The best dance music records are often the ones that seem the most basic. Simple tracks built of little more than a few looped beats, melodies or perfectly-pitched samples, which nonetheless convey tension and emotion through subtle variations in each repeated motif.
Intro, by French musicians Alan Braxe and Fred Falke, is a prime example. Released in 2000 on Braxe’s Vulture Music label, Intro samples its refrain from The Jets’ 1985 hit Crush on You, that main hook augmented by crisp sampled percussion and a silky, grooving bassline played by Falke.
The two musicians began collaborating in 1999, but had met several years before during a stint of national service.
Braxe lived in Paris, and by the end of the 1990s had already had global success with Music Sounds Better With You as Stardust, a band Braxe formed for the one-off release with Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter and vocalist Benjamin Diamond.
He had recently released his solo debut Vertigo on Bangalter’s label Roulé, but was in the process of setting up his own Vulture Music label, inspired by the approach taken by Detroit techno icons Underground Resistance.
Having not seen each other in several years, Braxe chanced upon Falke in a secondhand instrument shop.
Falke, who is from Southern France, was forging a career as a session bassist, but a growing interest in synthesis and production had led him to hunt out secondhand gear to kit out his studio.
“Bass was my main instrument but I was also playing keyboards, I had a Minimoog,” Falke explains. “I started to do sessions for DJs, mainly trip-hop, hip-hop stuff. I would go to their place, play the bass on the track, but then they started to ask me, ‘Oh, can you replay this sample?’
“Doing that got me into the electronic stuff, and eventually I started to buy some equipment, like some samplers and stuff. I guess I was probably looking for some used gear when I bumped into Alan in that second hand store.”
The pair decided to try a few recording sessions together in Braxe’s home studio, at the time containing a fairly sparse setup of hardware tools.
“The centerpiece was the SP-1200 sampler from E-mu,” Braxe recalls. “There was another sampler, the ASR-10 from Ensoniq, which is a kind of workstation where you can sample and arrange, and do synthesis with samples. Then there was just a mixer and a very cheap compressor – the Alesis 3630 which is very well known for its pumping sound.
“There was one synthesizer, one multi-effects from Ensoniq – the DP/4, which has phasing, reverb, delays, all in one – and a turntable for sampling. That's it, there was no computer at all.”
Like many classic French house records, the creation of Intro started with a session of crate digging and sampling.
At the time, Braxe would make regular visits to record shops, buying 20 or more records with each visit, primarily from the ‘70s and ‘80s, before returning to the studio to listen and sample. It was during one of these sessions that he happened upon a hook in The Jets’ Crush On You.
“This bit was playing and instantly I felt like, okay, there is something there,” he explains. “This is a sample. It's easy to loop.”
Although the sample itself sets the mood for Intro, the use of the SP-1200 played an important role in the track’s character and tone.
“It has a very specific sound,” Braxe says. “The maximum sampling time you have in the machine is 10 seconds, and you cannot exceed two and a half seconds per sample. So at that time, the strategy to deal with this was to play the record much faster than its original speed.
“The record from The Jets was 33 rpm, so I played it at 45 rpm, thus you save time. Afterwards I detuned it, and when you detune the samples on the SP-1200 there are a lot of artifacts. It sounds very crispy.”
Braxe sampled the hook across four tracks of the SP-1200, sequencing the detuned samples one after another. The drum pattern, created on the same machine, is essentially just a sampled kick drum and a few tuned percussion hits.
With those sampled elements loaded onto a floppy disc, Braxe took the basic elements of Intro to Falke who wrote the iconic bassline.
“The idea was to just modulate [the root note of the] original sample. So, you work out it’s in F minor, and then you jam along,” Falke explains.
"It's all about making decisions and not looking back. You can do that with any kind of piece of equipment. It's just about like, a state of mind.”
“Because the whole thing is just a loop, you want something that you can hear over and over and over again. I love bass parts that you can sing along to. I mean, Billie Jean, or Another One Bites the Dust. All those tracks, they start with this bassline, right? It's infectious.”
The recording of the bass part itself was as unfussy as the rest of the track. Once again, the bassline was captured using a sampler, this time the Ensoniq ASR-10.
“The bass was plugged into the sampler, and that's it,” Falke says. “There was no preamp, there was nothing else.”
Even beyond the samplers, little in the way of effects was used on either the bass or sampled elements. The bassline was run through a Mackie desk, with a little bass and high EQ applied, while the sampled hook was treated with a phaser from the Ensoniq DP/4.
The one secret ingredient, Braxe explains, was the notorious Alesis 3630 compressor.
“It played a huge role in the sound of the track,” he says, “because it makes it really pump.”
The beauty of Intro undoubtedly lies in this simplicity. It is a track made of a few brilliant core elements, with the confidence to let these stand on their own, bringing each part in and out one by one, rightly trusting that their interplay is enough to keep a dancefloor engaged for its five minute duration.
Even by the admission of its creators, writing such a simple dance music track isn’t as easy as it sounds, and it’s a tough trick to repeat, particularly now that more advanced production tools are so readily available.
“I think it's almost impossible,” Braxe says. “I'm very often thinking about that. When we did this 25 years ago, it felt like we had no clue of what we were doing. Even if you were to give us the same equipment now, I'm not the same person. I know how a computer works. I know what you can do with the computer. I know what AI can do. The context is completely different, so I'm not going to interact with that equipment in the same way.”
“A lot of younger artists or producers I'm working with ask me about this,” Falke says. “They might tell me they’ve bought an SP-1200. I tell them it's not about that [piece of gear]. It's a state of mind
“We had those machines back then, and they're great, but it’s just what was available. Most of them were used and cheap. That was the whole point – you were making something that sounds like a record in your living room with a handful of machines.
“So I tell them it's all about making decisions and not looking back. You can do that with any kind of equipment. It's just about like, a state of mind.”
On 20 March, Intro is being reissued on vinyl by Domino offshoot Smuggler’s Way to mark the track’s 25th anniversary.
As part of the release, both artists have contributed their own remixes as b-sides.
“You don't want to change it that much, but you do want to change it,” Falke explains of his remix. “I wanted to get the idea very fast, because that's the way I work, at least in the beginning. The idea was to start from the original bass, and then maybe make it a little bit different, so it's different but has the same flavour. From there, you have this unexpected analogue synth breakdown.”
For Braxe, finding a new way to reinterpret the original didn’t come easily.
“The original is good as it is, so it's not easy to approach this,” he says. “Instead of putting pressure on myself, I took it the other way. Sometimes before going to DJ, I’ll make edits in my hotel room – like very fast edits of tracks on Ableton. I said to myself, Okay, you should do this remix in the same way. Don't think too much. Make it very fast.
“I tried to keep the original intention of this type of music, which is: don't think, just do it.”
Alan Braxe & Fred Falke – Intro (25th Anniversary Edition) is out 20 March via Smuggler's Way
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