Flying bird fell when it’s all o

Once he started the music—flinging up his right arm, while his left hand worked the decks to bring it flooding, then crashing in—the crowd in the hall could not resist. Caught up with him, they would shudder, pulse, sway, dance, then go “completely apeshit”, pumping their arms, buckling their half-naked bodies. He usually viewed it from above, a seething mass of sweaty shoulders, whiplashing hair and imploring hands, cut into sections by laser lights or masked by drifting dry ice. Relentlessly the oontz-oontz-oontz-oontz of a bass beat, Avicii’s signature, took them over. Wildly happy, his mostly millennial worshippers left the world behind.

“Taking them on a journey” was what he felt he did—a skill that led him to perform for gatherings of thousands all over the globe, headlining the festivals of electronic dance music in Europe, America and Australia, becoming a staple in the glitzy EDM nightclubs of Las Vegas, playing the Hollywood Bowl and electrifying the close of the World Cup. The energy of his music could carry ravers anywhere. Like the nerdy clerk in the video for “Levels” (2011), his breakthrough hit, his fans could dance crazily round the office in a perfect storm of paper. Or like the plump, fed-up girl in the video for “I Could be the One” (2013), they could be wafted to a paradise island full of feasting, fun sex and rides on white horses along the beach. Forget desk-drudgery, crashing banks, Middle Eastern wars. They could be there.