The French touch sound, machine by machine

Alan Braxe, born Alain Quême, starts with three objects. A twelve-channel Mackie mixer, an Alesis 3630 compressor and an old Casio sampler, the FZ-1.

He is twenty-five, has just failed his degree and finished military service, and gives himself one year before looking for a real job.

He learns to sample on that Casio. Then comes the E-mu SP-1200, the machine he says he will never sell.

Ten seconds of memory, and how you spend them

The SP-1200 samples ten seconds in total. Braxe says that is where he learned the thing that stayed with him: ten seconds are enough for a whole track, once you decide how to spend them.

Three seconds for the drums, the rest for loops and vocals.

You can make an entire album with these machines, a mixer and a hardware compressor.

This is not collector’s nostalgia. It is the constraint that shapes the record: when the memory runs out, the drums have to come from somewhere else, and that decision is audible.

What is inside “Music Sounds Better With You”

The track comes four months after Braxe’s first single on Roulé, Thomas Bangalter’s label, and it was recorded in Bangalter’s studio with Benjamin Diamond singing.

The starting loop is sampled from a 1981 Chaka Khan record, “Fate”.

And that was it, he says. That is the entire list.

Listen while you read

The compressor that made a scene’s sound

The Alesis 3630 is a cheap rack compressor, and Braxe used it for ten years to squash sounds well past the reasonable and get the pumping everyone recognises.

In the 2009 interview he says it with some impatience: everyone knows it is the typical French sound, and he has had enough of it. The problem, he explains, is that the compressor decides how he mixes. He already knows everything will be crushed in there, so he hears the mix in those terms.

It is the most honest sentence anyone has written about the sound of a scene. It is not a taste: it is a machine conditioning every decision upstream of it.

What they decided not to do

After “Music Sounds Better With You” the trio cut another five or six demos as Stardust. They were never released, and the decision was deliberate: better for that name to stay a single record.

Braxe says success came too fast and that Bangalter and Roulé shielded him from it. Then he went back into the studio to keep learning.

The method, as he summed it up twenty years later, fits in one line: take things away. Kick, snare, hat, bass, a pad, and you are done.