in the DNA of French Touch. You hear it, especially in the darker, distorted edges of Justice and Kavinsky.
Let’s also not forget the artists who laid the groundwork long before the French Touch became a thing. Quirky French electronic pioneers like Jacno, the retro-futurist charm of Telex from Belgium, and, of course, Giorgio Moroder, the godfather of Italo Disco—all contributed textures, tones, and sensibilities that would echo decades later. Even mainstream pop acts like Lio, Étienne Daho, or the orchestral-synth hybrids of Rondo Veneziano were constantly spinning on French FM radio, which in the ’80s was a chaotic, genre-blurring space. This eclectic mix quietly wired an entire generation of young listeners with an appetite for melody, groove, and synthetic textures—key ingredients in what would later become French Touch.
There’s also a certain California dreaming that runs through much of French Touch. The imagery of Los Angeles—endless boulevards flanked by towering palm trees and that golden sunset light—is a romanticized vision of America that influenced the aesthetic, especially in later works. This fusion of European electronic sensibilities with American dream imagery created something uniquely transportive. What started as a movement became a signature sound: nostalgic, futuristic, cinematic, dirty, emotional.