Air

The evening sky above Florence is still draped in a luminous blue-green, when Nicholas Godin and Jean-Benoit Dunckel, better known as Air, take the stage. They're two black silhouettes cut out against the sky, dressed with Kraftwerk-like restraint, minimal in their movements like people who create electronic sounds for a living. Our collective hypnosis begins with the two keyboard chords that open "Venus": this is the "Talkie Walkie Tour", with Air presenting live a markedly pop album, one that was received rather coolly and, just as coolly, awaited in concert. On one hand, that's a good thing: the crowd isn't glued to the barrier, has no preconceptions, hasn't come here to dance. They seem curious, hopeful of being surprised, and, why not, moved. They don't have to wait long. The second track is "J'Ai Dormi Sous L'Eau" from "Premiers Symptomes", an album released after "Moon Safari" but which is essentially made up of outtakes from Air's golden era, when they made dreamy, soft electronic music built from swelling keyboard carpets, retro vocoders, and gorgeous bittersweet melodies, vaguely nostalgic, vaguely nouvelle-vague. "I Slept Under the Water" becomes a slow, poetic accompaniment to the darkening sky, as the wind picks up and the stage's red LEDs light up, and I start to suspect this will be a night unlike any other. They play the faster tracks from "Talkie Walkie": "Alpha Beta Gaga" with its whistling, and "Surfin On A Rocket", stripped down by the basses to create a strange, almost disorienting, almost theatrical effect: the vocals seem to be recited over music that can barely be made out.

Suddenly we feel a little worried about how it will translate live, but there's no need… They've brought along a long-haired guy at the mixer and a Black drummer who's a marvel, unfazed even when he switches to electric bass, and "People In The City" delivers the full power that made it the best single from "10000Hz Legend", with a surprise in the finale: a frantic chase of electric distortions courtesy of an unlikely synth wizard named Jean-Benoit Dunckel, who from this point on will make his performance the most psychedelic I've ever witnessed. Maybe it was the charm of the Piazzale Michelangelo setting, or the wind sending smoke rippling through the stage's hypnotic lights, maybe it was a particularly well-chosen setlist, or maybe it was what I'd had to drink beforehand, but "La Femme D'Argent" and "Playground Love" sound lysergic, modular, as perfect as a light show, not to mention when Godin pulls out the vocoder and gives us a version of "Le Soleil Est Prés De Moi" that surpasses the original. "Dark Side Of The Moon" doesn't come to mind only for me, which says everything about the astonishing effect of these songs live.

Then Jean-Benoit dedicates to us "beautiful girls down here", a track like "Run" (described as "a love song") with his thin, caressing voice in the verse, and in the chorus distorted and looped into a wall of keyboards that could easily be a choir of night nymphs. The French duo takes a bow, not before stirring up the crowd with the soft, vocoder-drenched house track (yes, it used to be called that, and Air were once compared to Daft Punk and Cassius) "Kelly Watch The Stars" (we were all, absolutely all, dancing with our noses turned up to the sky with Kelly), but soon we're right back out there.

Godin picks up the electrified acoustic again, and asks us if we've seen a film called "Lost In Translation". A roar. "Alone In Kyoto" is followed by another gem from "Talkie Walkie", "Biological", which, I have to say, is the definitive anthem to love in the new millennium: "Some skin/Billions of genes/Again its you/XX XY/That's why it's you and me/Your blood is red/It's beautiful genetic love". The last track is clearly the ace up their sleeve: "Sexy Boy", and there's no need for me to go on, since you can easily picture the rest for yourselves.

It seems the concert is over, everything goes dark. But no, the square LEDs light back up for a track announced as "hot". It's "Le Voyage De Penelope", the closing track of "Moon Safari": psychedelia according to Air, wonderfully digital, alluring, starry; not ethereal and elusive, but liquid and at the same time as catchy as a pop song. Applause breaks out, the psychedelic light gets swallowed up in the synth's perverse distortions, and we don't know whether to watch that exceptional knob-twiddler (that's the word for someone with a sharp ear who delights in pressing buttons and turning dials to manually tweak digital sounds) Dunckel, or the drummer's overwhelming solo, who puts on a show for a good minute before taking the applause he deserves. For a moment I picture the Grateful Dead (!) and the whole Summer of Love brigade passing before my eyes, but then thankfully the spotlights go out and the vision disappears.

We head off, I'm on the back of the scooter, eyes firmly closed the whole way, and it's naturally a moonsafari.

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