The Quest For Frisson

It was a Saturday night and I was taking a shower while listening to Big Fish radio featuring David Guetta.

I was scrubbing my back and legs, preparing for a night out in town, when suddenly a song played and I said to myself: "Wait... What is this song?"

I fell into a trance. There were no words to describe how it felt, how the music took me higher and higher, deeper into my subconscious, evoking emotions, memories of things that have happened, and those that are yet to happen.

Roger Ebert describes these moments with the French word frisson: something English has no exact equivalent. It is a brief intense reaction, usually a feeling of excitement, recognition, or terror.

I call these wow moments and these moments become rarer as you grow older. Our threshold to be shocked, amazed, or be wowed steadily rises as we see more and more of the world. But the quest never ends: the search for frisson: whether in food, or art, or music, or literature, or love. Especially love.









Here is the song Beatport says "got all the ingredients of a summer festival smash."

"We are not going home
We're phazing
A million miles away."