genre dance

Roughly a decade ago, Bruno Boumendil, the French producer who goes by the name Folamour, perfected a distinct strain of soul-sampling house music, fragile yet fierce. 
For source material, he mined plush soul ballads from the late ’70s and early ‘80s, dropping vocal snippets into productions that flew forward, so the charismatic voices seemed to be battling to maintain their stately dignity. He programmed his drums to start low in the mix before they reared up and lashed out, and used repetition to push tracks to dramatic climaxes, looping to lethal effect. 

After an early run of success that included “When U Came Into My Life” (2016), “Ya Just Need 2 Believe in Yaself” (2017) and “I Know It Has Been Done Before” (2018), Boumendil pivoted. Though he never stopped making dance music, he started sprinkling it in among neo-soul and hip-hop tracks. But in recent years, he has been battling a creative funk. 

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“I started to feel like everything was just a routine,” Boumendil explains. “I was doing gigs and creating music, but I wasn’t really thinking about it anymore.”

His new album, Movement Therapy, out June 13, comes after he forced himself to turn off autopilot, “to actually think about what I’m doing and be more than just someone going on stage and playing for two hours.” The first song on the record is a spoken-word manifesto: “For a while, I stopped moving and I felt dead inside. My soul and body were losing their light and purpose, I felt devoid of love for myself. Then I understood that I needed to stay in movement.” 

In search of the lost spark, Boumendil fully recommitted to the style that initially boosted his career. He calls Movement Therapy his “first proper house music album.” 

Boumendil, bearded, beaming and wearing his trademark bucket hat, spoke via Zoom from Paris, where he is based. He’s eager to discuss the intricacies of his production process and earnest about his passion for full-length albums — this is his fifth. “The format is tougher to present than big singles,” he says. “But I just love albums too much. It’s always nice when people want to dig into it.”

While France has a proud tradition of sample-based house music — the “French Touch” of Daft Punk, Cassius, and more — Boumendil was not raised in dance clubs. He grew up in Lyon, where much of his early listening was informed by his father, who enjoyed jazz and punk, funk and stadium rock. Later Boumendil fell hard for ‘90s hip-hop from New York, the boom bap made by the likes of DJ Premier, Pete Rock, and Q-Tip, where heady samples collided with hefty beats. 

A love for rap led him obliquely to house, as if he snuck into the club through a side door: Both genres love a choice sample, even if they prefer different tempos. “I started to feel the connection,” Boumendil says, “and around 2010 to 2012, started falling in love with Kerri Chandler, Moodymann, Theo Parrish, all the old-school guys from Chicago and Detroit.” (Some of these “old-school guys” were a key influence on French Touch in the first place — when Daft Punk debuted their 1997 Essential Mix for BBC, they kicked it off with “Hear the Music,” from Chicago stalwart Paul Johnson.) Boumendil started DJing as a way of sharing his growing record collection. 

Production came later, in 2014, when he was laid up in bed for three months with an illness. “I was like, ‘Okay, I have two options,’” he recalls. “I can watch Lost for like the 15th time, or I can try to do something better.” A friend helped tip the scale by introducing him to the production software Ableton. 

He improved quickly. “Baise en Ville,” from the following year, mixed snatches of Jodeci’s volcanic lament “Cry for You” with soothing piano house. But Boumendil says it wasn’t until 2017 that his music started getting widespread attention. That year he put out “Lost Frequencies” — which flips “Lady,” a 1995 classic from one of Boumendil’s favorite artists, the neo-soul savant D’Angelo — as well as “Ya Just Need 2 Believe in Yaself,” one of his most-streamed songs, and the album Umami via Classic Music Company, the label co-founded by dance luminaries Derrick Carter and Luke Solomon.

Boumendil saw that burst of activity as the close of a chapter. After years of chopping samples on his MPC, he decided to start playing more instruments — sometimes hiring musicians to help — and making “slower stuff.”

Not anymore: Movement Therapy whizzes toward the dancefloor and rarely lets up. “Feel the Power,” “a song about the energy we feel when we are all together in a party,” detonates almost immediately and borrows its over-the-moon vocal from a ‘90s rave track, Love Decade’s “So Real.” In “Everyone’s Beautiful When They Do What They Love,” the bass hits as if it’s trying to maul its way out of the speakers. “I wanted to feel that growl, like it was an animal or something really savage,” Boumendil says. 

While crafting Movement Therapy, he purposefully broke his studio routine in several ways as part of an effort to banish his malaise. “The musician’s life never stops — it’s hard to say, ‘I’m not doing shows for six months,’” Boumendil points out. “I had to feel a difference while I was still doing the things that made me feel that way [‘dead inside’], which was super tough.”

For the first time ever, he club-tested early versions of every song on the album. “One of the goals of coming back to house music was to have that link where on Thursday I can be in my studio making something, and on Friday I can try the song in a set,” Boumendil explains. After numerous tweaks — he’s been lucky to find a mastering engineer “who doesn’t mind doing like, 20 versions of a song” —”Ca Va Aller” and “Everyone’s Beautiful When They Do What They Love” have “been working super well” on the dancefloor. 

In addition to establishing a new feedback loop between the club and the studio, Boumendil added more electronic touches after years of being committed to analog instrumentation. On both “Ca Va Aller” and “Everyone’s Beautiful When They Do What They Love,” synthesizers glitter like pennies at the bottom of a fountain.  

The same goes for “Pressure Makes Diamonds,” the album’s lead single, originally released almost a year ago. “It’s always a bit unexpected [when I play that] in my set, because it has that really electronic, modern lead, which doesn’t really fit with the old-school funk, disco, and soul I usually play,” Boumendil acknowledges. 

But queuing up the track serves as another way for him to scramble his old routines. There is a point in the song after the second verse where the drums and vocal fall away before revving up again, and when Boumendil hears it, he’s repeatedly been close to tears. 

Treasuring these moments — “stepping back, understanding the power of dancing, and loving the music that makes you move” — is part of his larger project of creative rejuvenation. “I’m still working on it,” Boumendil says. “But I’ve never felt better about how I do things than I do right now.”

In 2023, the producer Kevin Saunderson wandered into the home studio he shares with his son Dantiez in Detroit. What he heard blasting from the speakers seemed familiar. “I said, ‘Man, that sounds like me!’” Saunderson recalls with a laugh. “[Dantiez] used some of my bass sounds.”
As one of three men widely credited with inventing Detroit techno, Saunderson is used to encountering artists who have borrowed scraps of his style. But this time, he got a chance to put his own twist on another producer’s unwitting homage.

“We’re always around each other,” Saunderson says of Dantiez. “We’ve already been doing Inner City [another group] together, and he sounds like me in some ways. So I thought, why don’t we just do an album together?” That release, e-Dancer, which takes its name from one of Saunderson’s projects in the 1990s, is due out June 13. 

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The two men spoke to Billboard over Zoom from their Detroit home: Dantiez, laid back, lounged on a couch in one part of the house, while the elder Saunderson spoke passionately in another room about the genre he helped create. He has embraced the role of elder statesman and techno historian in recent years, doing frequent interviews about the style’s origins and even guest editing a series for Mixmag. “I’ve been in it since the beginning — I’m the beginning of this movement in many ways,” he explains. “I’ve seen a lot, and I want to be a driving force trying to educate people to our music.” 

Over more than three decades, Saunderson’s discography has ranged from vocal dance-pop classics — Inner City’s “Good Life” and “Big Fun” — to the scrappy, scraping techno on e-Dancer’s canonical album, 1998’s Heavenly. “If you opened the techno songbook, Kevin Saunderson may have the most diverse — and in some ways, most prescient — discography of all,” Sam Valenti, founder of the label Ghostly International, wrote in January. “In any other country,” Valenti added, “he’d be given every tribute and lifetime achievement award imaginable.” 

The producer DJ Spinna put it more simply in a recent Instagram comment: “Just Want Another Chance” — the song in which Saunderson invented the “Reese Bass” sound that he heard Dantiez using in the studio — “changed my damn life!!”

e-Dancer started as a retort to a dance world that often polices its borders, wary of the potential for dilution that accompanies mainstream success. Inner City’s first two singles traveled far beyond Detroit and even the wider, if still insular, world of dance-heads, becoming top 10 hits in the U.K. (“Good Life” also cracked the Hot 100 in the U.S.) “I had all that success with Inner City, and all the Detroit guys were joking with me — ‘You’re commercial, now we can’t play “Big Fun” in the club,’” Saunderson explains. “It ain’t underground enough.” e-Dancer was meant to demonstrate that Saunderson still “had that other sound” in his arsenal.

He put out the first e-Dancer single in 1991; the title was “Speaker Punishing,” suggesting this wasn’t easygoing ear-candy. The follow-up, “Pump the Move,” put harsh chattering electronics front and center — softening them slightly with a cushy synthesizer line — while the B-side was squirrely and agitated, with the strafing energy of acid house. Heavenly collected tracks from these singles along with more songs from the mid-1990s.

In the last decade, Saunderson has decided to revisit some of his early successes. Nearly 20 years after Heavenly, he gently retouched the songs on Heavenly Revisited (2017), and followed that with Re:Generate (2021), which gave producers like Adam Beyer, Robert Hood and Special Request a chance to rework tracks from the original album. In 2019, Saunderson also relaunched Inner City, enlisting Dantiez — now a dance music producer in his own right — to join the new version of the group with Steffanie Christi’an handling vocals in place of original singer Paris Grey.

Father and son have established a working routine that Saunderson summarizes as “he starts it, and usually I finish it.” “Even though we live together,” adds Dantiez, who also puts out music on his own and with his brother, “it’s hard to actually get us both in the studio at the same time.” 

Between start and finish, though, tracks undergo endless tweaks. “I usually go through six, seven, eight versions of a song before it even makes it to [Saunderson],” Dantiez says. 

And even with the album due out shortly, they continue to iterate. The early advance copy sent to Billboard had a hard-driving, string-soaked vocal cut titled “Symbolical,” but Saunderson said he would likely pull out the drums before e-Dancer came out, making the song “real ambient, just the violin and her voice.” A previous version of the album-closer “Escape” — which pairs revving synths with a mean, ankle-level bass line — featured a male vocal, but it was later removed.

The Dantiez track that reminded Saunderson of his own work is “Emotions,” the second song on e-Dancer, which lays out the album’s throughline: A bass, frayed around the edges, that skulks and snarls under many of the tracks, seemingly spoiling for a fight. That buzzsaw sound reappears on “Dancer,” with wordless vocals wafting above it, “Frequency,” where the synths stutter and screech like rusted car brakes, and “Reece Punch,” which pairs it with pounding four-note piano runs. Dantiez once said that the key to a killer club track is “a big kick and a great bassline,” and he stayed true to that principle on e-Dancer.

Since Saunderson’s output has been so “prescient,” as Valenti put it, he remains at ease even as techno continues to evolve around him. The style has gone through “so many different phases,” Saunderson says. “Tech house became very popular. I was always in between [genres] — I could do something very techno or really house. I never said I was doing tech house at the time, but it’s really an in-between version of house and techno [like what I was doing].”

Lately Saunderson has noticed that in the U.S., “the trend seems like everything has gotten faster.” It can be “a little complicated” following up a set from a DJ who is racing along at 150 beats per minute, but he’s seen that before too — as Saunderson posted on Instagram recently, he’s been “playing hard ‘n fast long before TikTok techno was a thing.” When playing out new tracks in his sets, he has found that “Melodica,” “Emotions,” “Dancer,” and “Frequency” have elicited the strongest response from club goers. 

Following the release of e-Dancer, Saunderson and Dantiez will take their act on the road, performing at Loveland and MUTEK Montreal. They also have a party in Detroit, The Hood Needs House, that they are hoping to bring to other cities. On top of that, Saunderson maintains a busy solo DJ schedule, including a recent party at Detroit’s Movement Festival. At the event, he described recently as “techno Christmas,” he celebrated his KMS Records label and also featured his two sons — Damarii along with Dantiez — in the lineup.

“I find a way to play a few classics each set so people get a good education,” Saunderson says. “Some people may not know who the hell I am. But they hear me, and they get kind of blown away.”