Nicholas Bracegirdle isn’t your typical electronic artist. In fact, he stands uniquely tall in a landscape crammed full of four-to-the-floor tweakers and bleepers, the kind who make dull soulless dance music.
But you wouldn’t know Bracegirdle immediately by his name. You would, however, recognise him by his recording name: Chicane.
‘I would say I have a widescreen movie track approach to dance music,’ Bracegirdle recently told OUTinPerth, in the northern hemisphere to promote his new release Giants.
‘In essence, my music has a lot of atmosphere and a kind of melancholia injected into the melodies. It’s a very emotional take on dance music.’
Chicane hit the big time in 1997 with their debut album Far From The Maddening Crowds.
It should have been evident then, with the album lifting it’s name from a Thomas Hardy novel while taking a dig at the crowds dance parties were attracting at the time that Chicane were pioneering something different, something grander, dashed with nostalgia.
‘One of my all time personal highlights was having my first ever Top 40 record, and I mean it went in at number 40 many many years ago, but that was a seminal moment for me,’ Bracegirdle said.
‘It proved not only to me but everyone around me that this was a do-able career. And from there you then can be a Festival Producer: you can’t come out of school or college and suddenly scratch it out of nothing, as such.’
Since then they’ve dropped a further two albums, before releasing a greatest hits album in 2008, something Bracegirdle described as being about ‘drawing a line in order to make something new’, that being this year’s release Giants.
‘The current album, the criteria for it was one foot in the past and one foot in the future. That’s what we did when we started to write it.
‘We’ve been doing it for 15 years and I think we’re still very much “on it†in terms of what’s happening in the credible dance scene. But you do have to take what’s happening around you into your own context so that you are, like, The Emperor’s New Clothes.
‘It’s my first artist album in a long time. It’s an album with reflection on some of my earlier styles and stuff I’ve done before but with a new twist and just reinvented. It’s a blend of the old with the new.’
But what sets Chicane apart is their diligence to the sound.
They make albums, not tracks. They’re about capturing the full sweep of an emotion, not just one physiological reaction. What Chicane creates is neither dull nor soulless but rather well crafted and majestic.
‘Structurally it flows as an album: it has a beginning, a middle and an end.
‘In an era where we are cherry pickers and people don’t tend to buy a whole album, they just pick the best bits, this does actually have a flow to it and that’s really important to me.’
Giants is out now through Central Station Records.
Scott-Patrick Mitchell
