Crydamoure - painting a filter-house smile on the frowning face of dance

Plus Danny L Harle, Call Super, Wevie Stonder and more

“The glimmering winged horse with an eye in the sky", cut paper monoprint collage @annajanemcintyre.

It is a situation we are all familiar with: the DJ’s not quite doing it; the drinks are overpriced; and you’re feeling a little tired. And so you decide to leave the club, only for Zeus - “the greatest god of all times” - to suddenly appear in a flash of thunder and disco string rushes and sentence you to “a never-ending dance on this floor” for offending the sacred community of dance.

OK that’s not exactly a record of my life, more a scene from The Eternals’ Wrath of Zeus, a 2000 12 inch release on none-more-filter-house French label Crydamoure. But it is a moment that seems fitting for an introduction to a label that is, perhaps, one of the most cartoon-ish in all dance music, one that pushed the idea of filter house to its logical extreme by essentially doing nothing else over its half decade or so of existence, but doing it in such a rush of colour, funk and tongue-in-cheek fun that no one seemed to mind.

I should, perhaps, declare an interest. We all have a genre of music that we can listen to until the cows come home, not exactly irrespective of quality but at a level where quality is not the highest concern. And for me that genre of music is late 90s / early 2000s French filter house. A math rock record, say, would have to be exceptionally highly-regarded for me to even consider giving it a spin. But I can happily listen to people filter disco samples in and out of the mix for hours on end.

And that, essentially, is why I love Crydamoure, the label set up by Daft Punk’s Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Eric Chédeville in 1997. While Roulé, the label established by Thomas Bangalter, the other half of Daft Punk, made heart-leaping experiments into extreme minimalism (Together), stop-starting house lurch (Rock Shock), breakbeat techno (What to Do) and gigantic pop hits (Stardust), Crydamoure gleefully ploughed its own furrow of filter house until 2003, when Waves 2 came out and the label went into stasis.

Crydamoure is by no means as interesting as Roulé. But it is a riotous amount of fun and it came to me this morning, as I was listening to Waves 1, the label’s first compilation, that this is the kind of thing that the dance music world could do with a lot more of, in the face of the looming minimal revival that people keep on telling me is happening but I keep on trying to face down, back into its dismal greyscale bin of disaster.

The funny thing is that Crydamoure actually has quite a lot in common with minimalism, in that both favour the same kind of two-ideas-good-one-idea-better approach to making you dance. Within these strict parameters, though, Crydamoure gets entirely ridiculous, throwing great easel-loads of splatter paint fun at the walls, to minimalism’s excruciating 5,000 shades of grey.

Consider Wrath of Zeus. It’s stupid - I mean really stupid - on several levels, from its concept to the French accented proclamations of Zeus that start the record. But it’s also brilliantly dumb in its production, throwing extreme layers of disco samples, rolling thunder sound effects, jibbering bass lines and house percussion bounce at the wall and seeing what sticks. (Answer: quite a lot.) It sounds, in the nicest kind of way, what a Cartoon Zeus track should sound like, all overblown, gently menacing and totally irresistible.

But if you think that’s ridiculous, how about Archigram’s Doggy Style, a 2002 track from Crydamoure that makes a filter house tune out of The Stooges’ rock classic I Wanna Be Your Dog in a way that should be an absolute disaster but actually makes you wonder how on earth no one thought of it before?

Or how about the giant rock-synth riff that rips through Archigram’s classic Caranaval like a heavy-metal worm squirming around under the mulchy earth? Or the perfectly ridiculous howling-wind-plus-footsteps-through-snowdrift samples that open Le Knight Club’s 1997 song Santa Claus by Le Knight Club (aka Guy Man and Eric Chédeville), a song on which Thomas Bangalter played the bass line, his contribution bringing the song together after a long period of gestation? Ridicule, as Adam Ant once noted, is clearly nothing to be scared of.

Even when Crydamoure is being serious, it’s not really being serious. This is a label that gives not one shit about artistic development or avoiding being pigeonholed, perfectly content instead to explore ever more esoteric pockets of inspiration within the filter house sound.

CRYDA001 - Le Knight Club’s previous mentioned Santa Claus / Holiday On Ice, from 1997 - and CRYDA 018, If You Give Me The Love I Want / Playground / Loaded by Crydajam, a Crydamoure supergroup of label all-comers from 2002 - really aren’t that different, while CRYDA 016, Le Knight Club’s Nymphae Song / Rhumba from 2002, could definitely have come from the same studio sessions as Holiday On Ice.

And I am absolutely fine with that, given the love, care, funk and joy these tracks are clearly made with. The Crydamoure approach is basically find, filter, move, shift, cut, filter, drop and repeat for as long as you’re having fun.

And it always sounded like the Crydamoure crew were having fun. A more family-like label you will struggle to find. Crydamoure pivoted around Le Knight Club, who were responsible (in some way) for 10 of 12-inch releases. Guy-Man’s brother, Paul De Homem-Christo, was half of The Buffalo Bunch, who released one 12 inch on Crydamoure and one on Roulé sub-label Scratché; as Play Paul, meanwhile, he was also behind CRYDA 010 Spaced Out / Holy Ghost.

Romain Séo, the other half of The Buffalo Bunch, also released a solo record on Crydamoure, as Raw Man. Deelat (aka David Girier-Dufournier) collaborated with Le Knight Club on CRYDA 009, United Tastes of Deelat. Archigram (aka Julien Mallart and Nicolas Trichet) released three records on Crydamoure, while The Eternals and Sedat The Turkish Avenger were responsible for one apiece. The Crydajam 12 inch, fittingly, was basically a huge label-wide jam in vinyl form. And all of it came in Guy-Man’s immaculate art work, uniting the Crydamoure clan like tartan on a bright Highlands morning.

As Chédeville once described it to me, Crydamoure was equal parts social club and label, with the label’s studio in Neuilly becoming a hive of activity, both professional and more debased. And you can hear this in the music, which sounds essentially like the soundtrack to that party your friends always go on about, where the music was swinging, the drinks were cold and the vibes were quite perfectly à point.

This is why Waves is a great name for the two Crydamoure compilations: the music is like waves, all slight variations on a theme, some big, some small, some menacing, some funny but fundamentally made up of the same ingredients: house drums, rubber-twang bass, samples and filter effects.

And just as you wouldn’t look upon the majesty of waves breaking upon a shore and think: ‘well that’s probably enough of those disturbances in the ocean’s surface’, it will be a rare listener who listens to the two Waves compilations and wishes they would liven it up with a bit of, I don’t know, nu-skool breaks or melodic psytrance.

For all that, Waves 2 was probably the right time for Crydamoure to put a halt to proceedings. (There was one digital release in 2015, Le Knight Club’s The Fight, by which point I believe relations had become a little frayed between Guy Man and Chédeville. But this doesn’t really count.)

By 2003 filter house was on the way out, while Justice were soon set to unleash We Are Your Friends and Waters of Nazareth on the world, bringing a new wave of French dance music that was a little more darkly intense into the world. You could argue that Archigram’s use of guitars on Doggy Style and dirty synths on Caranaval laid the path for Justice’s none-more-feedback house sound; but I’ve never really seen any evidence of the one influencing the other.

Meanwhile, Daft Punk themselves were moving on to even bigger and better things. 2001 saw the release of the duo’s second album Discovery, a record that blasted the filter house-isms of their debut into orbit, and in 2005 came Human After All, a release that was pretty much the polar opposite of Le Knight Club’s party vibes.

The curtain, then, drew a close on Crydamoure’s cartoon-ish club world and the label’s artists went on to other things, in a club scene that seemed a little less welcoming to their exuberant bright colours. Le Knight Club themselves remixed Daft Punk’s Technologic and produced a handful of remixes for other artists, with a fairly spectacular encore in 2016 when Chédeville and Daft Punk shared songwriting credits on The Weeknd’s global hit I Feel It Coming.

Serious stuff. Except, well, not really. Crydamoure’s success feels to me like the polar opposite of much of the brow-drawn, po-faced dance music world, one perpetually ripped apart by internecine conflicts and online bickering.

Which is not to criticise the more thoughtful, serious side of dance music: I love that too. But Crydamoure’s output feels like a timely reminder, one that should be taken every few months, that getting together in a big dark room to dance can be a joyful thing, both deadly serious and slightly idiotic at the same time. And if you don’t agree with that - well Zeus would like to have a word.

PS Can I just say thank you again to Anna Jane McIntyre for the wonderful art that accompanies this - and many other posts? It is a real privilege to be able to use it.

Some listening

Call Super - Mothertime

Mothertime closes Call Super’s new mix CD - yes! CD! - for Dekmantel in an enigmatic tussle between super-sweet electronic melody, chipmunk rave vocal cut up, a slapping 2-Step beat and a bass line of such obnoxious filth it threatens to turn this sentence into a public health warning. A winning combo, in other words.

Eiko Ishibashi - Pareidolia (with Jim O’Rourke)

A single edit feels like the wrong way to approach the new collaborative album from Eiko Ishibashi and her romantic / creative collaborator Jim O’Rourke, given that the album is based on (what I imagine is) magnificently sprawling material that the two artists played live during two weeks of European shows. And yet, even over three oh-too-brief minutes, you can hear the delicious depth of Ishibashi and O’Rourke’s music, so strong you can almost taste it, rampant with the waft of texture, the whole seeming to make nonsense of the fact that only two people were involved in its creation.

Wevie Stonder - Vanja & Slavcho

Despite being nine albums in, I don’t think I had ever actually listened to Wevie Stonder before the launch of their new record Sure Beats Living, on the Skam label, which put out Autechre’s first ever release. Did I expect melodic - and even very tender - electronics with a large dose of surreal humour, including overblown cartoon sound effects? Ermmm… maybe? Whatever the case, there is something very charming about Vanja & Slavcho, which feels both the polar opposite of - and yet strangely in line with - Autechre’s steely, mind-popping experiments in sound.

Danny L Harle ft Pink Pantheress - Starlight

My favourite Danny L Harle song is Broken Flowers, for its gorgeous melancholy edge and bittersweet chord sequences. So it is a joy to report that Starlight, Harle’s new single with Pink Pantheress is cut from the same lugubrious cloth, its Elizabethan Madrigal-inspired chord sequence tearing the listener’s heart from out by its bloody roots as the bass drum thumps out a hardcore elegy to your love life. “Euphoric melancholy”, Harle calls it, and he is absolutely correct. He also mentions Monteverdi, John Dowland, Gigi D’Agostino and Alice Deejay and he’s also right, which is a pretty unique mix. And, by a happy miracle of timing, Danny is also the guest on the Line Noise podcast this week.

Things I’ve done

Line Noise podcast - Line Noise Danny L Harle live at Primavera Sound 2025

And as mentioned….we love Danny L Harle at Line Noise. For this third appearance on the show - this time live at Primavera Sound 2025 - we talked Eurovision, break-up songs and his new album.

The playlists

Summer heat is definitely here in Barcelona and my head is melting into a molten orange stew. And yet I have still managed, nonetheless, to update my two playlists: The newest and bestest 2025; and The newest and the bestest. Do follow them before my brain melts and it is all Cyndi Lauper hereon in.