Air

From the futurism of French touch to psychedelia  Floydian  70s all in one go. This is the self-proclaimed “Dark Side of the Moon Safari” by Air. An operation just as daring as the one that had kickstarted their saga in the first place. Another disorienting move, one bound to throw a wary critical establishment off course, which would take several years to grasp the real innovative scope of the fearless Parisian spaceboys. But let's rewind the tape — to stay in analog territory — in an attempt to trace the trajectory of the French duo, straddling the turn from the end of the twentieth century into the new millennium.

Sofia at the Court of Versailles

The “Premiers Symptômes” of the new French revolution appear in 1997, in the form of a daring experiment: the exhumation of electronic pop, reviled at the time, born of the hedonistic Eighties, updated for the end of the millennium — perhaps “with a splash of seltzer-vocoder for an astro-cocktail to be sipped through endless retro-glam nights,” to quote our milestone feature. Humiliated and offended, exiled for a decade as a relic of a past deemed too frivolous and unseemly, electropop was thus resurrected at the court of Versailles, in the hands of Professor Jean-Benoît Dunckel, a mathematician with a musical vice, and his associate, architect-turned-musician Nicolas Godin, soon persuaded to lay down his ruler and protractor in the name of their new mission.

"Premiers Symptômes" is in fact the title of the debut EP by Air, formed in Paris two years earlier. The name pays tribute to the great Swiss architect Le Corbusier, one of Godin's idols, but it's also an acronym for "Amour, Imagination, Rêve" ("Love, Imagination, Dream"). Passionate about technology and musical retro-futurism, the two budding cosmic couriers scoured flea markets for old Korgs and Rhodes pianos, along with various vocoder models. And they contemplated an impossible mission: to use their electronic know-how, honed by listening to gods like Kraftwerk, Jean-Michel Jarre and Vangelis, to resurrect nothing less than easy listening, the most retro sounds of their homeland and beyond (Serge Gainsbourg, Françoise Hardy, 60s–70s film scores, exotica, chill-out, lounge music), and never shying away from getting their hands dirty with everything that, up to that point, had been banished by the indie world (Euro-disco? Space-disco? Yes, even those...).

It's a perfect alchemy: Godin's more experimental, electronic approach combines with Dunckel's more classical training, which supplies the crucial melodic touch. But it's almost a form of madness, in the era of grunge desolation and the sparest indie rock, which had blacklisted any glossy leftover of the previous decade. And indeed, plenty of critics are already sharpening their pens, ready to open fire on the spaceship of "Moon Safari" – the debut album – with their usual lexical arsenal: kitsch, muzak, popmuzik and the whole standard bag of assorted nonsense. Too bad, though, that Air possess the French touch. That is, the subtle balance capable of making all the difference. Just the right dosage of ingredients, et voilà, there's the magic formula, which in two words could be defined as "good taste". Even when they flirt with kitsch and easy listening, in fact, Godin and Dunckel never sink into the swamp of banality, if only thanks to the extraordinary quality of their arrangements. It's a comeback not just for a genre, but for an entire nation. Air, in fact, represent the "pop" outpost (tied to the song, more than the groove) of that very French Touch that is conquering the world with vocoders and other trinkets. Leading the charge, a sizeable squad of musician-producer-deejays: Laurent Garnier, Daft Punk, St. Germain, Cassius, Motorbass, Dimitri From Paris among the best known. All sharing an idea of dance music as a mutant hybrid of varied sounds: disco, lounge, electro, funk, exotic, etc.

Air's music, however, can boast above all one unique quality: it's "timeless", incapable of being dated or feeling dated, precisely because it's entirely dreamlike and utterly detached from reality. Sofia Coppola must have sensed this right away, being both a filmmaker's daughter and a refined music connoisseur, as she would go on to prove throughout her entire career. But when Francis Ford's daughter commissioned Air to compose the soundtrack for "The Virgin Suicides", plenty of eyebrows were raised. Could those two chill-out-compilation pretty boys really capture such dark, dramatic atmospheres? Part of the answer lies in a flash of pride from Godin and Dunckel: "We were worried," they would later reveal to the press, "that people were labeling us as French buffoonery, easy-listening caricatures. We wanted to make something mature." Fans of Morricone and 60s Italian film scores, the pair were also well aware that France boasted a great tradition of film composers. Thus was born the soundtrack to "The Virgin Suicides": a dark work, tinged with a sense of tragedy, yet never sacrificing the purely sensual pleasure of Air's signature refined sound, saturated with analog keyboards and dreamlike atmospheres. Looming over it all, though, is an imposing ghost: that of the band who wrote the rulebook for psychedelia worldwide. "For us, Pink Floyd are a huge influence because we like their artistic approach," Dunckel would tell CMJ New Music Monthly in April 2000. "We're not interested in making a single and getting it played on the radio. We want to make concept albums and stylistically defined records, with a soul."

Conceived during harsh winter weeks in Versailles, amid snowstorms and high fevers, "The Virgin Suicides" would turn out to be exactly that: a concept album with a soul, born, moreover, with its own identity distinct from the film. Godin and Dunckel, in fact, made it a condition of accepting the job that they be allowed to conceive the soundtrack as a standalone album.

Making the undertaking even more complex was the progressive transformation of Sofia Coppola's film itself, as Dunckel revealed to Stereogum: "The first cuts we saw were really dark and deep, so we started making very somber music, like a passage from light to something decidedly darker," he explained. "But, gradually, Sofia also turned the film into a teenage love story." Nevertheless, it should be stressed that "The Virgin Suicides" remains a much darker, more jagged take than contemporary teen films like "10 Things I Hate About You", "Can't Hardly Wait", "She's All That" and "American Pie", which hit theaters between the summer of 1998 and that of 1999. Despite the young, attractive cast set in a high-school context, in fact, the heart of the story remains marked by a bleak sense of predestination. The kinship with contemporary teen movies, then, is only skin-deep, an appealing veneer covering far darker narrative material. In the same way, the beauty of the female leads acts as a screen for their inner pain, just as the reassuring image of 1970s American suburbia masks the suffocating tensions and deep cracks within a disintegrating family microcosm.

An inexorable descent into the abyss

Based on the novel of the same name by Jeffrey Eugenides and drawn from a true story that took place in a Detroit (Michigan) suburb in 1974 (the collective suicide of the five Lisbon sisters), "The Virgin Suicides" (2000) is a tragic portrait of adolescence, as well as the first chapter of a sort of trilogy on female solitude that Sofia Coppola would go on to complete with "Lost In Translation" and "Marie Antoinette". Air's soundtrack is its load-bearing structure, decisive in weaving itself into the folds of the events and heightening their dreamlike, surreal dimension.

The most delicate challenge for the two French spacemen was to lower their gleaming spaceship into the black hole of anguish, without ever losing the "lightness" of their touch. It's a challenge they won hands down, and with full awareness of it. "I think the true spirit of the soundtrack is this fascination with death, and with the idea that, in dying, your spirit might float free and suddenly feel liberated from the earth, from who you are, and from the adult world you actually despise," Dunckel would explain to Dazed in 2015.

The sonic key – as mentioned – is the hazier end of psychedelia, the Pink Floyd of "The Dark Side Of The Moon". Air, who had devoured those languid sounds through years of compulsive listening, transplant them into the film's funereal atmospheres, ideally aligning themselves with the era in which it's set (the 1970s). But another clear reference point is the mature Beatles, whose influence surfaces in particular on tracks like "Bathroom Girl", "Cemetary Party", "Highschool Lover (Theme From 'The Virgin Suicides')", where certain drum fills and shrieking guitars almost seem lifted wholesale from "Abbey Road".

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 ouverture "Playground Love" is the record's only vocal track, with Gordon Tracks (Thomas Mars of Phoenix, Sofia Coppola's future husband) reeling off sensual, unsettling lines like “I’m a high school lover/ And you’re my favorite flavor/ Love is all/ All my soul/ You’re my playground love… Yet my hands are shaking/ I feel my body remains/ Time’s no matter/ I’m on fire”. A languid ballad that unfolds sinuous and enveloping, with Hugo Ferran's beautiful sax solo recalling Dick Parry's contributions to "Us And Them". It's also the only concession to pop songcraft: the other twelve tracks, all instrumental, are conceived in an almost progressive vein, with the reiteration of motifs and themes ideally mirroring the film's dramatic crescendo. A tension that begins building as early as the second track, "Clouds Up" – essentially Faust's paranoia evaporated into the clouds – and which smolders beneath the skin of the electric guitar riffs on "Bathroom Girl".

"Cemetary Party" is already psychic disorientation: operatic female voices buried in the mix, mechanical beats, almost imperceptible organ stabs. After the dense hush of sinister signals ("Dark Messages"), the inescapable 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 descent into the abyss. "Dirty Trip", a gorgeous, lysergic six-plus-minute ride, is driven by a pulsing bass along a path paved with shrieking, howling synths, right up to its horrifying final acceleration. "Highschool Lover" – essentially an instrumental version of "Playground Love", with a nod to the Floydian "The Great Gig In The Sky" – and "Afternoon Sister", with its controlled use of Moog and strings, seem to flow placidly along, but the guitar blasts and church organ of "Ghost Song" are already death knells. The house empties of life ("Empty House") and the discovery of the bodies, sealed by "Dead Bodies", is a terrifying apotheosis: an almost motorik pulse, a hammering piano, frenzied harpsichords, swirling synths and drumming that rages, as the mellotron bursts in with some of the most majestic choirs ever recorded.

The epitaph of "Suicide Underground" – a computer-processed voice narrating the story over a blanket of funereal organs – closes the record on that same note of stunned sorrow that the film inflicts on its viewers.

The role of the soundtrack within the film is fascinating too. While on screen the deaths of the five sisters strike the viewer like lightning bolts, Air's sound creeps in gradually, growing darker by degrees, scattering ominous omens here and there. At times, it even disappears entirely: a substantial portion of "The Virgin Suicides" is in fact completely devoid of music. Interviewed by MTV in 2000, Godin would note that only 4 of the 13 tracks on Air's soundtrack actually appear in the film. Elsewhere, moments of awakening and discovery are paired with classics like "Magic Man" and "Crazy On You" by Heart, "I'm Not In Love" by 10cc and "Strange Magic" by Electric Light Orchestra. So there wasn't just an original score, but also a separate soundtrack, which would be released a couple of months after Air's album. "It's no wonder those virgins killed themselves," Pitchfork would quip about that '70s pop pedigree, at a time when disdain for that kind of sound was still sadly widespread.

But no matter. Even 25 years on, "The Virgin Suicides" remains a stunning film, the sublimation of domestic oppression into dreamlike drama. There's no doubt, however, that the soundtrack contributed enormously to the success of Sofia Coppola's debut feature, fueling its growing hype and ushering in an era of auteur soundtracks that would accompany the American director's entire filmography.

After that feat, Air wouldn't rest on their laurels, and faced with the choice of returning to the sugary refrains of "Moon Safari" or developing the atmospheric ideas of "The Virgin Suicides", they chose a third path, no less ambitious, with the new downtempo experiments of "10,000 Hz. Legend". "Without that soundtrack, we wouldn't have been able to make this record the way we did," they would explain in 2001.

Never again so dramatic, epic and haunting, the Air of "The Virgin Suicides" thus crown a bold and brilliant feat. If Pink Floyd weren't, by now, just a lucrative - and quarrelsome - brand name, perhaps this is how they'd sound today.

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25/04/2026