Everywhere It Landed
House travels well because it needs very little: a machine, a room, a reason. France built a filtered, sample-heavy version that briefly conquered pop radio and then walked away from it. Italy had a piano-and-diva era that the UK charts swallowed whole. Japan, Brazil, Germany and the Netherlands each arrived at their own, and Detroit, which invented something adjacent and is forever being merged with Chicago by people who were not in either city, appears here on its own terms. This facet is the music after it stopped being American.
Part of House Music
86 moments in this segment.
- - Daft Punk - Da Funk. The record that carried Chicago house back out of Paris, first issued on Soma in 1995 and then on Homework. Its filtered, hip-hop-tempo groove is the founding statement of the French touch, and the Spike Jonze film built around it made it a mainstream artefact.
- - Daft Punk live at Planet Rose, Doornroosje, November 1995. A recording of a Daft Punk DJ set from November 1995, before Homework, with a tracklist running through Chemical Brothers, Thomas Bangalter's own Roule material, DJ Sneak and Lil' Louis. It shows what the duo were actually playing as the French touch formed.
- - Motorbass - Pansoul. The album by Philippe Zdar and Etienne de Crecy that set the template for French house: dusty samples, heavy filtering, and a debt to Chicago worn openly. It preceded Homework and shaped everything the French touch generation did next. Presented here in full.
- - Motorbass: Philippe Zdar and Etienne de Crecy on French house. Period French television footage of Motorbass, the Zdar and de Crecy project whose album Pansoul set the template for the filtered French sound. It shows the studio culture the French touch came out of, before Daft Punk's Homework made it a phenomenon.
- - Daft Punk - Homework. The full 1997 debut album that made French touch an international proposition, built by Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo out of filtered disco loops, a TR-909 and a room in Paris. Revolution 909 and Da Funk are explicit acknowledgements of the Chicago and New York records the pair grew up on. Released 20 January 1997 on Virgin.
- - Motorbass - Ezio (Cassius remix). Cassius reworking Motorbass, released as a white-label promo 12" on Different in France. A small record that shows how tightly the Paris circle worked, remixing each other under overlapping names. Deep house built out of filtered loops.
- - French touch reportage with Bangalter, Zdar, De Crecy and Garnier. A Dutch television report from the height of the French touch, with Thomas Bangalter, Philippe Zdar, Etienne de Crecy and Laurent Garnier on camera in the period. Contemporary footage of the scene rather than a later retrospective, which makes it rare.
- - Daft Punk, Garnier and Motorbass on Dutch TV, 1998. A Dutch television report on the French house wave, filmed in Paris with Laurent Garnier, Motorbass (Etienne de Crecy and Philippe Zdar) and Daft Punk on camera. Period broadcast footage of the scene while it was still forming, before any of it was canon. The interviews are the primary value.
- - Sun City at the Hippodrome, April 1998. Over an hour of raw footage from a UK garage night at the Hippodrome in London, filmed on the floor: the DJs, the MCs, the clothes and the crowd. Pre-2000 club video of this scene barely exists, which makes an unedited night like this more useful than any retrospective. The record of what the room actually looked like.
- - Derrick Carter live at Moxa Club, Mantova. A four-and-a-half-hour recording of Derrick Carter playing the Moxa Club in Mantova, one of the Italian venues that booked Chicago DJs through the club boom. The full-night length shows what the export market actually bought: not a festival hour but a resident's shift, played by a visitor.
- - French Touch - a documentary by Alexis Bernier and Philippe Levy. A fifty-minute film made at the height of the French Touch, when Daft Punk, Cassius and Motorbass were still current rather than historical. Contemporary documentaries like this are worth far more than retrospectives: nobody in it knows how the story ends.
- - Daft Punk interviewed in the Homework era, 1999. A short television interview with Daft Punk from 1999, subtitled by a fan channel. Interviews with the duo from before the helmets and the near-total media silence are rare, and this one catches them while Homework was still the record they were being asked about.
- - Carsten Hellmich in Dortmund. The deep house DJ Carsten Hellmich playing the Juicy Fruit festival in Dortmund in 2000. Germany absorbed house early and kept a deep-house lane running alongside its better-known techno.
- - A rave in Seoul. 2001, uploaded to Commons two decades after it was taken. Korea's dance scene grew through the 1990s and 2000s with almost no coverage outside the country.
- - Daft Punk's pyramid at Coachella. Daft Punk inside the pyramid at Coachella in 2006. The French duo's return to the stage reset expectations for what a dance act's live show could look like, and every LED stage since owes it something.
- - Tobi Neumann at Registratur. Tobi Neumann performing at the Registratur in Munich, shot by his brother. Munich's club scene of the 2000s was one of several German circuits where house and techno shared the same rooms and the same bookings.
- - Cassy - Panorama Bar 01. The first release in Ostgut Ton's Panorama Bar mix series, by Cassy, who held one of the room's earliest residencies. It is the founding document of how Berlin's biggest club programmed house rather than techno. The selection reaches back to Chicago and Detroit records alongside contemporary European deep house.
- - Daft Punk on Kastljós, Iceland, October 2006. Icelandic national television interviews Daft Punk, in bags rather than helmets, during their 2006 visit. It is a small, strange piece of broadcast archive from the year before Alive 2007 made them a stadium act.
- - Xxxperience, Santa Luzia. The Xxxperience rave at Santa Luzia in the Belo Horizonte metropolitan area on 26 August 2006. Brazil's large outdoor dance events ran on a circuit of their own that owed very little to Europe.
- - Yellow, Tokyo. The club Yellow in Nishi-Azabu, Tokyo, long the room visiting house DJs most wanted to play and a fixture of the city's nightlife with a capacity of around 800. Japan built a serious house circuit largely out of view of the Anglo-American story.
- - Philippe Zdar live on Radio Campus Paris. An hour of Zdar mixing live on Paris student radio during the Cassius touring year, recorded off air. The kind of unglamorous document that normally disappears: no edit, no promo, just the set as broadcast. Zdar died in 2019, which makes recordings like this scarce.
- - Daft Punk at O2 Wireless. Daft Punk performing at the O2 Wireless Festival in London in June 2007. French touch built its sound on filtered disco loops, the same records Chicago had been playing a decade earlier.
- - Closing the show in Sydney. The closing moments of Daft Punk's set at Sydney's NeverEverLand event in December 2007. The Alive tour ran through 2006 and 2007 and was recorded for the live album that followed.
- - Guest set at Club Yudelins. The DJ Makai playing a guest set at Club Yudelins in Japan in September 2008. Japan built a durable club and house scene of its own that the Anglo-American press has largely never looked at.
- - Barzilay, Tel Aviv. Barzilay, a gay nightclub in Tel Aviv that became one of the city's core electronic-music rooms, photographed around 2009. House's spread through gay nightlife is not incidental to it; it is the mechanism.
- - Tama Sumo - Panorama Bar 02. The second instalment of Ostgut Ton's Panorama Bar mix series, by the room's long-standing resident Tama Sumo. Panorama Bar is Berlin's house floor above Berghain's techno room, and this series is the closest thing to a document of what is played there. The tracklist runs through deep house and Detroit-leaning records rather than techno.
- - T Dance crowd, Midsumma. The crowd at T Dance, the daytime dance party run as part of Melbourne's Midsumma festival. House came out of queer dance floors in Chicago and New York, and queer dance floors on the other side of the world are part of what kept it going.
- - Cassius interview, Paris, 2010. Philippe Zdar and Boombass on camera in Paris, talking through the duo's work and the scene they came out of. First-hand testimony from two of the people who actually built French house rather than a retrospective about them. Posted again after Zdar's death in June 2019.
- - Theo Parrish - Boiler Room London debut. Theo Parrish's first Boiler Room, filmed in a London flat in the series' opening year. Parrish's Detroit deep house is built from unusually long, unquantised edits, and this is one of the earliest filmed records of the format that would go on to televise club DJing worldwide.
- - Groove Armada - Superstylin' live at Glastonbury 2010. Groove Armada playing 'Superstylin'' on Glastonbury's stage, one of the British house records that carried the sound to a mass festival audience. It is a useful marker of how far house had travelled from the clubs by the 2000s. Filmed by the BBC as part of its Glastonbury coverage.
- - Powerhouse arena at Southport Weekender 46, May 2010. A clip from the Powerhouse room at Southport Weekender 46, filmed at the Pontins site. The Powerhouse was the weekender's main house arena and the room that gave the British soulful scene its annual gathering point. Rough footage, but it is period evidence of the crowd and the room.
- - Open-air party outside Chiang Mai. Dancers at an open-air party on the outskirts of Chiang Mai, Thailand, in November 2010; the photographer notes the night ran on house and techno. House travelled a long way past Chicago, and it usually arrives like this, at small unlicensed parties rather than in clubs.
- - Nicolas Jaar in Spandau. Nicolas Jaar and his band at an open-air event staged by the Berlin club Wilde Renate in a film-studio compound in Spandau on 13 June 2011. Jaar's early records slowed house down to a walking pace and found an audience doing it.
- - Derrick May on what separates techno from house. Derrick May draws the line between techno and house in his own words, which is the distinction most secondhand accounts blur. Short, and useful precisely because a founder is defining the terms rather than a journalist.
- - Real Scenes: Paris. Resident Advisor's film on Paris after the obituaries, tracing the city from the filter-house years of Daft Punk and the French touch to the promoters rebuilding a club circuit under some of Europe's tightest nightlife policing. France is the one place outside America that rewrote house into a national style, and this shows what that scene looked like once the hype had gone.
- - Rewind 4Ever: The History of UK Garage. The feature documentary on UK garage, tracing the London scene from its roots in New York garage house through the pirate radio and Sunday-morning years. UK garage is a direct descendant of the Paradise Garage sound, rerouted through British sound-system culture - a different genre with a shared parent. Told by the DJs, MCs and promoters who ran it.
- - Theo Parrish - Boiler Room at Studio Africa. A short Theo Parrish set recorded for Boiler Room at the Studio Africa project. Parrish plays African and diasporic records alongside Detroit house, which is the argument the whole event was making about where the music comes from.
- - Kaytranada - Boiler Room: Montreal. An early Boiler Room from Kaytranada, filmed in Montreal before he had an album out. His way of pulling house tempos through hip-hop swing became one of the defining crossover sounds of the following decade.
- - Derrick May on Detroit, Chicago and club culture. An interview in which Derrick May talks through the relationship between Detroit and Chicago and how both cities' records travelled internationally. Extended conversation on the exchange between the two scenes rather than on techno alone.
- - Ryan Elliott - Panorama Bar 06. Ryan Elliott's entry in Ostgut Ton's Panorama Bar mix series, released free through the label. A Detroit-raised DJ resident in Berlin, Elliott shows the deep house and dub-inflected end of the room's sound. It is one of the better-documented statements of Berlin's house floor.
- - Southport Weekender 50 - the house room, May 2014. A short piece of floor footage from the house room at Southport Weekender's fiftieth edition. Handheld clips like this are the only visual record of a scene that was documented almost entirely in audio. It shows the soulful-house crowd that sustained the sound in Britain between revivals.
- - Moodymann on Detroit and staying independent. Kenny Dixon Jr. on Detroit, vinyl, and refusing to work the way the industry wanted him to. Moodymann is the clearest case of Detroit producing house rather than techno, soul, gospel and disco records rebuilt into loops, and of an artist keeping ownership of them.
- - Solomun - Boiler Room: Tulum. Two closing hours from the Diynamic label boss, mixing older records with unreleased material, at Boiler Room's second Tulum broadcast. Tulum in the mid-2010s is where the Ibiza superclub economy exported itself to Mexico, and this set is a document of that circuit at its peak.
- - Premiers symptômes: aux sources de la French Touch (1/5). The opening part of a Swiss public radio series on where the French Touch came from, noting that the term itself was coined by the British press about a group of artists who did not all make the same music. Broadcast reporting rather than fan retrospective.
- - Honey Dijon - Boiler Room Madrid. Honey Dijon in Madrid for the Ray-Ban x Boiler Room series, playing to a room she visibly pulls toward her. The set is a good record of how the Chicago-via-New-York sound travelled through the branded club circuit of the mid-2010s.
- - The Black Madonna b2b Mike Servito - Boiler Room x Dekmantel. Two hours back to back with Mike Servito at Dekmantel in Amsterdam, one of the sets that made both DJs' reputations outside the United States. It also documents the Midwest American queer club network, Chicago and Detroit by way of New York, arriving on the European festival circuit as a scene rather than as individual bookings.
- - French Waves. A feature documentary on French electronic music told through the artists themselves, tracing the line from illegal raves back to its American roots and forward to a younger generation. It is explicit about the debt French house owes to Chicago and Detroit rather than treating the French Touch as spontaneous.
- - Moodman - Boiler Room Tokyo. The House of Liquid resident giving what Boiler Room framed as a lesson in Japanese house music. Japan built a deep and largely self-contained house scene around small, sound-obsessed Tokyo clubs, and there is very little filmed record of it in English-language archives.
- - The Story of When House Music Went Global. A Channel 4 short on the young Black entrepreneurs who turned house from an underground import into a business that reached the UK charts. It is a rare piece of reporting on the commercial machinery - labels, promoters, distribution - rather than on the DJs.
- - Real Scenes: London. Resident Advisor's portrait of London club music, a scene made by immigration and by the pressure of the city, where house sits alongside the garage, grime and jungle it helped produce. It is the best available account of how a house record functions in a British city rather than an American one.
- - Derrick May on the Belleville Three and house music. A long Red Bull Music Academy lecture in which Derrick May goes through his Belleville upbringing, 'Strings of Life' and the constant traffic between Detroit and Chicago. He is direct about how much of what Detroit made was heard, and sold, as house.
- - I Was There When House Took Over the World, part two. The second part of a broadcast documentary on how Chicago house reached the British charts, with Nile Rodgers, Jesse Saunders, Traxman and Honey Dijon. It follows the young Black entrepreneurs and the money as much as the music.
- - Honey Dijon - Boiler Room Berlin. An hour of hard house from Honey Dijon at Boiler Room Berlin's sixth birthday party in Mitte. A Black trans DJ from Chicago who learned in the city's clubs and then made her name in New York and Berlin, she is the most direct living line from house's founding rooms to the current international circuit.
- - Peggy Gou - Boiler Room at Dekmantel, Amsterdam. Peggy Gou's long-awaited Boiler Room, played at Dekmantel in Amsterdam just as she moved from respected selector to headline name. A Korean DJ built out of Berlin, she is a good marker of how far the genre's centre of gravity had spread by the late 2010s.
- - Kevin Saunderson - Boiler Room at Movement Detroit. Kevin Saunderson of the Belleville Three DJing at Movement in Detroit. Saunderson is the Detroit figure whose Inner City records, 'Big Fun', 'Good Life', were house records with house vocals, and this set is where the two cities' traffic is audible. It is kept as Detroit's relationship to house rather than as techno.
- - Homework at twenty - a Daft Punk documentary. A French television documentary made for the twentieth anniversary of Homework, on a duo who gave almost no interviews for three decades. It treats the record as the pivot on which French house turned from a local studio habit into an export.
- - Juan Atkins on Detroit, the Belleville Three and Chicago. Juan Atkins on founding Detroit techno and, more usefully here, on the rivalry with Chicago that shaped how both cities' records were made and marketed. The Chicago question is the reason this belongs in a house archive rather than a techno one.
- - Solomun at Théâtre Antique d'Orange. Solomun playing a Cercle set in a Roman theatre in the south of France, at the height of his Ibiza residency years. It is a good marker of the superstar-DJ economy that grew out of house once the music became a global touring business.
- - Omar S - Boiler Room BUDx, New Delhi. The Detroit producer and FXHE label owner playing in New Delhi, a set that sits squarely in the raw, unpolished Detroit house that runs parallel to the city's techno. It also documents the late-2010s push to build club circuits in India through brand-funded events.
- - Marcellus Pittman - Boiler Room BUDx, New Delhi. Marcellus Pittman bringing Detroit records to Delhi on the same BUDx run as Omar S. Together the two sets document a deliberate attempt to seed a house circuit in India using Detroit's second generation.
- - Jamie Jones at Time Warp, Mannheim. Two hours of Jamie Jones at Time Warp in Mannheim, a hall built for German techno and rarely programmed with house. The booking is worth keeping precisely because it sits on the border: it shows the tech-house strain being accepted by a techno institution that spent the 1990s defining itself against Chicago's sound.
- - Ravekjavik, third edition. A performance at the third Ravekjavik festival in Iceland in 2019. Small national festivals are where house and the styles next to it get played outside the big-market circuit, and they rarely get photographed at all.
- - Jamie Jones at Music On Festival, Amsterdam. Two hours from Jamie Jones at Music On's festival weekend in Amsterdam's Havenpark, filmed for the promoter's own archive. Music On is Marco Carola's brand and one of the biggest of the Ibiza-derived tech-house franchises, so the set is a good record of what that end of the house family sounded like at its commercial peak.
- - Peggy Gou - Boiler Room: Streaming From Isolation, Seoul. Part of the series Boiler Room ran when every club on earth was shut, filmed from the highest point in Seoul as South Korea's first lockdown lifted. It is a direct record of what the pandemic did to dance music: the DJ, the city view and no crowd at all.
- - Masters At Work at the BPM Festival, Costa Rica. A two-and-a-half hour Masters At Work set filmed for Beatport at BPM Costa Rica, the festival's first year after it left Mexico. Shows the veterans of New York house working the present-day international festival circuit. Useful as a record of where the money and the audience for house sit now.
- - Green Velvet - live at a Melbourne day party. Curtis Jones performs live as Green Velvet in Melbourne, alongside Claptone and Michael Bibi. It shows how far the Chicago acid-house-and-attitude template had travelled by 2020: an Australian promoter's outdoor day party built around a Cajual Records veteran.
- - Moodymann at The Music Locker, GTA Online. Moodymann plays a set through his own back catalogue, recorded for a nightclub inside Grand Theft Auto Online during the year real clubs were closed. Detroit's most house-facing figure appearing as a licensed in-game resident is a genuinely strange artefact of how the music kept circulating in 2020.
- - Marcellus Pittman - Boiler Room at Beacon Festival, New Zealand. The Detroit selector and 3 Chairs member closing Boiler Room's first New Zealand broadcast with a two-hour set. New Zealand was one of the few places holding open-air festivals in this period, which is why a Detroit house DJ is playing there at all.
- - Teachers: the Chicago roots of Daft Punk's Homework. A short film running exactly 9:09, with a mix by CK303, built around the roll-call of Chicago names in Daft Punk's 'Teachers'. It makes the archive's central point in nine minutes: the most successful European dance record of its era is a list of Black American producers, credited by name.
- - Mamba Negra at the Fabrica dos Brinquedos. A Mamba Negra party in the disused Fabrica dos Brinquedos in Sao Paulo on 22 May 2022. The collective runs queer-centred parties in industrial buildings, which is the same arrangement house started with and for much the same reasons.
- - Jamie Jones for Cercle at the Pliva Waterfalls, Jajce. Cercle films Jamie Jones playing beside the Pliva waterfalls in Jajce, Bosnia-Herzegovina, with the landscape as the whole production. It is the clearest example of the format French producers Cercle invented in 2016, the DJ set as a location film, which has become one of the main ways house now reaches an audience that never enters a club.
- - The Global Rise of Afro House. A documentary tracing afro house across the African continent and into European clubs, with the producers and DJs driving it. It is direct evidence that house's centre of gravity has moved: the same music, made and claimed far from Chicago.
- - Roy Davis Jr. at Djoon, Paris. A long night's set from Roy Davis Jr. at Djoon in Paris, a club whose programming is built on the deep, soulful and gospel side of house. French audiences kept that strain of the music commercially alive through periods when American clubs would not book it, and this is what the relationship looks like from the booth.
- - Ravekjavik, seventh edition. The seventh Ravekjavik festival, Iceland, June 2023. Four years on from the earlier frame in this archive the event is still running, which for a festival of that size is the achievement.
- - Southport Weekender 2023 - weekend montage. A montage of DJs, live acts and dancers across a full Southport Weekender, the British soulful-house institution that ran for decades before moving to Bognor. It is one of the few pieces of footage that shows the crowd, not just the booth. Useful as evidence of how the New York and New Jersey vocal tradition was kept alive in the UK.
- - Folamour at Cathédrale Saint-Pierre, Geneva. Folamour playing a Cercle set inside a Geneva cathedral, disco-sampling French house in a building designed for organ music. Cercle's whole model, a DJ, a monument and a livestream, is one of the clearest examples of how house is packaged for audiences who will never be in the room.
- - The Blessed Madonna - Boiler Room Bali at Potato Head. The Blessed Madonna plays Boiler Room's return to Potato Head in Bali, an hour of disco-leaning house for a Southeast Asian crowd. The booking is a straightforward illustration of the circuit that now carries the music: a Kentucky-born DJ, a British platform and an Indonesian beach club.
- - Theo Parrish - Club 77, Sydney. Four and a half hours of Theo Parrish recorded live in a small Sydney basement, long enough to show the drift and repetition that a festival slot never allows. Sets of this length from a Detroit deep-house player are rarely filmed in full.
- - Folamour - Boiler Room at Sugar Mountain, Melbourne. The French house producer plays Boiler Room's stage at Sugar Mountain in Melbourne, a set built on disco and soul samples in the Parisian filter-house tradition. It shows how completely the French reading of house had been absorbed into the global festival circuit by the mid-2020s.
- - Honey Dijon - Mixmag live set, Barcelona. Honey Dijon closing the Barcelona leg of a European tour filmed by Mixmag, a full house set from one of the genre's few genuine crossover stars. It shows the vocal, disco-rooted end of her playing rather than the harder Berlin material.
- - Marco Carola b2b Jamie Jones - KEEZY, Düsseldorf. Nearly four hours back to back between Marco Carola and Jamie Jones as the Kiesgrube open-air party moves to its new KEEZY site in Düsseldorf. The pairing is the Ibiza tech-house axis of the 2010s transplanted to a German gravel pit, and the running time shows how that style is built, slowly, on loops, over hours.
- - Cassius on three decades of the French touch. Boombass of Cassius interviewed about the arc of French house, from the mid-1990s Paris studios through the global success of the French touch to the present. A first-hand account from inside the scene that took Chicago's filtered disco and sent it back out.
- - Alex Party at Durham Pride. The Italian house project Alex Party, whose mid-1990s singles carried Italo house onto British dancefloors, performing at Durham Pride in 2025. Italy's piano-house studios were one of the first places outside America to answer Chicago.
- - Pedro Winter on thirty years of the French touch. The founder of Ed Banger and former Daft Punk manager on Daft Punk, Justice, Cassius and DJ Mehdi, and on how a Paris label economy grew around the music. It covers the business side of French house as much as the records.
- - Etienne de Crecy b2b Cassius b2b DJ Falcon at Le Trabendo. Three of the surviving figures of the French touch playing back to back to back at ARTE Mix in Paris. Nearly three hours of the filter-house lineage handled by the people who invented it, thirty years on. A rare document of the style still being played live.
- - The NTS Guide to French Touch. A two-hour curated guide to the French house wave from the mid-90s to the early 2000s, assembled by NTS with an argument attached: these producers were openly indebted to Chicago house. Useful as a map of the records rather than as a period document. Dated to its own publication.
