Cassius take it back to ‘1999’

Cassius take it back to ‘1999’

12 May, 2010 | 2.39AM

• Written by: Kornel Koch
• Filed under: Videos: cassius, french touch, zdar

Been wondering what the heck is up with Parisian house lately? Feeling the urge for some good ol’ filter disco? Well, 11 years after the fact, Cassius and their French Touch are still giving goosebumps.

Never before available digitally, Cassius’ back catalog is finally coming online, beginning with their fin-de-siècle masterpiece ‘1999’. (Not to toot our own horn, but Beatport is currently the only place you’ll find it at 320 and WAV quality.)

As if that weren’t enough, they’ve also released brand-new remixes of ‘99’ by Italian outfit Reset! and London’s Tim Green (aka TG), a rising talent whose star is still in the ascent. Reset!’s mix is a heaving slab of turbo funk, while Tim’s fixes up the filter-house classic with rolling Caribbean drums.

Cassius, ‘99’

Cassius, ‘99 (Tim Green Remix)’

Cassius, ‘99 (Reset! Remix)’

For anyone who doesn’t remember, Cassius is the duo of Hubert Blanc Francard and Philippe Zdar; they got their start as La Funk Mob, recording a pair of hugely influential EPs for Mo Wax, and then really came into their own with the French house explosion of the late ‘90s and early ‘00s. (They’re still at it, too: Cassius recently contributed a remix of Booka Shade’s ‘Bad Love’.)

Like their peers Daft Punk, Alan Braxe, Thomas Bangalter’s Stardust, et al, Cassius’ music is generally a love letter to the supple sound of filtered samples — a whooshing rush of chicken-scratch guitars and funk licks. Listening today, though, it’s striking how much Cassius pioneered their own sound on ‘1999’, balancing driving disco with hip-hop inspired breaks, and slotting their sound somewhere between Basement Jaxx and Pepe Bradock: populist and soulful, but as experimental as they like. With the currency of house and disco again at all-time highs, ‘1999’ sounds like the future all over again.

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