Thursday, September 22, 2011

Alan Braxe is some sort of witch

I guess we have been sort of in a nostalgic mood recently. If you can count being sucked into mid 2000's house music nostalgic. I'm just going to go ahead and say, yes, we are being nostalgic and it's fucking awesome.



Before the days of witch house, post dub-step, hazy-core, and chill-wave there was a man in France making dance music named Alan Braxe. Standing six feet, four inches tall, with a face that was easy on the eyes, and dressed to the nines, Alan Braxe stalked the streets of Paris at night haunted by the gifts that God had given him. Underneath his dashing looks and come hither stare was a man being crushed by what he knew and could never un-know.

While the rest of the world in 2005 was knee deep in cheap credit and multiple homes, Alan Braxe was a man who had been given an unsolicited gift. His gift - the ability to make devastating house songs that destroyed space and time and made reality questionable.

The stories are more haunting than anything. When people talk about them you can see a certain haze come over them, they have tendency to stare off into space, their foreheads will start to perspire a little, and they will have a hard time speaking. Legend has it one hot summer night, in one of those clubs in Paris that are underground in a 800 year-old catacomb that you can only get into if you know someone Alan Braxe dropped this song for the first time. Depending on who you talk to details may differ, but everyone will agree - it felt like space and time ceased to exist. People who were there described have feelings of euphoria followed by feeling like their bodies didn't exist anymore. They will swear that people on the dance floor just starting flowing into one another like when water pellets run into other water pellets they make a bigger water pellet. They will describe that for those four minutes they knew for a fact that reality was just a figment of our imaginations' and that nothing really existed and that life as we knew it was a lie.

After that night Alan Braxe was never the same. You can't un-see the things I have seen, he would tell people. He grew pale, he stopped eating, he stopped shaving, and he swore he would never play the song again in public. To this day, if you ask him about it he won't acknowledge the question. The closest he has ever come to talking about it was in an interview he did for an quasi-anarchy zine in Paris soon after reports started surfacing of the event.

"One man shouldn't have this much power - the power to show people the true nature of the world, the true nature of the universe. Space, time, and reality are walls that our minds use to make sense of the world, but now, I believe they are only that - walls. Walls that are meant to be broken through."

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