FEATURE:
Sexy Boy
Air’s Moon Safari at Twenty-Five
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THERE are some classic albums…
IN THIS PHOTO: Air’s Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunckel in 1998/PHOTO CREDIT: Paul Bergen/Redferns
turning twenty-five this year. Perhaps the first one to have a big birthday is Air’s Moon Safari. One of the most impressive debuts of the 1990s, the French Electronic duo released Moon Safari to the world on 16th January, 1998. The album was re-released on 14th April, 2008 to mark its tenth anniversary. I will get to a review of that re-release. I wanted to bring in a feature about the album just before a couple of positive reviews. I remember Moon Safari coming out in 1998 and, as a then-fourteen-year-old, it was unlike anything I had heard. With notable songs like Sexy Boy, All I Need, and Kelly Watch the Stars, this album is going to endure for decades to come. A top ten success in the U.K., it has not aged at all and still sounds incredible. To mark its twenty-fourth anniversary, udiscovermusic.com told the story of Moon Safari:
“Leave it to the French to turn retro-leaning lounge music into space-age scores. Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunckel achieved just that, announcing their arrival with their debut album, Moon Safari by Air “French band” on January 16, 1998.
Labeled an electronic act, Air was light years away from their Gallic contemporaries Daft Punk. Instead, they crafted the perfect post-club soundtrack with dreamy, spectral soundscapes, and a jazz-like sensibility that washed away all memories and substances from the night before.
This new incarnation of “chill-out” music in electronica was also decidedly analogue, a study in contrasts that felt both nostalgic and futuristic at the same time. Armed with old Roland drum machines, vintage synths, a Rhodes piano, and even some bongos, Air oozed 60s kitsch. Some likened it to camp, others an homage, but to a young audience who didn’t grow up going to key parties and listening to Francis Lai, it felt wonderfully exotic and revolutionary.
Before they became purveyors of ambient pop, Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunckel were just two students from Versailles who worshipped at the altar of rock in a country that was historically blasé about the form. They played in an indie band in university before forming Air and released two EP’s in ’95 and ’96 that ended up on their Premier Symptomes compilation. Blending Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson samples with trance music, the duo already proved themselves masters of mood, but it wasn’t until Moon Safari where they showed their chops for pop craft as well with the singles, “Sexy Boy” and “Kelly Watch the Stars.”
With the exception of artists like Serge Gainsbourg, Johnny Hallyday, or Jean-Michel Jarre, not many French acts had been able to crack the international charts, but in the mid-90s, downtempo acts such as St. Germain, Daft Punk, and La Funk Mob were reinventing the French music scene and people were taking notice. As Godin recently told The Guardian, “Before we came along, French pop was synonymous with Sacha Distel. I hated it. But electronic music meant you could make cool music without being a rocker.”
Arriving during the swan song of Britpop, Moon Safari instead embraced theatricality, with its vast symphonic arrangements that borrowed equally from Burt Bacharach as it did from Pink Floyd and ELO. When it came time to record, Godin and Dunckel took a cue from their muses and recorded the string sections at the legendary Abbey Road studios with noted arranger David Whitake, who’d worked with everyone from Serge Gainsbourg to France Gall, The Rolling Stones, Jimmy Page, and Sylvie Vartan. In contrast, the rest of the record was recorded on an 8-track machine and purposely retro gear, not only for aesthetic purposes but also to challenge the duo musically.
Starting a record with a track that has a 7-minute plus running time is a bold move, but “La femme d’argent” is the perfect opener for the sonic odyssey that is Moon Safari. Beginning with soft rain over the Blaxploitation sample “Runnin” by Edwin Starr, it builds into an exquisite musical montage that proves you don’t need a bass drop to feel catharsis. This electronic crescendo is then quickly followed by the album’s breakout single “Sexy Boy” that single-handedly relaunched the vocoder into pop culture along with their other hit, “Remember.” But Moon Safari is not all android disco a la 70s Herbie Hancock. Two of the tracks including “All I Need” and “You Make It Easy” feature American singer-songwriter Beth Hirsch, whose honeyed vocals float over the acoustic and ambient lounge arrangements.
From the galloping bass line of “Talisman” to the tuba solos of “Ce Matin La,” Moon Safari is a mosaic of retro references and yet Air never limits themselves to just references, instead they create their own universe and a soundtrack to a movie that never existed. That’s what happens when you get two studio obsessives with a love of astrophysics and staying in. Moon Safari is the ultimate armchair exploration, all you need is a shag rug and decent speakers.
Following their debut, Air quickly became a critical darling worldwide and was praised for putting French pop back on the map and yet reception in their home country was not as enthusiastic. Moon Safari peaked at No. 21 on the French album charts and No. 6 in the UK. They were similarly a massive success stateside, landing a US tour, ad placements, remixes, and glowing reviews. Just a year later, they were scoring the soundtrack to Sofia Coppola’s tale of 70s suburban ennui, The Virgin Suicides, with their atmospheric opus.
Now 20 years later, it’s clear how Air profoundly changed the cultural perceptions around not only French music but electronic music in general, pushing the boundaries of both to create something wholly unique and often replicated in the decades that followed”.
Recorded between London and Paris from April to June 1997, Moon Safari is one of those albums from the 1990s that people know but might not rank as one of the best. So astonishing was the decade, there is pretty tough competition! I think that Air’s marvellous debut is among the best from the decade. Jean-Benoît Dunckel and Nicolas Godin created a masterpiece of an album. This is what AllMusic said in their review of the beautiful Moon Safari:
“Although electronica had its fair share of chillout classics prior to the debut of Air, the lion's share were either stark techno (Warp) or sample-laden trip-hop (Mo' Wax). But while Air had certainly bought records and gear based on the artists that had influenced them, they didn't just regurgitate (or sample) them; they learned from them, digesting their lessons in a way that gave them new paths to follow. They were musicians in a producer's world, and while no one could ever accuse their music of being danceable, it delivered the emotional power of great dance music even while pushing the barriers of what "electronica" could or should sound like. (Never again would Saint Etienne be the only band of a certain age to reveal their fondness for Burt Bacharach.) The Modulor EP had displayed astonishing powers of mood and texture, but it was Air's full-length debut, Moon Safari, that proved they could also write accessible pop songs like "Sexy Boy" and "Kelly Watch the Stars." But it wasn't all pop. The opener, "La Femme d'Argent," was an otherworldly beginning, with a slinky bassline evoking Serge Gainsbourg's Histoire de Melody Nelson and a slow glide through seven minutes of growing bliss (plus a wonderful keyboard solo). The vocoderized "Remember" relaunched a wave of robot pop that hadn't been heard in almost 20 years, and the solos for harmonica and French horn on "Ce Matin La" made the Bacharach comparisons direct. Unlike most electronica producers, Air had musical ideas that stretched beyond samplers or keyboards, and Moon Safari found those ideas wrapped up in music that was engaging, warm, and irresistible”.
In 2008, PopMatters reviewed the new release of Moon Safari. They were definitely impressed by the fact it has not aged or been surpassed in that decade. As I said, it is an album that is still remarkably fresh to this day:
“Ten years later on, there’s still no album that sounds quite like Moon Safari. It is as evocatively light and dulcet as its namesake, alarmingly sensual, profoundly kitsch, and singularly beautiful. Air’s breakthrough masterwork gets the deluxe treatment for its 10th birthday. That amounts to three CDs, including the original master, a long player of bonus material, and a DVD of Air-related material directed by Mike Mills (Thumbsucker), including the documentary Eating, Sleeping, Waiting & Playing.
Upon its release in 1998, it seemed certain that there would be droves of imitators following in the billowing smoke of Air’s hazy wake. And yes, there were plenty waiting in line in the waning days of endless chillout room compilations, but none could ever grasp the same pan-stylistic sonic portmanteau that Air’s Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunckel molded in their colossal proto-prog, moog-lounge, plastech soul jazztronica. Even Air themselves never attempted to repeat their definitive moment, for better (2004’s Talkie Walkie) or worse (2001’s 10,000 Hz Legend).
Yet Moon Safari, as atypical and retro-gazing as it was, came about as a product of its era. The world was ablaze with kitsch sampledelia hot off the critical fawning over the Salvation Army eclecticism of Beck’s Odelay. Soon, the music press was discovering, uncovering, and lofting adoration upon Stereolab, Cibo Matto, Cornershop, Fantastic Plastic Machine, Thievery Corporation, etc. Indie-pop’s obsessions began to converge with the dance community’s, and vice versa. The music of the past was beginning to take on a new light and the new French band Air were more than willing to shoot an ironic wink towards the dusty spindles of music’s former space age bachelor pads in pursuit of its melodic treasure map.
However, the French “band à part” were set apart by their recalcitrant resistance to the authority of the breakbeat, the gold standard of ’90s music. The drums of Moon Safari are commendably unfunky, and often so minimal as to be practically utilitarian and metronomic alone, as they often were for their spiritual forefathers in Kraftwerk.
Those Teutonic pioneers are commonly mentioned in the same breath with Dunckel and Godin, and perhaps there’s a good reason for that. Both artists are interested in extracting warmth from machinery, but Kraftwerk’s clangor arose as a reaction to German Post-War reconstruction and the possibilities it presented. It was also a pre-punk counteraction to the communal vibe of the naturalist, commune-based hippy music being made by their psychedelic peers, a taut and perfectionist exercise in absolute studiousness.
Air’s music, on the other hand, came about during the height of commercial culture, as pop began to eat itself, when the new architecture was to build anew from the trash heap of yesteryear. 1998 was a time that couldn’t even conceive a return to nature without looking like a John Zerzan/Ted Kaczynski-style lunatic. The primitivism that supercharges today’s freak-folk movement was beyond fringe for the newly interconnected global village. It was passé. Air, then, had no need for the Kling-Klang, but they were equally as fascinated by Florian Schneider’s flute on Ralf and Florian as they were by his synthesizer on Radio-Activity. They felt equally thrilled by the sensual strings of Isaac Hayes and Serge Gainsbourg as by the deep chord sinusoidal keytars of ELO.
For all their allusive ties to the day’s reigning hipster cognoscenti, Air, unlike their peers, always felt oddly comfortable on the girls’ shelves in The Virgin Suicides alongside Todd Rundgren, 10CC, and Styx. Their score for that film, though hardly their most consistent work, seemed nevertheless appropriate because Moon Safari had such a dull AM radio sheen to it, such as when “Ce Matin La” flexed its day-glo Ibiza warm pads beneath Burt Bacharach-style trumpets. Beyond the already pejorative chillout, Air’s music could justifiably be classified as something far more egregious: soft rock. Easy listening. Certainly intended more for space cadets than yuppies, Air’s music is vivacious, dynamic, and weird, but so mellow that you’d need to fill up a room with pillows and valium to bring yourself down to its level.
Album opener “La Femme D’Argent” is so floaty and mysterious that you hardly notice the sugary organs tripping out to where the sidewalk ends. After chutes of starry piano, distant moans, and persistently cool basslines bring you to the eclipse of consciousness, the tempo switches up a few BPMs with some precipitating cymbal taps whose mild torrent seems to promise a highly theatrical and bombastic finale to the tension. But rather than crescendoing into an M83-style burst of energy, Air seamlessly wind the song back down to just the main melody and a series of hand claps and finger snaps. It’s miraculous that they can get away with such a mood shift, but they do, amicably. Such is the mellifluous majesty of Air.
“La Femme D’Argent” and its lack of climax gives way to the dark electro-ribbits of Air’s most well known song, “Sexy Boy”, a minor hit in Europe that even received some airplay from MTV around that time, back when they were known to play music videos in their regular programming. In the documentary included on the DVD, Godin reveals that he wanted “Sexy Boy” to elicit the same kind of disorienting sensation as the one brought on by the appearance of the man from another place in Twin Peaks. To Air’s credit, it is a demented pop nugget, equally homoerotic and androgynous, menacing and erogenous. “Sexy Boy” alternates between light, feminine, amorous verses and a dark, gently brutal, faux-masculine chorus. Like all of Moon Safari‘s vocal tracks not sung by Beth Hirsch, “Sexy Boy” is delightfully transgender, transcending sexual boundaries by being tantalizingly alien, appealing to GLBTQ, hetero, and beyond.
Likewise, “Talisman” is undeniably seductive, but perilous as well. It’s like Jerry Goldsmith conducting the Love Unlimited Orchestra. Its atmosphere is perhaps best exemplified by its inclusion in Doug Liman’s Go. As a tantric three-way gradually builds steam, the room literally ignites around them and fire envelopes the scenery. Air tactfully place wild slides and howling synths in the backdrop as if to subtly sound the alarm. It’s love under duress, but passion that simply can not be bridled”.
A happy upcoming twenty-fifth anniversary to the dazzling and truly beguiling Moon Safari. Such a wonderous album that I fell in love with when it came out in 1998, I still have the same affection all these years later. Go and listen to the album if you have not heard it before. Moon Safari is definitely one of the greatest albums…
EVER released.