SPIRITED AWAY

It began with a childhood vision of heaven. After a lifetime’s exploration, it encompasses self-doubt, superlative sounds and, er, emotional yoga sessions. Gallic post-metal duo ALCEST‘s story is very much one-of-a-kind. Frontman NEIGE gets spiritual…

- Nick Ruskell

Alcest could have been anything, so long as that anything was able to articulate what the young Neige had been seeing in his head. From the age of four, strong, brilliant visions would appear to the future frontman, of a beautiful place – “pretty much what you think about when you hear the word Heaven” – that he would struggle to equate with the real world. Repeatedly, this place would keep coming to his mind, and as he grew into a teenager it began throwing up questions about the nature of life, death and what it is to be human. Questions that his family’s Catholic background couldn’t answer.

“The whole purpose of this band is to speak about this spiritual experience I had when I was a kid,” he says. “It traumatised me and changed me from the inside, because when you have something like that happen, it changes your perceptions of life and death. It makes you wonder, ‘What’s going to happen when I die, and where have I been before being here?’

“The vision was always this vast garden-type place with glowing trees, and I could hear some melody floating in the air. I never knew what to do with it. So, when I was a teenager I decided to create Alcest to talk about it, because words are so limiting. It’s best to play music. I could have tried painting as well. It’s almost the same thing – expressing something that’s hard to put into words.”