There are Sundays like this. Grey and heavy with humidity. Sundays that make you want to stay comfortably at home. As luck would have it, the Enemies decided to take us for a walk an hour outside of Paris. A strange place, the Aérotrain. A kind of railway Titanic, this failed transport had left behind it a t-shaped coffin, its’ tracks. These relics provided a place to make music, perched 10 metres above the ground.
Several years ago, this seemed like the solution to link Paris and Orleans with an express train. Before the conception of the TGV, the high-speed Aérotrain, floating on pockets of air, would have done it in less than 2 hours. I won’t go into the technical details for the reason that it doesn’t much matter anymore. But somewhere, lost in the middle of nowhere, the project’s test section, still in prototype form, is there. An immense concrete slab and a track of several posts are still standing. Where the train of the future was once meant to fly like the wind, there is now nothing but the wind and an inversed t-shaped track over which passengers were supposed to glide. A strange universe, a no-man’s land well suited to the Enemies’ intense sound.
At least the abandoned Aérotrain project could be used for this, our day-long amble along its tracks. We descended to earth, our cars drove away from the site. In the past, the concrete still stands.
- Nat, translated by Tara Dominguez
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