Alan Braxe keeps the window in his studio open at all times, even during the depths of winter. This decision is partly scenic, partly practical. Surrounded by an assortment of drum machines, compressors, and modular synths, he perches at his desk with a vista of Southern France’s rolling green countryside for company. Alongside the occasional bracing gust of wind to wake him up, this enduring mainstay of French house music makes three trips into the nearby village for coffee every single day. On a sunny Saturday in late February, I tag along for two of these voyages, puffing up the hill in a comically rinky-dink car. It’s not that Braxe enjoys being scrunched up against the dash, but with a suspended license, this glorified golf cart is the only vehicle he’s allowed to drive.
Now 50, Braxe—real name Alain Quême—is thoughtful and measured, with a weathered melancholy that he holds close to his chest. He also smokes prodigiously, barely getting through half a cigarette before stubbing it out and leaping to another tangent in conversation. One of his two teenage sons, a keen coder who makes gallant attempts at conversing entirely in English during my visit, chides him for ashing in a glass tumbler over lunch. “I’m divorced,” Braxe shrugs.
In the afternoon, Braxe’s younger cousin Stéphane—better known as fellow French house icon DJ Falcon—joins over a video link. Even at 49, Falcon still carries a skater’s air of insouciance. He’s a little hungover after hanging with old friends in the Parisian electro-set, basking in the anticipatory glow of a grand return that has been simmering for a very long time.
The duo’s new double A-side single, “Step By Step” / “Creative Source,” marks the first instance of Braxe and Falcon releasing a record together, as well as the first original DJ Falcon material in 20 years—an absolute eon for any artist, but especially one in the forever-forward realm of electronic music. “Creative Source” is a thick slab of disco house, all slap bass and cut-up vocals and heavy filtering—a familiar template to anyone who’s ever tuned into a dance music radio station in the past 25 years. “Step by Step,” though, serves up a curveball. It’s the sort of blockbuster AOR anthem you’d hear as credits roll on a John Hughes coming-of-age film—an inescapable hit from a parallel universe’s 1985.
At the center of “Step By Step” is guest vocalist Noah Lennox, aka Panda Bear of Animal Collective, in strikingly full and clear voice. A fan of both producers, Lennox leapt at the chance to be involved. In a separate interview, he says the repetition of the song’s title phrase throughout the verses, chorus, bridge, and coda reinforces it as a hopeful mantra. “It’s a reflection of how much I’ve been inspired by their sampling work,” he explains. “They can find short, meaningful phrases which hang over the whole track and just accrue power.” Lennox’s satisfaction with the end product is palpable. “It’s rare that I listen to stuff that I’ve done or worked on, but I listen to this all the time.”
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As for Braxe, he became infatuated with the handclaps and harmonizing of Animal Collective’s rootsier jams, spotting commonalities with the way he and Falcon work. “It was obvious we shared the same intention and had to make music together.” Braxe is especially interested in how simplicity can trick the mind and cool the listener down into a jellylike state of receivership. “If you build a song the traditional way, you have to be strong in your progression, or else the ear detects mistakes and is disappointed,” he says. “When we focus on loops, you’re not waiting for more, you’re waiting for less.”
The single will be followed by an EP, also called Step By Step, in August, featuring two additional versions of the title track. (There’s a wishlist of house lifers being courted for remixes too; Falcon is particularly fond of Moodymann). A full Braxe and Falcon album is slated for the top of next year, and a reissue of Braxe’s long-out of print compilation The Upper Cuts is due this November, all released on a new breakaway sub-label of indie heavyweight Domino called Smugglers Way.
You’d imagine there might be trepidation from a pair of producers whose most well-known work is older than some of today’s clubgoers, but Braxe and Falcon are brimming with confidence about their comeback. “After the reception we’ve had playing this music to friends,” Falcon acknowledges with a bashful smirk, “we’re now wondering what took us so long.”
For many, Braxe and Falcon will forever be tied to Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter. It was his label, Roulé, that gave them their initial breaks: In 1997 came Braxe’s rough ‘n’ ready “Vertigo,” followed two years later by his kin’s sample-happy EP, Hello My Name Is DJ Falcon. Sandwiched in the middle was a one-and-done collaboration between Braxe, Bangalter, and vocalist Benjamin Diamond, Stardust’s “Music Sounds Better With You,” which has a fair claim to the greatest house track ever made outside of America.
Stardust’s smash hit was an unrepeatable feat—it sold two million copies worldwide, and the trio allegedly walked away from $3 million to make an album. Lifted by a snazzily utilitarian title which chimed with the era’s general vibe of peace and prosperity, “Music Sounds Better” helped soundtrack the hot, unmistakably Gallic summer of 1998. It was when bangers spilled out of Roulé and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo’s sister imprint Crydamoure, Air’s Moon Safari filled the communal air with space-age cool, Daft Punk’s Homework continued to shift bucketloads, and France even won the World Cup on home soil.
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Then Falcon and Bangalter joined forces as Together and had their own run in the clubs with dance hits like “So Much Love to Give,” which bulldozes the path from repetition to delirium using the grand sum of seven words over 11 minutes. Mainstage-friendly house and techno could hardly get more economical than that, which partially explains the scene’s turn towards maximalist grind from the mid-’00s onwards.
Even if they had stopped there, Braxe and Falcon would remain deified in certain circles. Stardust and Together occupy a gilded place in French house music lore, not just exemplary in their own right, but side-projects strong enough to be considered in the uppermost ranks of Daft Punk’s overall body of work—which is to say, really really good.
Yet while Braxe continued a streak of popular nu-disco jams throughout the 2000s beside partner Fred Falke, and has continued to release steadily via own label Vulture Music, Falcon switched lanes and indulged his love of surfing, DJing, and photography instead. He currently resides in the coastal town of Biarritz when he’s not traveling widely with his camera, capturing the flashpoint of social movements. (An anthology of his work, which includes snaps of Hong Kong’s student protests and France’s gilet jaune riots, is set to be published soon.) As a recording artist, though, Falcon is an enigma. Beyond an appearance on Daft Punk’s swan song, 2013’s Random Access Memories, and a smattering of edits for close allies, his career is defined by scarcity.
The cousins have been making music together on-and-off since 2014. Both work with acute precision, building sound libraries from scratch by routing their monophonic synths into the computer to record every tone and texture, before playing chords through them in polyphonic VST samplers. Braxe spends an entire hour walking me through his digitized LinnDrum catalog, which he’s sampled from every great Prince, Michael Jackson, and Donna Summer record—a mirepoix of references to elicit subconscious tingles of pleasure in the listener. They take months to hit upon a sound that a less judicious producer would knock out a decent-sounding clone of in minutes. It’s as if the phrase “step by step” has been tattooed under Braxe and Falcon’s eyelids for a decade, even if Lennox actually came up with the title while he was cooking.
Braxe puts this painstaking approach down to the fact they’re not “especially technical musicians.” Insecurity over their lack of chops means they arrange the optimal conditions for magic to strike instead. “We’re trying to engineer fate, but never straying too far from what we know,” Braxe adds. “This record is our variation on downtempo. The formula for dance music has evolved so far in terms of technically perfect production that we decided to give up on it and aim for sincerity foremost. And once we came to that realization, it was quite freeing.”
That’s not to suggest the new music isn’t danceable, though. “Creative Source,” which employs heavy use of the namesake funk group’s “I’d Find You Anywhere”—also cut up by Kanye West on the Game’s 2007 track “Wouldn’t Get Far”—bumps along just above the 100-BPM mark, vaguely reminiscent of DJ Falcon’s breakthrough “Honeymoon.” It possesses the kind of groove that a more hands-on, EQ-friendly type of DJ will greet like manna from heaven.
On the EP, “Love Me” provides more disco house, riding on a sample of Arnold McCuller’s LinnDrum-propelled funk number “Gringo,” while the foot-tapping “Elevation” is a slinky R&B track with rising intensity in the chorus, featuring Californian artist Sunni Colón, whose voice has previously adorned songs with Kaytranada and SebastiAn. It’s unlike anything Braxe or Falcon have done before.
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A waning sun gives us the cue to wind up. Braxe is getting ready for a trip to Bergen, Norway to work with the pop singer Annie, and he’s only just got back from lecturing on music production to college students over the border in Switzerland, which is contributing to a zonkedness that even three espressos can’t quite fix.
He is, however, buzzing about a sync deal that landed his 2003 collaboration “In Love With You” in a key scene of the recent Sex and the City spinoff show. Braxe proudly walks me through a statistical spike on his YouTube and DSPs, tracing the graph with his finger. “Although we are lucky to have Daft Punk’s success sustaining us, this is very motivating to me, because these people are leaving generous comments without any understanding or association with French house,” he says. “They just enjoy the sound.”
As Falcon slowly recedes deeper into the couch, I ask about the rationale behind his lengthy absence from production, and why now is the time to return. “It’s like having children,” he starts. “You don’t want to have a kid for the wrong reason, right? You need to feel comfortable bringing them into the world and stand by your decision in 30 years time. We’re submerged by exponential information all the time, and I just want to be sure that I’m adding something meaningful to the table, rather than engaging in cultural pollution. We want to have the feeling that we do this for the love of it.”
He draws back and chuckles knowingly. “It’s a cliché, but in our case we prove it.”
