Air - An alien lounge party

We are the syncronizers

Send messages through time code

Midi clock rings in my mind

Machines gave me some freedom

Synthesizers gave me some wings

They drop me through twelve bit samplers

We are electronic performers

We are electronics

(Air, “Electronic Performers”)

Humiliated and offended, exiled for a decade as a relic of an embarrassing past (the vacuous, synthetic Eighties), electronic pop was reborn at the court of Versailles in the late Nineties, setting the stage for a sensational comeback.

The architects of this “coup” were two young former students apparently devoted to entirely different pursuits. Jean-Benoit Dunckel taught mathematics, but had studied classical music at the Paris Conservatoire and played for fun in an indie-pop outfit called Orange. It was actually a member of that band, Alex Gopher, who put him in touch with Nicolas Godin, a brilliant architecture graduate ready to set aside ruler and protractor in the name of music.

The two formed Air in 1995. The name is a tribute to the great Swiss architect Le Corbusier, one of Godin's idols, but also an acronym for “Amour, Imagination, Rêve” (“Love, Imagination, Dream”). Passionate about technology and vintage musical gear, the two budding cosmic couriers scoured flea markets for old Korgs and Rhodes pianos, along with various vocoder models. And they plotted a mission that seemed impossible: to use their electronic know-how, honed by listening to idols such as Kraftwerk, Jean-Michel Jarre and Vangelis, to bring back into the light even easy listening, the most retro sounds of their homeland and beyond (Serge Gainsbourg, Françoise Hardy, 60s-70s soundtracks, exotica, chill-out, lounge music), without shying away from getting their hands dirty with everything that, up to that point, had been banned from the indie world (Euro-disco? Space-disco? Yes, even that...). It's a perfect alchemy: Godin's more experimental, electronic approach combines with Dunckel's more classical background, which supplies the crucial melodic touch.

The “Nouvel Beat”

It's not just the amount of sugar that makes the difference between cream and molasses. It's a subtle chemical balance, a precise dosage of ingredients. And Air possess this magic formula, which in a word could be called “good taste”. Even when they flirt with kitsch and easy listening, Godin and Dunckel never sink into the mire of banality, if only thanks to the extraordinary quality of their arrangements, built on a highly original marriage of digital technology and traditional instruments. But above all, Air's music boasts one unique quality: it's “timeless”, impossible to date or to feel dated, precisely because it's entirely dreamlike and detached from reality. “When you're immersed in amniotic fluid, you have no awareness of time, or of where you are. That's what it's like when we write in the studio”, Dunckel explained. 

In 1996 came their debut single “Modular Mix”, followed by “Casanova 70” and “Le Soleil Est Près De Moi”. These are refined, playful tracks, halfway between easy listening and tangy pop à la Stereolab, which already earned Air solid international credibility. Artists such as Depeche Mode and Neneh Cherry recruited them to remix their tracks. Even Jean-Jacques Perrey, the father of “musique concrète”, wanted them by his side.

But 1998 was the year of the real breakthrough: signed to Virgin, Air released their debut album Moon Safari. More indebted to Burt Bacharach, Serge Gainsbourg and Ennio Morricone than to Derrick May or Aphex Twin, the record reworks easy listening through an avant-garde lens, with obsessive attention to detail and intricate orchestration: every instrument is played live, with no sampling whatsoever, and the masterful arrangements would become the duo's trademark. Here, then, are acoustic guitars and cascades of analog synthesizers, celestial voices and vocoders, Moog and violins, Wurlitzer and tuba: the music of this “safari to the Moon” is pure sound in its most gaseous state, stardust with a dazzling melodic appeal. The American Beth Hirsch's sugar-coated vocals blend with strings (recorded at Abbey Road), with trip-hop's slow-motion rhythms, with chill-out inflections and flashes of psychedelia à-la Pink Floyd, painting lush, luxuriant soundscapes.

The opening “La Femme d’Argent” is a gorgeous psychedelic intro, with a sinuous bassline grafted onto a carpet of analogue keyboards, trading lines with the Moog and letting itself be lulled by jazzy languor, breathing in an almost “pastoral” sense of calm. “All I Need” and “You Make It Easy” — the two tracks sung by Beth Hirsch — seal a new kind of dawn-lit soul-pop, steeped in pure, candid sweetness.

Among the recycled seventies sounds, there's the ever-present kraut-rock but also a few Canterbury-scene echoes, tangible above all in the use of certain horns (the flute on “All I Need”, the horns on “Ce Matin Là” and “Le Voyage de Pénélope”).

An electro-dance pulse drives the two singles: the Buggles-esque, almost disco “Kelly Watch The Stars”, a tribute to the most stylish of Charlie's Angels, complete with a nostalgic video resurrecting the prince of videogames d'antan (“Pong”), and the propulsive “Sexy Boy”, almost a postmodern reworking of Bowie's art of the hook: two little vocoder-pop gems that would conquer both sides of the Atlantic.

Romanticism, on the other hand, takes over in “Talisman”, a tender symphony for strings and synths, and in the closing serenade of “Le Voyage De Penelope”, where the Korg's tremolo delivers fresh galactic shivers and the sax carries you off to some smoky Parisian bistrot.

The listener is left trapped in the soft coils of this sound, a kind of spatial lounge-party soundtrack for endless “retroglamour” nights. And in the end, inevitably, surrenders.

“Kraftwerk drowned in strawberry syrup” or “the world seen through the glass of a champagne flute” are just a couple of the quirkier descriptions of Moon Safari, which would sell over a million copies within months, even picking up the Victoire de la Musique for techno/dance album of the year, and would become one of the coolest musical fetish-objects of the Nineties (despite being light years away from that decade's dominant sounds).

This is a comeback not just for a genre, but for an entire nation. Air, in fact, represent the “pop” outpost (tied to the song form rather than the groove) of that French Touch which was conquering the world with vocoder sounds and other trinkets. Leading the charge was a sizeable squad of musicians-producers-deejays: the best known being Laurent Garnier, Daft Punk, St. Germain, Cassius, Motorbass, and Dimitri From Paris. All of them shared an idea of dance music as a mutant hybrid of varied sounds: disco, lounge, electro, funk, exotica, etc. Some of them (Cassius, Modjo, Etienne de Crecy, Saint Etienne) began citing Air themselves as “masters”; the techno-house cousins Daft Punk paid heartfelt tribute (“Digital Love”); and the Versailles duo even had a bespoke musical genre carved out for them, with the unlikely name “Easytronica”.

If the musical significance is notable, the cultural impact is no less so. With the Air aesthetic, a whole seventies imagery buried under layers of dust for the following two decades came back into the light: Ziggy Stardust's jumpsuits, Space: 1999 TV shows, cheap horror flicks, the crackling synths of “A Clockwork Orange”, sticky crystal balls, first-generation video games, colourful lava lamps, and, of course, whole stacks of vintage organs and keyboards.

Sealing this golden moment, 1999 saw the release of Premiers Symptomes, which gathers some of Air's early singles released on Source, such as “Casanova '70”, one of the most romantic peaks of the entire lounge revival, the lysergic trip of “Brakes On”, the eccentric soul of “Modular Mix”, and the galactic pop of “Le Soleil Est Pres De Moi”.

The dark side of the Moon Safari

A year later, the Versailles duo were hired by Sofia Coppola, daughter of Francis Ford and Hollywood's rising star, to compose the score for her first feature film, The Virgin Suicides (2000). Based on the novel of the same name by Jeffrey Eugenides and on a true story that took place in a suburb of Detroit (Michigan) in 1974 (the collective suicide of the five Lisbon sisters), the film is a tragic portrait of adolescence, as well as the first chapter of a sort of trilogy on female solitude that the American director would complete with “Lost In Translation” and “Marie Antoinette”. Air's score is the film's load-bearing structure, crucial in seeping into the folds of its events and sharpening its dreamlike, surreal dimension.

The trickiest challenge for the two French spacemen was landing their gleaming spaceship inside the black hole of anguish without losing the “lightness” of their touch. It's a challenge they won hands down. The key, this time, is the hazier psychedelia of the 70s, the one belonging to the Pink Floyd of “The Dark Side Of The Moon”: Air transplant it into the film's funereal atmospheres, paradoxically breathing new life into it.

Godin and Dunckel surround themselves with an even richer array of instruments. Bass and drums (the latter played by Brian Reitzell) stitch together a relentless rhythm section, pumping blood through the rarefied inlays of vintage keyboards (Moog in particular), while the guitars, always very Gilmour-esque, sketch out murky textures, counterpointed by ghostly swirls of strings.

The overture “Playground Love” is the only vocal track (sung in English by outsider Gordon Tracks), unfurling into one of their typically sinuous, enveloping ballads, with a lovely sax solo front and centre. It's also the only concession to pop songcraft: the other twelve tracks, all instrumental, are conceived in an almost progressive vein, with recurring motifs and themes that ideally track the film's dramatic crescendo. A tension that starts building as early as the second track, “Clouds Up”, essentially Faust's paranoia evaporated into the clouds, and which smoulders beneath the electric guitar riffs of “Bathroom Girl”. “Cemetary Party” is already psychic disorientation: operatic female voices buried in the mix, mechanical beats, barely perceptible organ stabs. After the dense calm full of sinister signals (“Dark Messages”), the inevitable storm gathers (“The Word 'Hurricane'”): the sampled voice rings out aseptic, in a vacuum filled with effects and distortion.

From here on, it's a swift plunge into the abyss. “Dirty Trip”, a stunning six-minute-plus lysergic ride, is propelled by a pulsing bass along a path paved with shrieking, screaming synths, right up to the horrifying final acceleration. “Highschool Lover” — essentially an instrumental version of “Playground Love”, quoting the Floyd-ian “The Great Gig In The Sky” — and “Afternoon Sister”, with its controlled use of Moog and strings, seem to flow placidly, but the guitar detonations and church organ of “Ghost Song” already sound like funeral bells. The house empties of life (“Empty House”) and the discovery of the bodies (“Dead Bodies”) is a terrifying apotheosis: frenzied harpsichords, swirling synths and drumming that rages with unusual fury. The epitaph of “Suicide Underground” — a computer-processed voice narrating the story over a blanket of funereal organs — closes the album on the same note of stunned sorrow that the film inflicts on its viewers.

Never again so dramatic, epic and heart-wrenching, the Air of The Virgin Suicides crown an achievement whose scope not all critics would grasp at the time. If Pink Floyd weren't by now just a lucrative brand name, today, perhaps, this is how they'd sound.

The soundtrack helps drive Sofia Coppola's debut feature to success and contributes enormously to her growing “hype”. But Air don't rest on their laurels, and faced with the choice of returning to the sugary refrains of Moon Safari or developing the atmospheric intuitions of The Virgin Suicides, they choose a third way, no less ambitious.

Do androids dream…

With 10.000 Hz Legend (2001), Dunckel and Godin craft a "solid" and measured album, more exploratory than its predecessor but still firmly anchored to the duo's singular melodic taste. The naive restlessness that has always set them apart is well present within these grooves, which thicken the sweetness of Moon Safari into a whirl of "serious" electronics, scatter a bit of analog gloom here and there, but then bring everything back home with sudden flares of strings and melodies travelling through time.

At the heart of the album is the idea of another planet, full of megalopolises populated by androids. Self-mocking to the point of excess, Air tell tales of Venusian love affairs and implausible situations. The most obvious musical influences are Kraftwerk and Pink Floyd, caught between quadraphonic splendour and the supremacy of machines. The frivolities mixed with honey are reserved for a couple of tracks, namely the instrumental "Radian", with its ethereal harps introducing gentle horns, and "People In The City", which revisits the glories of the past without too much nostalgia.

The rest of the album sets aside the poetics of their ballads in favour of a more mature sound, one that crosses electronic roughness with extremely delicate strings, tension with melody. "The song form, which lies at the heart of the idea of pop, continues to obsess us, but we decided to make it drier, more direct, free of embellishments for their own sake," Nicolas Godin explains about the record. Such is the case with "Electronic Performers", the album's programmatic manifesto, which lays guitar arpeggios over a solid rhythmic base; or "Radio #1", a choral performance with a vaguely kitsch but irresistibly intriguing flavour, built on pulsing keyboards and ending in an unexpected percussive celebration. And it's especially the case with the three closing experiments: "Wonder Milky Bitch", "Don't Be Light" and the less successful "Caramel Prisoner", which pulse with electronics crossed by nervous bursts before suddenly relaxing into mischievously arpeggiated guitars, blending 70s soundtracks and avant-garde, symphonic rock and light pop with a perhaps excessive, but nonetheless pleasant, ease.

The use of technology is dosed intelligently: the electronics are in fact interspersed with acoustic guitars and strings. "The album is a love letter to our machines," Godin explains. "You have to love them to really know how to use them the right way."

There are numerous outside contributions, including one from Beck, who lends his twisted funky touch to "The Vagabond". Finally, credit must go to the production effort and sonic focus achieved by the two Parisians: everything on 10.000hz Legend is perfectly polished and serious, marking a further point of distinction from similar bands tackling similar themes with far less care.

A record that doesn't renew the glories of the "lunar safari", then, but one that confirms the duo's crystalline talent. "Our music is dreamlike, our songs are like dreams, we want to escape reality," Jean Benoit Dunckel said in the early days. Now, however, it's Nicolas Godin who gives the measure of the Parisian duo's new direction: "We've moved from the dreamlike phase to the real one, where the outlines of things have become sharper." 

10.000 Hz Legend cements the band's fame even outside musical circles. Writer Alessandro Baricco, for instance, hires them to score some passages of his book "City". The result is an evocative theatrical production, in which the French duo's velvety landscapes lend new resonance to the narration, and an album (City Reading) that, however, sounds more like an exercise in ambition than anything else. 

Tokyo and cherry blossom

Air's new studio effort is likewise born under the sign of prestigious collaborations. Recorded between Paris and Los Angeles, Talkie Walkie (2004) bears the stamp of Nigel Godrich's production (who had already worked alongside Radiohead and Beck), as well as the orchestral arrangements of Michel Colombier, famous in France for his long collaboration with Serge Gainsbourg. Everything is even hazier and more drawn out: the key instrument of this new phase is a sort of "spatial lullaby", which Air serve up softly from the first track to the last.

In the opening "Venus", the otherworldly voice is wrapped in a carpet of synthesizers and surrounded by piano, claps and a soft little keyboard line. More evocative, if anything, are the dream-pop atmospheres of the following "Cherry Blossom Girl", which is also the single, complete with a video directed by a director of hardcore films and dedicated to American porn star Tracy Lords. Here retro taste takes over, amid twee little choirs à la Stereolab, an acoustic guitar, an exotic flute, synthetic sounds of yesteryear and various bits of whimsy, including sampled voices in the style of Art of Noise.

The game of looped little voices resurfaces in the following "Run", where electric vibrations and increasingly liquid keyboards accompany a lovely vocal overlay that openly quotes 10cc's classic "I'm Not In Love". The disorienting, vaguely industrial ticking of "Universal Traveler" isn't enough to break this relaxed, cognac-lounge atmosphere, amid arpeggiated guitars and sultry female choirs. But if anything, it's "Mike Mills" that marks the record's true high point, and not just for its title, inspired by the New York video director the duo share with Beck and Beastie Boys: Air nail a thoroughbred melody, majestic and enveloping, alongside a piano sonata that crosses the minimalism of Wim Mertens with the most aching moments of Sigur Rós.

The Beach Boys turn into astronauts in the midtempo "Surfing On A Rocket", while "Another Day" is a slowed-down "Sexy Boy". There's also room for a whistle-along tune ("Alpha Beta Gaga"), amid cheerful mandolin strumming and electronic gurgling, and for the descent into the bleak vertigo of "Biological", with streaks of Moog and another mandolin, this time more tense.

The journey leaves us alone in Kyoto, amid light electronic breezes, oriental aromas and the crash of waves ("Alone In Kyoto", the lovely track featured in the soundtrack of Sofia Coppola's second film, "Lost In Translation").

Talkie Walkie makes an ideal backdrop for nighttime car rides or romantic encounters. An enchanted music box that, on the whole, seduces, but occasionally spins its wheels. Perhaps this is also why Jean-Benoit Dunckel allows himself a solo digression, under the moniker Darkel, reuniting with his partner Godin only to co-write and produce Charlotte Gainsbourg's delightful "5:55".

The pop-fresco collection of Darkel (2006) can't simply be filed under mannerism, nor can it be counted among the so-called watershed moments. Still, Jean Benoit shows he has ideas of his own, especially when he tries to carve out a songbook as far removed as possible from the looming Air-style, landing happily on a mellow 60s pop sound. That's the direction taken by the delicate single "At The End Of The Sky" and the sparkling "My Own Sun", closer to the dreamy indie-pop of Austin Lace than to the rarefied interplay of the better-known French touch sound. That interplay, however, does resurface - weighed down by some rather overused clichés - in the Floydian chant of "Pearl", the downtempo chill-out of "Bathroom Spirit" and the atmospheric piano-and-whispers piece "Some Men".

Between these two extremes live kindred inspirations never aired before. That's true of the winning solemnity of "Be My Friend", with its Goblin-like shivers, of the infectious electronic boogies "TV Destroy" and "Beautiful Woman", and of the Røyksopp-esque proto-ecologist anthem "Earth". The hidden gem is the aching lullaby "How Brave You Are", which, though clearly lifted straight from their back catalogue, keeps intact all the splendid innocence of their finest days.

Now in high demand the world over, Air even indulge in the whim of a cocktail-lounge compilation revisiting four decades of pop music condensed into 18 tracks (Late Night Tales, 2006). A move as narcissistic - they're French, after all, we can let them have this one - as it is full of surprises (among them, even a surprisingly "soft" version of Black Sabbath's "Planet Caravan"!).

A pocket symphony

After three years of wandering off the beaten path, Godin and Dunckel return to the Air mothership for a new, ambitious project. A "pocket symphony", born from time spent among different worlds: Japan and composers in the mould of Glass. That means piano scales stealing small spaces, grafted onto an electro-pop cut.

Pocket Symphony (2007) fits conceptually perfectly into their story. Formally, by developing a cue - that of "Alone In Kyoto" - in the manner most natural to them. And substantively, by confirming their knack for crafting pop delicatessen.

Piano lines and electronic drums form the backdrop to the single "Once Upon a Time", a seductive pop-soul blend whispered by treated vocals and arranged with soft touches (with sophisticated dustings of horns and crystalline textures). Equally well-trodden is another path: instrumentals (or semi-instrumentals) built on harmonic progression or the repetition of sonic landscapes. Yet Air still manage to surprise. Take "One Hell Of A Party", an intense emotion entrusted to the voice of Jarvis Cocker: a skeletal sonic base (percussion and a few synths) wrapped in a delicate layer of Oriental instrumentation. The same goes for "Redhead Girl" and its soft piano loop, alternating with ethereal vocals. Further highlights can be savoured in "Napalm Love" and in the melodic caresses of "Somewhere Between Waking And Sleeping" (with an assist from Neil Hannon).

What's left is craft. Sometimes served with great skill, as in "Space Maker": mallets, acoustic guitars and synths sketching out an ever-shifting landscape. Other times less so, as when they linger on the bland melodic solution of "Photograph", suspended without much balance between unease and sweetness. Only once does it turn genuinely atypical, when "Mer Du Japon" leans heavily into Stereolab-scented territory.

Backed by superior class and an authority over the new electro/pop generations that's now beyond dispute, Jean-Benoit Dunckel and Nicolas Godin head into the close of their second decade with a bit of rust on their Moogs, but wearing the smile of someone who's won a bet - and one of the riskiest kind.

The power of amniotic fluid...

The shame is that Love 2 (2009) breaks the spell, settling into a stereotyped, self-indulgent sound - chill-out music well past its sell-by date.

Self-produced by the French duo, the album was recorded at their Atlas Studio in Paris, with a lavish array of analogue gear and support from drummer Joey Waronker. That the hits of "Moon Safari" would be missing could already be guessed from the two singles chosen to preview the album: the sci-fi of "Do The Joy", its robotic vocal wrapped in a B-movie synth melody, and "Sing Sang Sung", a spatial lullaby light years away from the gentle lightness of a "Kelly Watch The Stars".

The rest of the album doesn't stray far from this sophisticated emptiness. Take "Love", the bossa-disco pulse of George McCrae's "Rock Your Baby" anesthetized amid sugary lounge-music sighs, or the equally formulaic "So Light In Her Footfall", where acidic guitars and retro synths pay tribute to England, complete with a quote from Oscar Wilde's "The Canterville Ghost" - not to mention what might be the most ambitious track of the bunch: "Tropical Disease", almost seven minutes of Bacardi-glass electro-psych-jazz assembling sax, piano, xylophone and flute, along with one of the most dreadful lines Dunckel has ever whispered ("Woman/ Make me feel... warm inside"). And the lava-lamp lights can't be switched back on by attempts to freshen up the sound with the syncopated wave of "Missing The Light Of The Day", the afro-exotic pulse of "Night Hunter", or the be-bop languor of a Parisian club evoked by "African Velvet".

Things improve slightly when the pair pick up the pace, as in the kraut mantra of "Be A Bee" - spaghetti-western guitars and a vocoder droning darkly among distorted synths, an oddball experiment but definitely a worthwhile one - or in the propulsive instrumental "Eat My Beat", which sounds like it stepped straight out of a 1960s James Bond film. "Heaven's Light", meanwhile, unleashes a aching melody, while a powerful snare roll builds toward a flourish of keyboards, in an ideal ascent toward the light.

Still, it's impossible to overlook the far too many dead spots on an album that marks the lowest point of their stellar career.

Return to the Moon

Three years on, they're back in the game with Le Voyage Dans La Lune, a work based on the French filmmaker Georges Méliès's eponymous masterpiece and conceived as a soundtrack for the film. A step forward compared to its predecessor. The sense of "sophisticated vacuity" left by the previous record, however, doesn't show up in this new effort from the silver-plated Parisians. The more pop-leaning format of their music gives way here to looser, more fluid writing, less tied to conventional song form, though still fuelled by the dreamy stretches between psychedelia and cosmogony that have elevated them to deities of the electro-pop scene over the last twenty years.

Just over half an hour of music that, as usual, glides along caressingly between Eighties-flavoured synths and floating nocturnal landscapes. Air's trip to the Moon opens with the heavy, acidic stride of "Astronomic Club", before truly taking flight on the collaboration with Victoria Legrand, vocalist of Beach House, a band that owes no small debt to Air. The typically Air-ish piano interlude "Retour Sur Terre" bridges into the spatial sheen — itself a well-worn trope across the Parisians' career — of "Parade". A slow-motion dark orchestration wraps around the docile piano of "Moon Fever", before "Sonic Armada" sees the duo dissolve their sweetness into a psychedelic march that almost verges on math-rock (!). The tremulous mystery of Au Revoir Simone suits the sinister "Who Am I Now?" perfectly. The soft bridge "Decollage" paves the way for the ethereal gallop of "Cosmic Trip". The journey ends with the cryptic ballad "Lava".

Refined chiseling, meticulous flourishes, flawless production. Air once again show off their crystalline class — so perfect it ends up feeling artificial. Then again, this is a trip to the Moon, not the Moon itself: what more did you expect?

Despite being conceived for museum use (specifically for the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Lille), the music shaped by the French duo on Music For Museum is a soft electronic sound that clings to, then slips away from, any context where some form of temporal suspension takes place.

A new lunar landing ("Land Me") introduces us with dreamlike delicacy into the halls of this imaginary museum, followed closely by the evanescent Moog of "Reverse Bubble", which scatters acoustic dandelion seeds across the room. "The Dream Of Yi" travels on almost the same frequencies as "Discreet Music" – albeit in a more accommodating bedroom-electronica mode – but elsewhere there are also echoes of the idyllic "Pavilion Of Dreams" by Harold Budd, aided by wordless vocalizations that are simply melodious vowels.

Next come "Angel Palace", a luminous, illuminating meditation in the vein of Stars Of The Lid, and "Art Tatoo", fifteen minutes of minimal Kraftwerk-like alienation in the form of a joyous short-circuit.

There's no guilt in letting this imaginary visit play in the background. That said, this doesn't diminish its musical – as well as "therapeutic" – value: we credit AIR with the role of custodians of a reassuring memory, of a quiet joie de vivre whose charms more than one listener will find harmless, but which, at bottom, represent the essence of our (negligible?) happy moments.

In the summer of 2016, exactly twenty years after the release of their first single "Casanova 70", Godin and Dunckel tackled their first anthology release. Two LPs (a limited edition also included a third containing various remixes), evenly split: the first featuring the Versailles duo's "historic" singles, the second b-sides, soundtrack outtakes, and unreleased material.

The anthology's tracklist touches on practically every chapter of Air's studio career, with particular emphasis on their very first albums: "Moon Safari" (a full five songs, practically half the album), "Talkie Walkie", "10 000 Hz Legend", and the soundtrack to "The Virgin Suicides".

As for the second LP, it features a few guest spots (Jarvis Cocker and Charlotte Gainsbourg on the ballad "The Duelist", Françoise Hardy on the gorgeous "Au Fond du Reve Doré"), tracks never released on an album but already used as soundtrack pieces ("Adis Abebah"), live versions, an excellent remix of "Remember" courtesy of David Whitaker, and a couple of extracts from old sessions ("Crickets" and "The Way You Look Tonight").

Nicolas Godin in libera uscita: da “Contrepoint” a “Concrete and Glass”

In September 2015, it was finally time for the other half of Air, Nicolas Godin, to step out as a solo artist. Worked on since 2007, "Contrepoint" contains eight tracks that, taking cues from certain compositions by Johann Sebastian Bach and Glenn Gould's related reinterpretations, plunge into retro-futurist territory. Classical music, rock, jazz, lounge, even Latin patterns merge and take turns within the folds of the album. The swift arc of "Orca" winks at Bach's fugues, while on the opposite end "Elfe Man" carries traces of Morricone and light symphonic touches. "Widerstehe doch der Sunde" renews the collaboration with Thomas Mars of Phoenix, while "Quei Due", with spoken vocals in Italian, is an open homage to Gainsbourg, set to lyrics written for the occasion by Alessandro Baricco. Godin's spin-off from Air plays out like an exercise in style in which classical music is stripped of all mannerism and subjected to a (post)modern gaze – a chapter deliberately removed from the logic of the music industry, or what's left of it.

The summer of 2018 found Godin busy scoring the second season of "Au Service de la France". The Versailles-born composer crafted a soundtrack blending the French tradition, in its many shades (chanson, beat, French touch), with jazz and world sounds. The imagery, in particular, is uncharted territory for him, though culturally and environmentally close to home: a sonic backdrop for spy stories that nod to the detective genre, but with a distinctly French flavour, ranging from inevitable references to Peter Sellers's Pink Panther ("Dans la Brume" is far more than a simple homage) to full-on dives into post-war chanson. There's a whole Riviera-esque imagery at play in the languid seaside feel of "Clayborn" or in the sixties beat of "Twist à Saint Germain", with "Les Rues de Paris" settling into the alleys of Montmartre through the melancholic, popular interplay of guitars and accordion, embodying yet another tribute to tradition filtered through the now-unavoidable lesson of Yann Tiersen. The brevity of the tracks (sixteen, for a total of forty minutes) makes them feel more like sketches than a conventional soundtrack, with all the limits and advantages that entails. And while "Au service de la France" has all the air of a parenthesis within a journey only just begun, for Godin it may well prove to be the key to new adventures. In a spacesuit or a tuxedo, does it really matter in the end?

January 2020 saw Godin retracing his steps, both artistically and conceptually. His third solo album is titled Concrete And Glass, literally concrete and glass. Primary elements, undoubtedly essential for building a modern structure capable not only of standing upright, but also of providing a pleasant stay equipped with every comfort. Which is exactly what Godin sets out to achieve on this third studio effort, the one closest in sound to his two decades of spatial wanderings with Air. In every respect: in the synthetic sounds, in the retro-futurism that creeps in with an apparent lack of gravity into the songs' structures, in the subtly introspective, melancholic mood that permeates everything like a trademark. Add to that, dare we say, the rare and singular ability to temper the intellectual component with light, thoroughly sustainable pop atmospheres.

"Concrete And Glass" thus finds Nicolas Godin at – almost – the peak of his powers, a sound architect capable of crafting airy, comfortable spaces marked by warm colours. Qualities that fit songs like "The Foundation" (inspired by Pierre Koenig's Case Study House #21) like a glove, and even more so the gem "The Border", a track that recalls the best albums written four-handed with Jean-Benoit Dunckel. A leitmotif of the record is the presence of guest features, almost always spot-on, as in the ethereal "We Forgot Love" with Kadhja Bonet on vocals, "Time Is On My Hands" with Australian Kirin J Callinan on mic and guitar, and the sophisticated "Catch Yourself Falling" with Alexis Taylor of Hot Chip lending his timbre. The alternative comes via the good old vocoder ("Concrete And Glass", "What Makes Me Think About You"), another defining element of that French touch which Godin himself helped shape and etch into the collective imagination.

"Cité radieuse" closes things out in synthetic layers that dissolve into the jazz veins of the sax, like a futuristic outpost that can't help but retrace its own steps. Which is, in a way, what Nicolas Godin has always translated into music: the urge to keep moving forward, always, without ever giving up looking back - and around. Retro-futurism for discerning palates.

In June 2022, Jean-Benoît Dunckel also released a solo album, his third after Darkel in 2006 and H+ in 2018, titled Carbon.

JB Dunckel is, so to speak, the more sophisticated mind of Air, the one who gave their distinctive electronic compositions that elegant touch which acted as the trait d'union between retro visions and futuristic languor, blended into a swirl of psychedelic sensations, caressing vocals and that damned, unmistakable french touch. On "Carbon" the lush groove à-la Moon Safari is right at home, loaded with synthesizers, strings, harpsichords and vocoder ("Zombie Park", "Sex UFO" and "Space", the latter featuring Heather D'Angelo of Au Revoir Simone), but there's also a strong influence of the kraut-rock of Neu! ("Corporate Sunset") or the more techno-dance side of Kraftwerk ("Dare"), and it holds a substantial amount of lyrical content, far more than one might expect from the co-author of magnetic hits like "Sexy Boy".

It's obvious that Carbon doesn't have the stature to add anything extraordinary to JB Dunckel's distinguished catalogue, and that it's not a mass-market product with strong commercial appeal, but that was certainly never the main intention of the talented musician from Versailles. Rather, it's a solid demonstration of the class and the proverbial refinement of one of the brains behind the French electropop duo, and perhaps the clearest evidence of who was the principal source of the distinctive sounds enjoyed throughout their golden era.

In January 2024 JB Dunckel returned to the scene with Paranormal Musicality, an album made up of 18 solo piano improvisations. Where "Carbon" was set in the synthetic, spatial world of Air's beginnings, "Paranormal Musicality" returns to the root of it all, to the lowest common denominator, to first love: the piano.

Beyond its rather grandiose title, in fact, the Parisian's second solo work is a long sequence of keyboard improvisations (18 tracks, an hour in total) with nothing added. A reduction to bare essentials that the cover - as usual minimal, cast in black-and-white tones - sums up well with a charcoal-style shot of the man himself, dressed in white and barefoot, busy taming a sinuously shaped piano.

Flights, phrasings, ecstatic moments alternate throughout this tracklist of pieces flowing from Dunckel's hands, never so devoted to showing his most melancholic and emotional side, one that in turn demands we tread lightly, letting the notes chase each other freely. A body of work, then, that should be taken for what it is, within the implicit nature of improvisations put down in black and white that may not always strike for the expressiveness of the result, but at times manage to achieve meaningful outcomes ("Playjoy", "Égérie", "Melo Walk", "Sun Stone"...), standing out against the backdrop.

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