Alan Braxe is a singular musician with a rare and restless spirit. His penchant for composition and melody commenced at an early age, with classical training in clarinet and cello. Braxe developed an omnivorous appetite for music in his adolescence, devouring everything from Alexander O'Neal to Heaven 17 and Public Enemy.
At the end of the 1980s, techno and house music arriving to France from the US captured Braxe’s fascination, and he became a regular fixture in the embryonic rave scene in Paris. Before long, Braxe was producing his own viral strain of dance music using only a mixer, a compressor, and an Emu SP1200.
Within a year, a handful of Braxe’s early demos attracted Thomas Bangalter’s attention, and Braxe’s debut single, “Vertigo”, was released in 1997 via Bangalter’s influential Roulé label. “Vertigo” was a hallmark of the emerging French Touch sound, and Braxe, Bangalter, and childhood friend Benjamin Diamond decided to join forces for a collaborative project. That project would be called Stardust, and their 1998 single “Music Sounds Better With You” — which they wrote and recorded in one week — arrived as an instant dance music classic, selling over 3 million copies, and earning the trio a canonical spot in the electronic music constellation.
Never content to sit back and relax, Braxe in 1999 inaugurated his own record label, Vulture, releasing collaborations with the DJ and producer Fred Falke. He also remixed for a diverse crew of artists both popular and underground — a who’s who list of innovators that features Beyoncé, Test Icicles, and Ford and Lopatin. Over the next two decades, Braxe’s production credits swelled to nearly 100 influential titles.
Approaching the 20th anniversary of Stardust’s smash success and the Vulture label’s launch, Braxe again takes a radical turn in method. He strips his studio of all things digital, and starts to experiment with a Buchla modular synthesizer, echoing his first setup’s minimalism. The results of these trials are simple, sparse, and stunning — sprawling anamorphic vistas of ecstatic analogue electronic sound. The first four tracks will be released as an EP via Vulture in the autumn of 2019.
