Bluedot Volume1

AIR
coming back to life.” That’s how
Jean-Benoît Dunckel describes AIR in
2016.
This year, he and Nicolas Godin are
“Ghosts
revitalising a project that germinated
when they met as teenage school kids in Versailles in
the late 1980s. After 21 years and seven albums (eight if
you include 2000’s teenager-slaying soundtrack for Sofia
Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides), last month these masters
of heart-prodding electronic music released Twentyears,
a meticulously collated anthology of singles, rarities,
remixes and unreleased tracks.
The pair formed Air in 1995, splintering into a duo after
three years playing in Orange with disco musician Xavier
Jamaux and Alex Gopher, who’s now a house DJ. Dunckel
and Godin had busied themselves with solo projects since
2014’s limited edition release for Lille’s Palais Des Beaux
Arts, Music For Museum, but are now back together and
on the road.
As part of an eclectic interview conducted via email,
Dunckel describes the shows – during which the now
46-year-old pair bob side-by-side behind their keyboards,
triggering twinkling choruses and heady waves of
electronic noise like Venus, Cherry Blossom Girl and Kelly
Watch The Stars – as “energetic”. He adds that they wear
all white onstage too, which chimes nicely with his ghostly
metaphor.
His comparison – and the astronaut-hued outfits –
shouldn’t come as much of a surprise: Air have been
dabbling in space and science fiction since the release of
their 1998 debut album Moon Safari. The video for that
record’s Sexy Boy featured an animated monkey flying
to the Moon. Dunckel puts the duo’s fascination with
galaxies far, far away down to the fact that human beings
are “stardust”, and has understandably fond memories of
recording Air’s most recent album, the first original score
for Le Voyage Dans La Lune, in 2012.
The 1902 silent short, directed lavishly by George
Méliès, charts the journey of a team of astronomers to the
Moon and is often held up as the first ever science fiction
film. “I was impressed because it’s from 1902,” says
Dunckel, “it’s people from another age moving in front
of your eyes.” But he reserves highest praise for Méliès’
“simple magic effects, such as when the characters just
vanish into the background”.
An extra quirk came with the fact that Méliès is
buried close to Air’s Paris studio, but Dunckel’s answer
as to whether that brought them any closer to the man
who made the film is short and simple: “Non.” His
response when asked whether he thinks the band will
draw inspiration from outer space in the future is exactly
the same.
Indeed, Dunckel won’t be drawn on Air’s future at
all: “It’s hard to see the future because it’s constantly
changing depending on the present, which is unstable.”
If these childhood friends are going to hide out in their
wood-panelled studio to cook up an album to follow
Le Voyage De La Lune, you get the feeling they’ll do so in
secret, content to let the intrigue build.
But to pick away at that answer, and many of Dunckel’s
others, is to reveal a portrait of a band revelling in a rich
history, still intent on eliciting feelings from anyone who
listens. Never mind ghosts coming back to life, Air are
exactly where they were back in 1995: lost in their own
world of space and sound.
You started Air in 1995, how did you want the band to
come across back then?
Jean-Benoît Dunckel: We presented the band to the word.
We particularly wanted to explain that we were not DJs
and that we were playing everything.
What are the main things you have learnt about yourselves
since those days?
JBD: That you can’t make omelettes without breaking
eggs, that it’s hard to achieve something without reaching
every goal. I was thinking that I had a blurry vision of
a perfect career but I had a perfect vision of a blurry
career.
Did you have any disagreements over the tracklisting
for Twentyears?
JBD: No the best of was fun to do. It’s an audio travel
in time. It was interesting to see the different turns of the
sound. We mutated, we incorporated more voices, and at
the same time, we started to be more experimental.
Did you discover anything about yourselves while
collating it?
JBD: I understood how right and inspired we were.
The third disc on Twentyears is full of remixes – what are
your favourites?
JBD: I like the Bowie one [A Better Future]. It was impressive
to have a David Bowie song sung a cappella.
You’ve also worked with Jean-Michel Jarre on the track
Close Your Eyes for the 2015 compilation Electronica 1:
what are your memories of that?
JBD: Good memories. Jean-Michel is a friendly, clever
person. We also discovered his studio. It was electronic
pornography. So many keyboards.
You once called your Paris studio a “Star Wars spaceship
with the equipment of Stevie Wonder”. What’s it really
like inside?
JBD: It’s a recording studio full of electronic keyboards
and instruments. There’s lots of wood so it feels like you’re
in California.
What are the biggest changes – musically, personally and
in the environment the band exists in – since you began?
JBD: We spent so much time in the studio and learnt
many recording techniques. But the more I was learning
things the more I thought I should unlearn how to record.
Because inspiration is the most important thing. It’s about
how to translate a feeling.
“Computers are just
tools. It’s just about
capturing the human
feeling through
melodies and rhythms”
Can you describe the connection between the two of you?
JBD: We are very different with a lot of common tastes.
We’re complete.
Do you know each other’s secrets?
JBD: Yes, a little bit.
You’ve previously spoken about having an obsession with
making “timeless” music. Is that still the case?
JBD: We were not into the fashion of music. We didn’t
want to be played in clubs or on the radio. We wanted to
become a cult band, [making] necessary music to make
the people feel high and at peace.
In 2009, you told Pitchfork: “We play the machines
and the machines play us”. How do you assess using
electronic keyboards and computers to make emotional
music?
JBD: Computers are just tools. It’s just about capturing
the human feeling through melodies and rhythms;
I like to record me playing and not program anything.
Also, computers show us some ways of editing music.
Machines play right at the same tempo. Humans don’t.”
How do you want people to react to Air?
JBD: I want people to caress themselves by listening to
our records. But maybe they’ve got something else to do.
I hope they’ll space out.
The Moon, space and travel have often crept into your
work, why the fascination?
JBD: Because we’re stardust, that’s what we really are:
turning on a planet during a short lifetime, and the only
way to feel really at peace is to never forget that
aircheology.com
WITTEN BY BEN HOMEWOOD
PHOTO BY LINDA BUJOLI
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