“Slow motion music.”
That’s how Jean-Benoit Dunckel characterises what his band Air creates. And if you’ve heard anything by this crafty French duo, which also includes Nicolas Godin, you know what he means.
In songs like Cherry Blossom Girl and Playground Love (from Air’s soundtrack for 1999’s The Virgin Suicides movie), Dunckel and Godin use breathy vocals and vintage-synth tones set at drowsy tempos to conjure a lush atmosphere of intrigue and seduction.
But Dunckel’s phrase also describes the pace of Air’s activity: The duo is making an unhurried return to the stage after years away.
The group wasn’t silent during that period. In 2012, Air released Le Voyage Dans la Lune, an album of songs designed to accompany a restored version of Georges Melies’ century-old silent film of the same title; two years later, the duo was commissioned to compose music for a French museum.
But after touring consistently since 1998, when Air released its hit debut, Moon Safari, the musicians were ready for a break — “to just enjoy life in Paris,” as Godin said, and also work separately on projects outside Air.
Absence, though, made le coeur grow fonder.
“The songs maybe had enough time to grow, and suddenly we were missing playing them,” said Godin. (Not coincidentally, there was also a new Air anthology, Twentyears, to promote.)
Dunckel said he liked the idea of coming back and doing festivals as a way to expose younger audiences to “real music”... music that’s played, he specified, not programmed — at a moment when many events are populated by guys standing behind laptops.
Indeed, there’s some irony in the fact that one reason DJs now rule the festival scene is the huge success that Air’s pals in Daft Punk found while Air was lying low.
Asked what he thought of Daft Punk’s embrace by American listeners — and Grammy voters, who named 2013’s Random Access Memories album of the year — Godin struck a philosophical note.
“If you want to be successful, you have to write big hit singles to get on the radio,” such as Daft Punk’s smash Get Lucky, he said. “But then you depend on that. It’s a lot of pressure.”
In contrast, he said, he and Dunckel were always aiming for timelessness — “songs that will stay forever” — over currency.
Right now the musicians have no plans to record new music as Air. But evidence suggests the old stuff may have met their goal.
In footage posted on YouTube of Air’s performance at the recent Outside Lands festival in San Francisco, fans can be heard cheering the deeply mellow Playground Love as excitedly as though it were the latest high-energy Top 40 jam.
“It’s always surprising to me to see that an entire crowd can sing along with a song that’s really slow,” Dunckel said with a laugh. “I mean, like, super slow.”
