At this summer’s Arvika festival TAjT were given a stage to do our thing (some pics of that here). So we invited Louis La Roche to play a 90 minute set and turn the disco vibe up a bit. And when we got the chance we did an interview as well. It’s a shame this hasn’t been published yet. But as they say, better late than never.

The Britt named Brett with all that French stuff

Louis La Roche is bringing back French House (or Filter House), thirteen years after the glorious year of 1997 when legendary Daft Punk released their Homework album and the Crydamoure label was founded. At that time Louis La Roche or Brett Ewels was 7 years old and you might say that he was litterally feeded with great house music growing up.

In 2008 with the unofficial release of The Peach EP Louis La Roche shows the world what his upbringing on house music has given him. On blogs around the world people are starting to compare him with Thomas Bangalter himself. Maybe that part was a PR trick by Brett himself, maybe it wasn’t. Well that doesn’t really matter. Louis isn’t Bangalter. Louis is Louis and that’s more than enough.

His first official release, called Me & Her EP, on label Ever After Records was released in May 2009 and followed up by Super Soaker EP in January 2010. In September he’ll be releasing My Turn EP which is also the single for his upcoming debut album  Hello You. Every single release has been true new and creative French House with influences from the 70’s disco scene and the 90’s house and eurodance scene. Yes, Louis La Roche is bringing back French House. His bringing it!

We met Brett at this years Arvika festival hanging out for a couple of hours before his first ever gig in Sweden. As we over some food and a beer at the Apollo beer stalls talk about his upbringing and musical influences we notice that he’s not only a brilliant producer but also a true music nerd. What’s just a discussion over a meal sometimes becomes a lesson in French House history. Even his name is adopted for it’s french touch.

- The music I was making was french style house music, so I needed a name. The music before that was quite different. It was called Night Facilities and it was basically a learning project for me, like founding my sound. As soon as I did this tracks, I sampled for my first time moving away from synth stuff and learning synths and sampling I found I was doing it in a French way, so yeah I needed another name. The whole Louis thing was basically a marketing thing, it’s a ”it says was it is on the bin kinda thing” so you know it’s a French name and so it’s French house. Basically that’s the reason behind. It’s more of an indentity thing.

The identity and the name (meaning Louis The Rock in French) has actually been the cause for some discussion. People been debating his true nationality. Some say Brittish, some say German and some say French.

- That’s not necessarily a bad thing. I would rather them to be English, but it’s not like I’m not proud to be English, cause I am. It just helps the thing grow, with the French name. It just does. Even when people say Daft Punk and Justice, it’s ”Däft Pönk” and ”Jûstiice”. It’s the French way of saying it and it’s not just to sound cool. When you hear English people say Louis La Roche they say ”Loui La Roache”. That’s sounds terrible, you know. But when you hear a French person say Louis it sounds so much better.

Louis La Roche the brand is something that’s been important to Brett when creating his identity as an artist. One the first press photos of him was one with a big panda head covering his own head. But this was something that didn’t felt right, he didn’t want to create another masked caracter. There were already too many, for example The Bloody Beetroots and Danger. Instead his identity is first of all based on his music, the filter and disco sounds.

The Disco Wave

The last couple of years there’s been a wave of new disco influenced music sweeping over the world. Suddenly what our parents danced to is made transformed into new electronic dance music that is hotter than ever. Louis La Roche is one of the artists helping this wave to sweep over all of us.

- I think disco has come back, because it’s almost like a forgotten genre. It was big in the 70s, it was big in the late 70s  and as soon as it hit 1981 all synths started to come in and the disco stopped and just went down hill and all this synth pop music started to come in. I think it’s a wipe up proof for dance music cause in the last few years it has been very electronic and overproduced, just too many techniques and it sounds too polished. People go back to disco, cause there’s something about the hand claps and the funk and groove about it that has been lost in electronic music. The groove hasn’t been there, it just has been about how big your bass sound is, not about how funky your song is. Now that disco is back people has realized that.

The samples has opened up as well, and it’s ”free” to sample now, before it was almost like a taboo thing, you mustn’t sample and dance music has to be electronic.Which it wasn’t like in the 90s as it was in the 00s. People like Duck Sauce is a great example of that, when you sample and still do really well on the top ten. I am glad that disco is back.

If the disco house sound is the sound of the late 00’s and early 10’s , French electro and fidget house was with out doubt the sound track of the mid 00’s. Nowadays we’re not talking about musical decades anymore, something Louis agrees with.

- I think the life length of sound periods are a lot shorter nowadays, we’ve had the Ed Banger distortion age, then there was like the wonky bass, the Crookers and very recently it’s your David Guetta, Afrojack, Swedish House Maffia, Deadmau5 – the very, in my opinion it’s still overproduced. Disco house might like for another 5,6,7 years. But not more than that, another sound will come along.

Go ahead to part II…(but listen to that amazing good old track first!)

Louis La Roche – Malfunction

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Etiketter: Louis La Roche

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