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.
“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.”