![]() ![]() The French house explosion of the mid- to late-’90s was already well underway, and the likes of Motorbass (made up of X and Zdar, who sadly passed last week), St. That shock value was one of the keys to its success. Here’s this record that samples this simple one-bar loop, and they managed to create a monster around it! It was almost shocking.” ‘I was blown away the first time heard it, just like most people were,” he remembers. Here, have one!’ And the record became so big, even before it actually came out, that some promoters were booking me just because I had that record.” The veteran New York DJ and producer Hector Romero was also one of the lucky recipients. “Daft Punk were on and played the song, and everybody was going ‘What is this? It’s really good!’ I went up to Thomas to ask about it, and he said, ‘Oh, it’s this new thing I did with a couple of other guys. “It was outside at the Raleigh Hotel, at an afternoon party,” he says. Soon after the Daft House sessions, a handful of Stardust white labels crossed the Atlantic to land at the March 1998 edition of Miami’s Winter Music Conference. It exists in a state of pleasure-giving perfection. It doesn’t do much of anything, really, nor does it have to. (The guitar was sampled from the first few seconds of Chaka Khan’s ‘Fate’, from 1981’s ‘What Cha' Gonna Do for Me” LP.) Diamond’s vocals, sung in a tone that’s half-pleading, half-ecstatic, soon join in: “Ooh baby, I feel like, the music sounds better with you / Love might bring us back together / I feel so good.” Toss a bit of filtering into the mix, and there you have it - there’s no build-up and no breakdown, save for a short passage when the guitar is filtered nearly down to a spectral afterglow. But just in case anyone needs a reminder, the core of the track is made up of a quick-hit guitar-riff loop, anchored by a straightforward yet hooky four-bar bassline. Like many of history’s beloved dance tracks, ‘Music Sounds Better with You’ is as simple and direct as a song can be. In the process of putting the music together, the team began to realize that one of their concoctions had that ineffable something, the magical essence that transforms a mere track into a far greater achievement. (Daft Punk was not quite the world-conquering force it is today - ‘Homework’ had come out in 1997, but ‘Discovery’ was still years away.) Together the trio settled in at Bangalter’s home studio, Daft House, and began to tinker away. ‘Music Sounds Better with You’ came together almost by accident when, in preparation for the Rex Club set, Braxe called on the help of a couple of friends, Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter and vocalist Benjamin “Diamond” Cohen. Almost exactly 21 years later, the song is getting the rerelease treatment, with a remastered vinyl version (single sided with lyrics etched on the flip, just like the original) hitting the shops on 28th June it will also be available on streaming services for the first time. The sessions leading up to the gig resulted in one of the most instantly recognisable tunes in house music history - Stardust’s ‘Music Sounds Better With You.’ Released on 20th July 1998, the song became one of the biggest-selling dance tracks of the year, with an influence that extends to this day. But when Alain Quême, a young Paris-based producer working under the name Alan Braxe, needed to quickly put some music together for an upcoming live set at the venerable Rex Club, he inadvertently changed the face of clubland history. This feature was originally published in 2019. ![]()
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