DJ Gregory - an accidental house hero

Plus Raisa K, Rufige Kru, Footshooter and more

Double wooden boomboxes by Anna Jane McIntyre: https://www.instagram.com/annajanemcintyre/

Before we get into DJ Gregory, a quick introduction. The last two Substack posts I did, in which I wrote about 10 dub albums I love, reached an audience far beyond my usual one here and I picked up quite a lot of new subscribers. Hello.

I wondered for a while if a piece about DJ Gregory, an out-of-joint French house producer who did most of his best work more than a decade ago, was the best way to follow up those dub posts. Maybe, I thought, I could do something that would appeal more to the new readers?

Then again, I don’t really know why the dub posts reached a larger audience. So there’s no point in chasing something I don’t really understand. In any case, this Substack is essentially about indulging my musical whims, writing about the things that other places don’t commission me to write about. And that includes DJ Gregory.

The Line Noise substack claims to be about “Dance music’s past, dance music’s future”. And it is. But it is also about a lot more than that. In the past few months I have written about The Beta Band (which seems a lot more relevant now than it did a few months ago), David Bowie, Broadcast, Nico and The Sugarcubes, together with a load of electronic / dance music things.

All of which is to say…. DJ Gregory is great. Please do read the post and listen to the music. And if, by any chance you don’t like DJ Gregory, then please do indulge me and keep on reading.

And a big thanks to multidisciplinary artist Anna Jane McIntyre who has provided the wonderful artwork for this post! Thank you so much! Go and follow her on Instagram.

DJ Gregory - an accidental house hero

DJ Gregory, aka Grégory Darsa, is one of the most unusual producers in French House. This is not so much for his sound, which is far from the absurd sonic adventures of Pepe Bradock or Justice’s prog metal overdrive; but for the fact that he doesn’t really fit in anywhere.

Darsa started out in the French Touch, producing standard - if very strong - filter disco, moved on to scuba-deep house, then took a left-turn into African and Latin-influenced dance music, making records that troubled the mainstream without ever being overly commercial. On the way he explored minimalism, flamenco, Baile Funk and Kuduro.

When UK Funky made its bow in the late 2000s, Darsa was immediately welcomed to its bosom, with Donae’O naming DJ Gregory’s Don’t Panic as one of his top 10 UK Funky songs and the inspiration behind his own Devil In A Blue Dress. The same song was also sampled in Gracious K’s huge 2009 hit, Migraine Skank.

Are there any other producers outside the UK / US axis who are hailed as pioneers of UK Funky? I don’t think so. And this is what I mean by Gregory being unusual: he’s not really French Touch, deep house, Latin House, Afro House or UK Funky, although his records have been popular with all of these scenes. He’s just… DJ Gregory, which seems like an admirable thing.

And so I bring you my selection of 10 records to know DJ Gregory, the accidental house hero.

Fantom - Faithfull (1997)

Darsa first discovered house music in New York in the early 90s, hooking up with Alex from Tokyo (who, despite the name, was born in Paris) and DJ Deep on his return to Paris, laden with records. He made his radio debut in 1994 on Paris station Radio FG and became resident at the TGV night at the Elysée Montmartre.

Gegory’s recorded debut came in 1996, when Gilb’R asked Darsa to remix Venus, a track he had recorded as Cheek for his nascent Versatile label. Darsa turned in a classic under his DJ Gregory nom de plume, the filtered magic of his Sunshine People remix turning the song into an anthem that still delights to this day.

Darsa followed this with a couple of tracks as Cheesy DJ on the celebrated Bakchich 1 and 2 EPs for Romain Dupont’s Basenotic label, Get The Cash And Run and Broken House (3 At Mosco's). Both intriguing and able to hold their own - if not quite excel - among the records’ star line ups, which included Motorbass and Pepe Bradock.

It was while DJing at Radio FG that Darsa met the producer who would become his most fruitful musical partner over the years, Julien Jabre. The pair hit it off quickly, producing a French filter house classic at first time of asking: Faithfull by Fantom, a one-off name they would never return to.

The song was an anthem in Paris and quickly ticked off some of the biggest achievements on the French Touch scene: appearing on a Source Lab compilation in 1997 and the Paris Is Sleeping, Respect Is Burning compilation the following year; and being played by Daft Punk on their seminal 1997 Essential Mix.

Faithfull is also a brilliant example of what DJ Gregory does best, taking a tiny handful of exactly the right ingredients - in this case a sample from T-Connection’s At Midnight, a phasing effect, a huge bass drum and train sounds taken from Telex’s Moskow Diskow - and letting them go to play, producing house music that sounds dangerously effortless. But really isn’t.

.g - Underwater (1998)

In 1997 Darsa debuted his deep house project .g (AKA Point G and yes it does mean “G spot” in French), with The Raw EP on Bob Sinclar and DJ Yellow’s Yellow Productions.

That EP was home to the wonderful Chicken Coma. But .g dropped its enduring classic the following year on the On The Raw Again EP for Basic Recordings, on which Jabre assisted on keys. That track, Underwater, is one of my favourite deep house tracks, a fathom-deep excursion that shows that you only really need a shuffling beat, cavernous bass line and rippling, aquatic effect to make a classic song, like Deep Burnt on scuba.

You can definitely believe Dabra when he says he made the .g tracks stoned as a horse. “Maybe if the mic was open when I was recording you could hear the lighter,” Darsa told Resident Advisor of the project. “This is really music from a guy who is smoking hard weed. Underwater, all those tracks, I was completely stoned.”

Underwater was reissued in 2013 on Apollonia and again in 2021, which proves you can’t keep a good stoner down.

Soha - Amour (2000)

Darsa left for New York in 1998, returning to Paris two years later. It was then that he cemented his relationship with Jabre, the two forming Soha, a relatively short-lived but brightly burning collaboration. “The main idea in those days was to find our own path in music,” Darsa told Resident Advisor in 2013, of his early days working with Jabre. “Very quickly, we understood that we couldn't do better than Masters At Work or Mood II Swing."

When I say DJ Gregory’s music doesn’t really fit anywhere, I am often thinking of Soha. Soha’s music is not, in any way, weird. Bit it seems to defy easy generic description. It’s house, sure, and pretty minimal but I don’t think it sounds like the music anyone else in Paris was making at the time.

Soha is, perhaps, a little like Thomas Bangalter and DJ Falcon’s Together project in its minimalism. But where Together looped the merry hell out of big disco samples, making extremely loud records, Soha tended to use very simple - but devastatingly effective - keyboard melodies, which feel almost empty within, the shadow of a house record rather than the record itself.

“Empty” doesn’t sound great. But I mean it literally, rather than emotionally. In fact, Soha records bound with emotion but it is very subtly expressed. And Amour, the duo’s debut in 2000, is the absolute epitome of this, with an insane amount of love bursting out of its expertly restrained grooves. Ëvë, released in 2001 on the peerless Versatile Family Album, and Izabelle are also well worth your attention.

DJ Gregory - Block Party (2000)

Soha would also feature in Gregory’s next big project, Africanism. After returning from New York, Darsa set up a temporary studio in the Yellow Productions offices, where he worked opposite Sinclar (real name: Christophe Le Friant.) This association would eventually lead to Africanism.

Honestly, I’m still not 100% sure what Africanism was. Bob Sinclar’s website calls it a “collective led by Bob Sinclar and featuring, among others, Martin Solveig, DJ Gregory, Lego and Eddie Amador”. The Resident Advisor article I mention above calls it “a sweeping project that brought together a range of producers working under the banner of the project title”, which was initially led by Darsa and Sinclar, with Jabre engineering the first releases.

I’ll go with that but it doesn’t really explain the origin of the Africanism name, none of these producers involved actually being African, as far as I can make out (and apologies if I have this wrong). I think the name is intended to express some kind of global outlook on house music, which would make sense, given that some of the Africanism releases are more Latin-influenced than African. And, yes, there are some legitimate concerns about such blatant borrowing.

Putting these aside for a moment - and maybe I shouldn’t - the Africanism project produced some of Darsa’s best music. Soha’s Les Enfants du Bled (which basically translates as “children of the town”, “bled” being an Arabic word that was transplanted into French), is a soulful roller of a tune with an excellent, live-sounding drum pattern and brilliant synth lead.

Africanism’s two real classics, however, are DJ Gregory’s Block Party and Tropical Soundclash. The former is probably my favourite DJ Gregory song and a tune I used to spin all the time (when anyone asked me to DJ, that is.) I mentioned before that a lot of Africanism music is Latin influenced and it is Block Party that I am thinking of here, with the song being dominated by a hefty sample of So Beautiful by Latin jazz funk pianist Milton Hamilton.

Credit, of course, should go to Hamilton for this. But Darsa’s production skills are immaculate on this song. Not only does he choose exactly the right sample for the occasion - one bar of wildly exciting, horn-heavy, salsa-influenced disco that definitely benefits from being looped - he marries it to an exquisite drum pattern that combines that wild, rolling rhythms of of soca and batucada with the precision of the best house music and a visceral sub bass line. Perhaps it is the soca influence but Block Party feels like the first DJ Gregory song that would have fit into a UK Funky set half a decade later. And it is a HELL of a tune.

DJ Gregory - Tropical Soundclash (2002)

Africanism’s other classic, Tropical Soundclash, had drums that are even better than Black Party’s, a live-sounding snare drum-led rattle that feels like an extremely funky battle charge, to which Darsa adds chicken scratch guitar, a needle-sharp bass line and a sample (I presume) of a low-ended and rather thoughtful vocal refrain that few producers would have picked for an upbeat house tune. The contrast works perfectly, though, creating a tune that is quickly absorbed but never forgotten.

Darsa says he spends a long time on his drums - and it certainly shows here. “I do spend a lot of time [programming my drums], maybe too much,” he told Defected in 2010. “Because actually I put as many layers as I can into the production then I keep what I think works. As an old schooler MPC drum programmer I know work inbox (on the computer) which is quite cool because the amount of tools you can use today is just insane. Now the secret is when I start to dance I know the beat is ready.”

Tropical Soundclash, as well as appearing on Africanism 1, was the first release on Darsa’s new Faya Combo label in 2002. (Of which more later). On the B side - and also on Africanism 1 - was Damelo, a track that brilliantly splits the difference between Block Party and Tropical Soundclash by combining the sample-heavy Latin feel of the former with the intense drum line of the latter.

Rounding out Gregory’s huge contribution Africanism 1 was Tourment d’Amour, featuring a gorgeously stirring vocal from Brazilian singer Salomé de Bahia and a beautiful guitar line sampled from Makchiné Doudou by French Caribbean disco funk band Malinga Five. The song was, apparently, an anthem in South Africa. “Us as South Africans will never forget this song,” writes Creative Soul Recolo on YouTube. “The impact it had on our people is timeless.”

DJ Gregory - Elle (2003)

The first Africanism album sold like hot cakes, shifting some 350,000 units according to Darsa. “At a certain point, Chris [Bob Sinclar] wanted to do Africanism Vol. II,” Darsa told RA “and I told him, 'You are going too fast, and the music you put out is too cheesy. This is not the idea that we started with, please don't go and do it.’”

Sure enough, Sinclar carried on regardless and the second volume of the Africanism album sold a much reduced (but still respectable) 65,000 copies. By this point Darsa had left Africanism and was concentrating his energies on his Faya Combo label.

There is some crossover between Africanism and Faya Combo - named, cringe, after the Jamaican for “fire” - with a number of Africanism records (including Tropical Soundclash, Soldiers and Takemussa) initially being released on Faya. But the label’s first big hit on its own would soon come, in the shape of Elle, a song Darsa apparently worked on for three years in a bid to get it right. The the result is a hymn to perfect simplicity

“Tropical Soundclash was very simple, Block Party; all of that stuff was very simple, a few elements,” Darsa told Higher Frequency in 2005. “But then when I had the opportunity to have a recording room; of course you have the possibility to expand what you do, so it means that you're gonna spend more time. At the end the most important thing is what you listen to and the emotion it brings - for example with a track like Elle, I worked a very long time to make it as simple as possible.”

It’s true: Elle is simple as hell, little more than acoustic guitar riff, rolling drums, minimal bass line, the simplest suggestion of synth chords and a few extra noises occasionally thrown into the mix like the finest culinary spice. And yet from this Darsa crafts a live-sounding house epic that unfurls over 12 minutes of glorious melancholy that gives deep house a good name (again).

DJ Gregory - Don’t Know Malendro (2003)

The credits I have found for Elle are rather ambiguous about how the song was created. It sounds like a live studio jam that Darsa then endlessly edited. But I can’t be sure.

Don’t Know Malendro, released the same year, is a lot clearer. Michel Fantasy played bass; Jeff Kellner guitar; Adrien Chicot keys; Darsa drums; and the strings are by Veronique C. More importantly, it sounds like it was recorded live in the studio, with everyone having an absolute ball. Don’t Know Malendro is slightly sloppier than Elle and a great deal more disco sounding than most things in Gregory’s catalogue. And damn does it work, the song’s unforgettable synth riff the icing on the cake of a track of quite perfect groove.

DJ Gregory and Gregor Salto - Con Alegria (2009)

Darsa released a steady string of excellent 12 inches as the 2000s progressed, with 2006’s Don’t Panic receiving a very warm welcome amongst the burgeoning UK Funky scene. In 2009 Darsa, then, hooked up with Dutch producer Gregor Salto to release the flamenco-sampling Con Alegria.

This is going to be a difficult one. I’ve lived in Barcelona long enough to know that flamenco is not to be messed with. Rosalía got a pretty strong backlash from some people in the gitano community for her use of flamenco and neither Darsa nor Gregor Salto are even Spanish. So I totally understand if anyone hates the idea of a house song that samples the vocal, palmas and guitar from an unnamed flamenco song. (I say “sample” - I assume it does. But I haven’t been able to locate any info about this.)

That said, I find the combination of almost industrial house beat - all metallic and funky, like those classic Deep Dish productions - and a nagging vocal hook that eventually unleashes an incrediblel flourish, all bare-armed emotion and dusky basements - basically irresistible. And, while you might argue that Con Alegria shouldn’t have been made; it has at least been made very well indeed from a house perspective, creating a dance-floor classic that always stands out from the doomf.

DJ Gregory and Sidney Samson - Dama S Salon (featuring Dama S) (2010)

In the late 2000s, Darsa started to get interested in Angolan Kuduro and Brazilian Baile funk, after visiting both countries. Dama S Salon, featuring Angolan singer Dama S and Dutch producer Sidney Samson, is perhaps the best example of his adventures into these sounds, with a tough, lolloping beat, distinctive stuttering synth motif and a fiery vocal from Dama driving it along, both agreeably rough and surprisingly commercial. Both Kuduro and Baile Funk were popular at the time and a lot of international dance producers were trying their hand at this kind of fusion. But no one had the quality and precision that Darma brought to the table: the synth riff, especially, is a jewel.

Gregory and Samson’s Canoa, also released in 2010, is another gem, which I became aware of on Louie Vega’s Mad Styles And Crazy Visions 2 mix - subtitled, quite correctly, “A Journey Into Electronic, Soulful, Afro & Latino Rhythms”.

DJ Gregory - Tropical Soundclash (Kenny Dope remix) (2002)

… and talking of Masters at Work, it all started for Darsa in New York, so why should it finish there too? (For this list, I mean: Darsa continues regularly DJing and producing).

Darsa never wanted to be Masters at Work, he once explained. On this remix, though Kenny Dope hauls him in anyway. The K-Dope remix is what Tropical Soundclash would have sounded like if Kenny and Louie stumbled onto the song’s various ingredients, rather than Darsa: wilder, less meditative, a little messier maybe but funky as all hell. A fittingly profligate end for France’s premier filter-deep-minimal-Latin-disco-flamenco-kuduro master.

PS I have a DJ Gregory playlist for you, on Spotify and Apple Music.

PPS Defected’s DJ Gregory and Julien Jabre House Masters compilations come highly recommended.

PPPS Maybe one day I will look at Jabre’s career too. For the moment, though, here is Swimming Places, his best known solo work.

Some listening

Massive Attack vs. Mad Professor - Heat Miser (Dub) demo

As a post script to last week’s dub albums post, an attentive Reddit user sent me a link to Dubs (Tape 7), the Bandcamp release (with the Mad Professor’s approval) of a 1994 cassette that features three demo tracks originally intended for Massive Attack Vs. Mad Professor’s classic No Protection. What this means is gloriously extended Mad Professor dubs of three Protection tracks (Eurochild, Heat Miser and Spying Glass) that run to two and even three times the length of the versions eventually released on No Protection. Heat Miser (Dub) demo, for example, is a stately 18 minutes long, compared to the (still great but…) six-minute take of the song on No Protection, which uses every one of those minutes to build something that feels more like a homage to Heat Miser than a remix in its splendour and grace. Obviously, length isn’t everything but dub remixes really benefit from having some space to stretch out their limbs and these three demos feel like the definite article.

Raisa K - Affectionately

Raisa Khan is an integral part of Good Sad Happy Bad, alongside Mica Levi, and her vocals were among the drifty highlights of the band’s excellent recent album All Kinds of Days. Affectionately, the opening song on Khan’s sparkling debut solo album of the same name, doesn’t sound like Good Sad Happy Bad; but it does fulfil the same sort of role as the band’s best music, mixing angular production - in this case detuned and even slightly rave-y synth chords with incredibly catchy and perfectly delicate vocals. The result is a little like the perfectly crudely shaped attack of Broadcast’s Tender Buttons, which is an album that not enough people dare to sound like these days.

Rufige Kru - Still the Same (featuring CASISDEAD)

Goldie is unquestionably one of the most important figures in contemporary British music, for his role in both pushing the limits of and popularising jungle, a very difficult tightrope to walk. For Alpha Omega, his first album as Rufige Kru in 16 years, Goldie is working with James Davidson, his long-term partner in Subjective (and a great producer in his own right). The song is as dark as an owl’s hoot; twice as hard as the Times crossword puzzle on a hangover; and as technically advanced as quantum computing, leaning perhaps towards techstep, if techstep got over its all-consuming obsession with the nastiest possible bass noise. And getting enigmatic UK rapper CASISDEAD in to add his atypical vocals is a very Goldie movie, bringing unusual artists together by sheer strength of will.

Footshooter - Folding (feat. Alllysha Joy)

Drum & bass is an incredibly malleable beast and it is a joy to dig into Footshooter’s relaxed-to-the-point-of-stasis soul roller after Rufige Kru’s hard-as-all-nails drum stomp. Folding combines a laidback, dembow-ish beat with jazzy piano chords and a vocal line from Allysha Joy that could have come straight off a Roy Ayers (RIP) 70s classic, before bumping off into a decorous drum & bass shuffle that Goldie would either be well into or eat for breakfast. Both are solid options. It feels like I have heard the song 1,000 times before, which is either the result of classic songwriting or too many hours listening to Gilles Peterson in the 90s.

Inwards - Meadowsweet Helkie

On Inwards’ new album, Zoomies, the British producer was trying to make the transition into more danceable tracks, which would work for his live performances - “But I was unable to avoid the classic Inwards weirdness so they have ended up somewhere in between experimental Inwardsness and club-based banger,” he explains. That sounds like a lovely place to be as spring comes upon us and sure enough Meadowsweet Helkie - all the tracks on the album are named after ancestors from the family tree of Inwards’ Golden Retriever Keira - sounds like Orbital having a relaxing run after too many hours playing video games, a sense of melody being subtly undercut by all kinds of weird squibbles, smudges and bleeps at the corner of the mix.

James Shinra - Finch

There is something fundamentally satisfying about Finch, which is taken from Meteorites, British producer James Shinra’s new album for Analogical Force. This is music that feels very much aligned with itself, in harmony with its own nature, just the right amount of melody balanced snugly against the perfect touch of weirdness, the sweet of the synth burbles cradled by the scuttling breakbeat and the razor-sharp low-end force.

Things I’ve done

Line Noise - Teklife special with DJ Spinn and Traxman

This week, on a slightly chaotic Line Noise podcast, I talked to DJ Spinn and Traxman from the Teklife Crew. Both men are legends in the house / juke / footwork scene and we talk about that scene, about dancing, history, partying, the importance of a crew - and lots more. As I mentioned the audio is a little funny at times but these are two legends so I hope you enjoy it

The playlists

Play is the beginning of knowledge, according to George Dorsey. To which I can only reply, yes but playlists are the very peak of knowing. So here are my two: my best new music of 2025 playlist. And my very, very long playlist of the best music from the last five years.