French Mixtapes

DJ mixes and mixtapes from the country that gave the world the French Touch - digitized and restored from original cassette tape and CD recordings.

France's relationship with electronic music runs deeper than Daft Punk. It starts at The Palace in Paris in 1987, where Laurent Garnier, Guillaume La Tortue, and a young David Guetta threw the first French Touch parties - introducing house music from Chicago and Detroit to French audiences for the first time. Garnier had cut his teeth in Manchester in the late 1980s, becoming one of the first people to bring that sound back to France, and by 1992 he had taken over the turntables at the Rex Club in Paris, where his legendary Wake Up parties invited the pioneers of Anglo-Saxon techno and house - Juan Atkins, Jeff Mills, Carl Craig, Carl Cox - often for the very first time in France. The Respect club night at the Rex Club, run by Garnier and Pedro Winter, became the focal point of the emerging French Touch scene in the mid-1990s - the place where Daft Punk, Cassius, and others tested their music on dancefloors before releasing it to the world. Meanwhile out in the Parisian banlieue, the early rave scene was throwing parties in construction sites, abandoned industrial spaces along the Seine, and the half-built architecture of a city in transformation - a parallel underground that was darker, harder, and completely its own thing.

These tapes document France at its most creative and least documented - before the French Touch became a global brand and when the music was still being figured out on dance floors nobody outside the city had heard of. Restored from analog sources and archived here for the record.