1/6/2024 0 Comments Les soleol et pres air![]() “I wanted to do just ten minutes of that bass riff, but JB said we should put something else on it,” Nicolas Godin quipped in a RBMA lecture in 2015. The moment that bass line surreptitiously slides in after 25 seconds or so, you know you're in for a kind of space-age retro-futurist-pop journey. But, as ‘La Femme D'argent' proves, not every seven-minute song is an epic.Īir have a gentle touch and used it to ease us into their debut with this super slinky instrumental. Opening your debut album with a seven-minute song would almost always be considered an ambitious move. This makes it hard to choose a song to start with, so we'll just start at the start. Intelligent, but accessible, it crossed over to a larger audience than many would expect – perhaps a case of ‘right place, right time' given the burgeoning boom in downtempo electronica – but has proven to earn its popularity as its songs retain their relevance so many years later. No matter how strong your feelings for this band are, you can hopefully appreciate that this is one of the great pop albums of the 1990s. There's a good chance your first exposure came via their 1998 debut Moon Safari and it's possible this is the only Air album you own. Perhaps they were on the stereo in a café, a bar or at a house party. Or maybe watched the sweet skater love story that played out in the film clip for ‘All I Need'. Perhaps you heard the intriguing space-pop of ‘Sexy Boy' on the radio. Chapter 2 ‘La Femme D'argent’ (Moon Safari, 1998)ĭo you remember the first time you heard Air? If you're new to Air, or you've let your fandom lapse in recent years, here are a few reminders of the genius of this impossibly cool French duo. But the fully-formed, easily digestible grooves of Air appealed to a There are tons of amazing French pop acts who utilise vintage synths and sophisticated pop melodies to set slinky moods and elevate the class levels in any given room. But their best songs – of which there are a staggering amount – remain elegant and exciting, years on from their release. Sure, their latest output might seem second-rate when stacked up against their classic albums. We don't talk about Air enough these days. The music retained the charm of its 60's models but was too peppy for many Air fans, who headed for the lobby.Chapter 1 20 Years Of Air: 5 Of Their Finest Moments Collaborating with Bertrand Burgalat on bass (who also sat in with Air, replacing an ailing band member), she revived the ye-ye style that set out to fuse French cabaret with British Invasion rock: sweet, breathy, mock-naive melodies over a brisk double-time beat. Now, listeners know the unswerving sounds that newer technology would bring.Īpril March, which opened the show, is led by an American singer, Elinor Blake, who's fond of 1960's French pop. Never exactly in tune, the instruments sounded both goofy and oddly vulnerable. The transparent arrangements displayed each keyboard as it joined in: pearly Rhodes tones, nasal melody lines, whistling swoops, breathy chords, buzzing and burbling counterpoint, phantom high tinkles running through tape-loop echo devices. Dunckel sang and spoke to the audience through vocoders and harmonizers, making his voice part of the machinery Beth Hirsh, who sang two gently melancholy encores, was Air's only undisguised human voice. The six musicians were all dressed in sci-fi white, and up to four at a time played keyboards. It was a gizmo-happy concert, as much about the textures as the tunes. Dunckel strumming fuzz-toned guitar chords and Roger Manning letting loose showy synthesizer filigrees, on the verge of progressive-rock noodling. Onstage, however, it let some songs grow more pushy, with Mr. In concert, however, the group shifted toward rock flamboyance and neo-1970's campiness.Īir's songs and instrumentals hark back to Pink Floyd's unhurried majesty, to the serenity of Ennio Morricone's soundtracks and to the subdued bluesiness of some 1970's pop-jazz. On its album, ''Moon Safari'' (Caroline), Air plays stately elegies to an obsolete version of the future, sustaining an unabashedly wistful mood. Like a keyboard version of an early-music ensemble, it took authentic Moog synthesizers, a Fender Rhodes electric piano and a stageful of other circa-1970's instruments to Town Hall on Friday night. ![]() For some musicians, it's a short step from quaintness to nostalgic revival, and analog keyboards have been turning up lately on rock albums.Īir, a band from France led by J.-B. ![]() So fast, in fact, that instruments invented in the 1960's and 70's now sound as quaint to rock ears as sackbuts and clavichords sound next to trombones and pianos. Keyboard instruments have evolved fast over the last 30 years as analog technology gave way to digital programming and precision.
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