21 years later Stardust’s Music Sounds Better With You is going digital
Stardust’s Music Sounds Better With You celebrates 21st anniversary this July.
On 20th July 1998, the Roulé label releases Music Sounds Better With You as a single-sided 12”, with the anthem’s lyrics etched into the verso.
The cut is enthusiastically embraced by France’s underground nightclub scene, and soon starts to circulate throughout Europe and North America.
Club by club, one DJ at a time, the song establishes itself as the soundtrack to a pivotal season in which electronica enters en masse into the mainstream cultural consciousness.
The song, the eye of a perfect techno-cultural storm became an immediate touchstone for a new and uniquely French kind of dance music that foregrounds filtered disco samples and deeply swung garage rhythms.
The song was one of the highest-selling singles of the year in the United Kingdom, where it debuted at number two in August 1998 and maintained the position for two weeks. That same month, the song also spent two weeks atop the US Billboard Dance Club Songs chart.
Back to the future
Now set for a vinyl reissue and available officially on digital platforms for the first time ever, what makes the song endure, where so many other hits of that era have been relegated to curiosity, unkindly treated by time?
Part of it is its timelessness, the sense that it was always-already outside time, a throwback to another generation, and at once a musical imagining forward into a technotopian, post-human future, one in which the mortal body would become just another constituent agent in a sprawling global ecosystem of digitally networked assemblages.
Another part of it is its cool simplicity, its unapologetic stripping away of anything extraneous, with nothing to disrupt or distract us from its modus operandi: to feel good experiencing music together.
Stardust’s Music Sounds Better With You will be released on 28 June 2019, pre-order the vinyl here.
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