How the Blaze’s Emotional Dance Music Brings Listeners to Tears

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/16/arts/music/the-blaze-dancehall.html

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PALM SPRINGS, Calif. — In April, the afternoon after Beyoncé headlined the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival’s opening weekend with an ambitious performance of history and imagination, the pair of cousins who make up the French electronic music duo the Blaze were still reeling, sharing their impressions in English salted with heavy accents and equally heavy romantic sentiments.

“For us French people, we don’t used to see that type of show,” Jonathan Alric said, sitting poolside in the backyard of a late-period modernist home the duo had rented here to work in between festival weekends.

“It’s uncritique-able,” said Guillaume Alric, mellow and slightly dreamy. “So perfect.”

In 2017, the Blaze released its first EP of patient, ethereal electronic music, the visceral and agonizingly pretty “Territory,” which catapulted them from anonymity all the way to Coachella, where they had performed the day before Beyoncé, on a smaller stage.

“We were very lucky to play at sunset,” Jonathan said. “Basically what we wanted to do with our show was to do something with a lot of poetry, that was main thing.”

The desert light, Guillaume added, was “very bright, very pure.”

The Blaze began that performance inside a shimmering box, invisible to the audience. They built up intensity slowly, and revealed themselves partway through, but mostly they looked at each other, not the crowd.

“Our creativity, it’s a bubble,” Guillaume said. “It’s a very strong bubble, and we try not to be perturbated by this kind of celebrity or big things.”

They were at that point on the cusp of completing their full-length debut album, “Dancehall,” which will be released next month. But instead of speaking in intense particulars about sounds and melodies and instruments, they mostly wanted to discuss feelings.

“We really talk a lot about our feelings, about love, family, friends,” Guillaume said. “It’s very good for creativity. When you can look to your friend and you know him, creativity just comes.”

The Blaze’s songs and videos work on these terms as well — epic, rough-hewed emotional landscapes that surge and yearn, pulsing thickly with sun-streaked, blurry edges. It is body music — dance music — but it works subcutaneously, operating on the level of emotion and thought more than movement. In the lineage of heavily exported French dance music, it’s less plastic than Daft Punk, less brute than Justice. And as a contrast to the Red Bull orgy that is contemporary dance music culture, particularly in the festival context, the Blaze are monastic outliers.

Guillaume, 35, grew up in Dijon, in Burgundy, and Jonathan, 29, in Normandy, the Ivory Coast and Peru. Their fathers are brothers, but they were not especially close until about seven years ago, when Jonathan was in film school, and Guillaume was making dub music as Mayd Hubb, inspired by Lee Perry, King Tubby and Mad Professor.

Jonathan needed to create a music video for film school, and asked Guillaume for a remixed version of one of his tracks. They found they had similar impulses, and soon began collaborating formally as the Blaze. (They now live together in Paris with their girlfriends.)

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Their music is architecturally sturdy, borrowing from electro and house, and also florid and misty, taking in some of dub music’s abstractions. “We try to have not too much clean,” Guillaume said.

From the beginning, they gave equal weight to music and imagery. “We were a little bit annoyed to see that every music video is the same, a guy or a girl singing with big cars,” Jonathan said. “We wanted to tell a story, to do something more original.”

Added Guillaume, “And speak about people we don’t used to see.”

First came “Virile,” made for about $100. “What can we do with 100 bucks?” Jonathan remembered thinking. They bought beers, and filmed two friends in an apartment overlooking Brussels. In the video, the men smoke, dance, sing — their interaction is part filial, part aggressive, part crypto-romantic. The conceit is simple, but the effect is overpowering. Shot with stark, nonjudgmental calm, the video has a patient affection that recalls nothing so much as “Planet Earth.” (The Blaze cite as visual inspirations the filmmakers Ken Loach and the Dardenne Brothers, and the photographer Sebastião Salgado.) It’s piercingly intimate, and utterly casual, everyday interactions rendered as dramatic theater.

Jonathan sent the video to Manu Barron, one of the founders of the French dance music label Bromance Records, who was struck by the unusual isolation of their vision. “All these young Parisians, young Londoners, who know everything about everything — the good shoes to have, how to have friends — these two guys were completely out of the game,” Mr. Barron said, calling in from his Ibiza vacation.

“They don’t have any reference, they don’t care,” he said. “They were what I call poetry for me.”

Mr. Barron signed them to the label, and “Virile” was soon followed by “Territory.” The second song suggests longing — it palpably aches — and the video, shot in Algeria, is a virtuosic, microdetailed story about homecoming and alienation, strength and vulnerability, marked by confidently sweeping camerawork. In one mesmerizing sequence, the protagonist shadowboxes in precise rhythm with the percussion. At last year’s Cannes Lions festival, it won the Grand Prix in Film Craft.

When the “Moonlight” director Barry Jenkins first encountered the “Territory” clip, via a Twitter post by the French director Romain Gavras, “I had an experience,” Mr. Jenkins recalled in a phone interview. “When those hands go up on homeboy’s face, I was like, ‘Let me put this on my flat-screen television,’” he said, describing the opening scene, in which the boxer begins to fight back tears. At one point, he had a screengrab from the video as his iPhone wallpaper.

“It’s almost like a ballet in a certain way, the camera is so active,” Mr. Jenkins said. “It’s participating in this dance.”

“Territory” established the Blaze as essential chroniclers of male fragility. “We wanted to talk about what is a modern man,” Jonathan said. “Somebody fragile who can cry and everything, but he can do both, he can be as virile and be honest with his feelings and his emotions.”

On the new album, “Dancehall” — named for the social space, not the reggae subgenre — the Blaze is fully embracing the potential of the body, with music that’s a cousin of the soulful house music of the late 1990s and early 2000s. The sound here builds upon the duo’s older work in two ways: It feels slightly fleeter, and more oriented toward the dance floor, and many of the lyrics have a darker tinge to them. Agony and frenzy are in the fore.

“When we speak about emotion we don’t want to just be positive,” Guillaume said last month, over Skype from France. “Sometimes it’s hard, sometimes it’s easy. Sometimes it can be sad or happy, but finally the more important part is we can find the poetry in it.”

While the Blaze’s following has been small but fervent so far, the intensity of emotion they channel has led to rhapsodic, almost primal endorsement.

“I’ve seen it at least 100 times,” Mr. Jenkins said of the “Territory” clip, adding that he mistakenly thought the duo starred in the video. “There was just no [expletive] way anything about this involves artifice.”

Mr. Barron said that meeting the Blaze was so powerful, it changed the way he approached his work. “I don’t want to produce music for people who buy stuff in a mall,” he said. “People need to have frank projects, not perfect projects. It’s something without any lie.” (The Blaze is now signed to his Animal63 imprint.)

The recurring theme throughout all of the Blaze’s work, in subject matter and aesthetics, is intimacy. It is in the texture of their songs, and is the anchor of all their visual work. Breaking down barriers to feeling and communication feels like their main goal.

“I remember something we discussed at the beginning of the Blaze,” Jonathan said. “We were imagining crazy things. Once we said that we wanted to do some electronic music, invent some kind of music where people can dance two by two.”

Guillaume continued, “To invite people to dance with a kind of human feeling but dance together, left side right side.”

Jonathan said, “It might sound cheesy, dancing with your eyes closed.”

“And feeling the people around you; it’s a little bit cheesy,” Guillaume added. “We don’t want that people just come and watch us and think ‘O.K., great.’ We want people to close their eyes and feel together.”

That’s a parallel for what they do onstage. “We make a hug before the gig and just after,” Guillaume said. “When we are playing live, if I am feeling stressed, I look Jonathan in the eyes, and vice versa, just to give strength. I just have to look my cousin in the eyes, and I feel better.”