I first encountered The Blaze about two years ago at my childhood friend’s apartment in Barcelona. We were probably binging music videos in a Sunday haze when she turned to me, wide-eyed, and said “You need to see this one.” We slouched toward her laptop, turned her minute speakers to the maximum and watched as the wake of a ship crossing the Mediterranean filled the screen.
We were looking at Territory, the first viral hit of a mysterious electronic duo of French cousins. In the video, a young man lands in Algeria after what seems like a long time away from home. He hugs his relatives, tearfully overwhelmed; he dances, entranced, blunt in hand, in a rooftop overlooking the bay of Algiers. He boxes against the wind in a rundown alley, and runs bare-chested with his pack of male friends towards the waves of a neglected city beach. Wrapping it all up is an evolving, melancholic beat sprinkled with French-accented, half surreal lyrics: “There’s no place like my home since I was born / When I was young / The flavor is so strong / I’ve missed it so long.”
My friend assured me that the story was real, that it was all part of a weird documentary-techno experiment, because, she reasoned, the emotion was too genuine to be fake. I was willing to believe it. The whole video is an outburst of testosterone, nostalgia and raw emotion — the three elements that undergird The Blaze’s creative world.
Today, the small but fierce fandom The Blaze gathered even before launching their debut album, Dancehall, last November, has grown enough to win them American tours and features in the New York Times. But at that point there was only one other video of theirs out there, which I ceremoniously binged-watched. Virile, produced with a budget of $100, featured two male friends dancing and smoking and chilling in a one-room apartment in the midst of a conglomerate of high-rise buildings. The video opens with a quote from Nat King Cole: “You call it madness, but I call it love.” The result shows a neglected truth that other Blaze videos would further explore: friendship can be as intense —and erotic!— as romantic love.
Virile also proved that the duo, formed by DJ Guillaume Alric and producer Jonathan Alric, doesn’t require a huge budget to achieve their goal. Which is to capture the vitality in these rare sparks of life that occur in moments of grief, loss, longing or communion. As Guillaume told the New York Times: “When we speak about emotion we don’t want to just be positive. Sometimes it’s hard, sometimes it’s easy, but finally the more important part is we can find the poetry in it.” The protagonists of their videos are taken straight out of a Dostoevsky novel: they’re emotional and unconstrained, or as Austrian writer Stefan Zweig defined them, “febrile itinerant characters […] endowed with an indecent and fanatical longing to live.”
Well, if that definition doesn’t apply to the crowd camping, dancing and smoking under a massive tree in Heaven, I don’t know what does.
Queens, their last video, brings it all together: the grief, the passionate friendship (even though, as one YouTube user noted, the nature of the protagonist’s relationship is ambiguous: are they siblings? are they lovers?), the coastal landscape where dusk seems to be perpetually falling. The “indecent and fanatical longing to live.” The main characters are women, but that’s irrelevant: everyone in the Blaze universe seems to be inhabiting the androgynous state of mind better illustrated by Virginia Woolf.
My friend Jac described Queens as “insanely beautiful.” After I forced her to watch all of the remaining videos, she texted me, “Watching the Blaze videos honestly make me want to live life more intensely.” She was ready to join the cult.
In interviews, the cousins have said that their project goes beyond producing breathtaking videos. And they certainly bring their intense, unironic character to their live shows. Last November, I went to see them in a former warehouse somewhere in East Queens. They performed an audiovisual spectacle that involved music, projections, lights and smoke, but I can’t describe much because I gave up on any journalistic pretense. I spent the whole time dancing, thoughtless and intensely happy, as everyone around me, including the hyperactive Algerians with whom I ended up partying in Brooklyn like there was no tomorrow. Just like in a video by The Blaze.
PHOTO: The Blaze in Queens, November 2018. By Anna Pazos.
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