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CASSIUS


Cassius could be the hardest men in dance music. Don¹t mess with Cassius. They took their name from the world's greatest heavyweight boxer, because he decided he didn't want it any more. But for the last decade, they've made some of the sweetest music, produced a portfolio of house, hip hop and leftfield music with more high-fat content than foie gras on toast, traveled their heavyweight sound across the world and spend ten years building Paris a name to rival London, Detroit, Chicago and New York when it comes to show-stopping records. In combination they're among the most successful outfits currently operating both in France and in the global house music demi-monde, and they return this year with the most highly anticipated album since Daft Punk's 'Discovery'.
Like all the best creative teams, Cassius are a duo. The pair - Philippe Zdar grew up in the Alps while Hubert (Boombass) is Parisian - isn’t exactly short on gilt-edged production skills and musical ability either. When it comes to funky music, Cassius have pedigree coming out of their well-trimmed ears. Hubert is a tireless evangelist of hip hop, he produced MC Solaar's milestone album, Qui Seme Le Vent Recolte Le Tempo in the early Nineties, the first indication in years that a nation famous for saccharine lolita pop could turn the voice of its own immigrant underclass into commercially viable music capable of ranking on the world stage. Solaar's album was the first peak in a wave of dance music _ hip-hop, house, drum & bass, reggae and techno _ that now dominates the French charts.

Boombass and Philippe met though Hubert's dad at his recording studio in Paris in 1988, where Hubert was working under his father's tutelage and Zdar had landed a job as a tea boy. They took one look at each other, and thought 'tunes'. The echo of their sound first arrived in Britain when Boombass stripped the vocals from the underground hip hop tracks he'd been producing and delivered the ultra-taut breaksmanship of La Funk Mob's 'Ravers Suck Our Sound' EP for Mo’ Wax. Philippe Zdar, meanwhile, headed for another zone of the dance floor and, as Motorbass - the partnership he forged with Etienne 'Super Discount' De Crecy, invented Motorbass's Pansoul, an album of deep midnight house music, in 1996. Then they regrouped. Just short of the millennium, when France's Daft Punk-headed assault on dance music's international stage was gathering speed, they released 1999, their own remix on the filter disco blueprint as defined by their colleagues Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem Christo of Daft Punk. Edgier than Daft Punk's debut album Homework, Boombass and Phillipe's grounding in the sounds of hip hop, reggae and two-step showed on 1999, where hyperbolic vocals samples - like on the thumping title track - sat atop basslines so heavy they could pulverize the Eiffel Tower at a hundred paces. Three years and countless parties, holidays, remixes, collaborations and studio sessions later, they deliver Au Rêve, a 14-track album whose title means 'at the dream'.

"We were in a dream when we made this", suggest Zdar. "It's good to dream and find images and ideas," adds Boombass, "but there's nothing mystical about it". Au contraire, the album is packed full with tracks so intent on stamping their way through the floorboards of your local disco. What differentiates Au Rêve from its predecessor is far less reliance on the loop-and-filter minimalism of house music into a wilder stylistic field. These days, the sampler is just an instrument among many in the Cassius arsenal, and the tracky filter disco prototype just another style they've mastered. "Au Rêve is not just beats and basslines," says Zdar. "You have to transcend the genre. We wanted to make songs and write poems".

Principal among Au Rêve's peaktime moments is the Jocelyn Brown-fronted single 'I'm A Woman'. Brassy doesn't begin to describe what must be French house music's least restrained moment yet. Thank Erick Morillo for that one - he passed on Jocelyn's number. "Straight after 1999 we contacted her and did the track, because we'd seen the potential to do a track in a studio with a singer. So we invited loads of people onto the album. Jocelyn is like a girlfriend now.'

While 'I'm A Woman' is a classic of empowered female disco, it's chest beating male-vocal counterpart is 'The Sound Of Violence'. A juddering and unashamed paean to male sexual dynamism (key lyric: 'I feel like I wanna be inside of you/when the sun goes down'), it's sung by Steve Edwards, previous collaborator of Charles 'Presence' Webster and native of that global house vocalist hotspot, Sheffield, England.

If you notice Cassius's far more song driven approach to house music at a time when sample technology remains pre-eminent, you may also notice the gratuitous use of screaming acid-laced guitar solos on both tracks. 'Très rock," beams Boombass. "We love the guitars, some people are like, I hate guitars! For me it's great, and it sounds good on the track". It's a trick, which begins to make sense when you consider the Cassius home-listening diet. "We've been listening to a lot of Seventies West Coast music," says Boombass. "All the classics of musique blanche, stuff like Crosby, Still & Nash. Sure, we're always listening to new music in clubs, lots of rap, reggae and house. But at home it’s Neil Young's Harvest". "The aim since 'Motorbass' has been to make album that lasts," adds Zdar. "An album like Daft Punk's Homework is an album I listen to all the time, even though it's five years old. The beats still sound fresh in a club."

Au Rêve, like any decent dream, heads into places it takes a powerful imagination, or a powerful stimulant, to conceive of. We begin with Chicago house, head for the West Coast and rock out, then, on 'Thrilla', make for the hood for a rumpshaking hip-house floorquake, then to Dusseldorf on the Kraftwerk-esque electro-baroque workout 'Telephone Love'. In a very real sense, Au Rêve is all over the place - in the best possible way. Not that Cassius see it that way. For them, there's nothing unusual in such rampant genre philandering. "It might all seem different for you, but it's all the same for us," says Zdar. "We never said we'd try and do lots of different things - we did 35 or 40 tracks and chose them. We didn't think about it too much."

And nor should you. It's the best possible advice. In 2002, dream your summer the Cassius way.