Moon Safari

Official Review

Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunckel recorded their debut album in the suburbs of Versailles, building a sound that deliberately recovers the aesthetic of 1970s French library music, analog Moog synths, and soundtrack-style easy listening — a vocabulary considered outdated at the time, which Air revives without irony or forced citation. The duo works almost entirely with vintage synthesizers (Mellotron, Rhodes, ARP), handled with an almost minimalist rigor in sound selection, avoiding the density typical of late-'90s electronic production. La Femme d'Argent opens the album with a synth bassline repeated for over seven minutes, over which keyboards and field recordings gradually stack up, while Sexy Boy — the single that brought the duo international success — layers a vocoded vocal melody over a minimal groove, as ironic in its lyric as it is seductive in its arrangement. Kelly Watch the Stars and Talisman work along the same principle of sonic smoothness, while New Star in the Sky (Chanson pour Solal), dedicated to Dunckel's newborn son, closes the album on a more intimate, less ironic register than the rest of the record. The connection to the CCRU here lies in the method of recombination rather than in thematic content: Air takes sonic fragments from a specific era — yé-yé France, B-movie science fiction, documentary library music — and reassembles them into something that didn't exist before, an imaginary 1970s France filtered through turn-of-the-millennium electronics. It's the same principle of cultural recombination that sonic fiction theory applies to Afro-diasporic electronic music: fragments of the past treated as raw material to construct a future (or, in this case, an alternative past) that never existed in that exact form. Moon Safari remains the album that established Air as a reference point of the late-'90s French electronic scene, alongside Daft Punk (already featured in this catalog), helping define what critics would later label the "French Touch."