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Robot voices. Jokes. The ‘Greek’ element. Beck. How
Air built ‘10,000hz Legend’ – the world’s
first concept album without a concept
The tape begins to turn. The On Air sign door illumates in bright
red. Pulsing analogue bass rolls across the audio spectrum like
fog, a snare drum crackles in, and three years after the Moon Safari
terminated, a detuned robot voice uploads the opening track from
Air's 10,000 Hz Legend into the world. The group who articulated
most acutely the subtelties of human emotion with through the diodes
of redundant technology: "We are the sychronisers," the
robot voice declares, "Sending messages through Midi timecode/Many
chords ring in my mind/Machines give me some freedom/Syntheseisers
give me some wings/The drop me through 12-bit samplers/We are electronic
performers..." The lost-in-space sounds swirl on, the voice
calmly finishes, "We are electronics."
***
A sunny day in Paris in Spring. Through the lobby of the Hotel
Lutece in the 6ème arrondisement and into the sombre wood-pannelled
bar where a clean-shaven man behing the bar polishes glasses and
the old couple collapse after their lunch.
Here come the electronics, cunningly disguised as men. Nicholas
Godin appears first, trailing a scarf suspended from his mop of
dark ginger hair, down past his tight faded Levis to his beige
All-Stars. One of France's bestselling music exports, he cuts an
instantly forgettable figure, more man at busstop than multimillion-selling
pop star. Then Jean-Benoit Dunckel arrives in an over-long white-leather
biker jacket, shell-toes and a tricky fringe with a tendency to
flick across his elfin features. JB sits down with a twinkly smile
and promptly apologises for the sunshine and blue sky outside.
There is some disquiet in the Air today. JB and Nicholas haven't
done an interview for two years, and as they emerge from creative
hibernation of an album recording, an uncertainties of the exterior
world replace the securities of the studio bubble. So… the
new album: 'How Does It Makes Your Feel' - a lyrical declaration
of massive love articulated in a husky computer voice so full feeling
its only reasonable to respond with tears - is brilliant.
"C'est pas de la merde," JB judges, almost grudgingly.
'It's not a shit song.'
***
IN the space of an hour today three different people mention Pink
Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon. Wherever they've visted in the past
two years - Los Angeles, Versailles, and probabaly the furthest
reaches of their imagination - the new installment of the voyage
is, they enthusiatically and ceaslessly repeat, "a trip".
It's clear that their relationship with the capricious muse has
matured considerably, and '10,000hz Legend' demonstrates the same
deepening and broadening, not to mention off-into-the-audio-cosmos
adventuring that makes Daft Punk's brain-scrubbing 'Discovery'
an equally diverting 'trip'. Compared to '10,000hz...', much of
'Moon Safari' was just Air going through their Westlife phase:
it is heavier, darker, sillier, more haunting; by turns it dips
into an ocean of blues, rockets aways on celestial choirs, settles
down into genteel guitar musings, shudders with rickety bassline
generators and expresses an enormity of feeling in 56 varieties
of robo-voice.
Two singles will be released fom the album: secondly 'People In
The City', a rich, airborne suite of folksy chords bullit carrying
a bird's-eye picture of the metropolis and her citizens, observed "moving,
watching, working, sleeping/driving, walking, talking, smiling'.
But firstly, there's 'Radio Number One', a comment on/tribute
to the power of Frequency Modulation rendered with the effusive
hi-fi sheen of The Beatles "Revolution". It features
the lyrics, "If you need some fun/some new stereo gum/Radio
Number One/Brand new ears at once/eject musical trash," But
it's a brilliant for another reason, the manner in which, two-thirds
of the way through, the voice of a radio DJ descends from nowhere,
and promprtly beings improvising around the melody, stopping just
shy booming "Greeeaaatttt! The new single by Air..." and
introducing the traffic report followed by the weather.
What do you define as 'musical trash', apart from just about everything?
"A lot of music is horrible," Nicholas offers diplomatically. "By
making this music, we eject musical trash and make brand new music."
"This is a manifesto against the international karaoke. The
music you hear everyday at the radio. The industrial phenomenon
of music."
Beyond this, Air are finding that encapsulating the essence of
air is as easy as bottling fog. They'd hoped to a double playback
session with labelmates Daft Punk, to compare notes and trade compliments,
but busy schedules have thwarted this. So far, they have been likened
its 11 tracks to "a tree".
In actual fact, it's a penetrating development of on Air's anti-gravity
ementional maximalism. But now, Nicholas is saying, it's like the
Millennium Dome's Body Zone, of all things. "You go in...
it's all craziness," he decides, enthusiatically windmilling
his arms across his torso to indicate humans passing through a
body. It's also like "a book", adds JB, the more intense
of the pair "with many well-built songs and we wanted to just
have the impact on the people, we wanted that the listener to undertsand
that the album is extreme, with no limit in imagination. The concept
is unconscious," he stipulates. "I mean, it's in the
word >10,000 Hz Legend<.'
What is the concept?
JB: "Aaah... We don't know yet."
N: "We are looking for it."
There is a pause.
Nicholas: "In fact there's is no explanation for a lot of
things. It's just, go in the studio and record… you don't
stop."
"For 10,000hz Legend we want to change the sound for two
reasons, "explains JB. 'One, if you don't change, you will
die as artists. Two, we consider that the music is a sort of god
and a god who always knows what is your will and purpose. Music
is an offering: if your always give the same thing, he won't protect
you. We want to please the god. We can't lie."
That sounds a bit... Greek.
"The album is a little bit... Greek."
In fact Air's music has never needed much in the way of explaining.
If Air never made another record, what they'd done so far would
probably be enough: definitely sufficient to grant these 30-year-olds
immortality, canonised alonside Burt Bacharach, Lennon & McCartney
and Brian Wilson as writers who articulated the sound of love,
loneliness, and longing; certainly enough to provided the world
with one more instant Zen-on-a-CD classic to file next to Isaac
Hayes' 'To Be Continued', Scott Walker's 'Scott Four' and the Beach
Boys’ 'Pet Sounds'. With the ambition and talent to reach
beyond the lazy strictures of trip hop, loungecore or any other
mirco-genre they at first appeared to inhabit, Air always did have
more in common with Brian Wison than Portishead's Geoff Barrow.
One of Air was an ex-architecture student and the other a ex-maths
teacher, both adept in the study of form and forumula. When Air's
debut album 'Moon Safari' was released in 1997, JB and Nicholas
were already on the precipice of fatherhood, but still enchanted
by the dreams a youth tuning in to the FM left them with. Back
then, they formed bands, and got more girlfriends than their friends
as a consequence. However, they were committed to the idea of music
like most people are committed to the notion of breathing. JB took
lessons at the Paris Conservatoire, and on a daily basis practised
rigoruous études at the piano. It was, and remains, apparently, "a
sexual need" of his.
In 1997, Moon Safari had become the apex of a slow-burn career
which began two years earlier. Initially, Air were smuggled into
Britain under the guise of trip-hop producers signed to France's
Source records. The likes of James Lavelle tuned in early to 'Modulor
Mix', an instrumental track built on woozy analogue washes, recalling
the experimentalism of of Jean-Jacques Perrey, Pierre Henry and
Claude Denjean that was dance music's in vogue sound at the time,
as well heavy-kitsch incidental music from Star Trek. Then, 'Casanova
70' aroused attention beyond dancefloors by virtue of an arrestingly
beautiful euphonium line seemingly plucked from between Burt Bacharach's
own heartstrings.
While their countrymen were busily redefining dance music according
to an aesthetic of their own, Air appeared to be moving futher
from the dancefloor and into a nebulous zone characterised by the
fusion of evocative cinematica, artisan songwriting and easy-listening,
all appropriated without descending into a hell of irony. Once
Daft Punk had opened dance's music Anglo-French dialogue with 1996's
terse exposition of filter disco, 'Homework', Air's 'Moon Safari'
opened for business in 1997.
By the time it arrived, 'Moon Safari' was unanimously voted a
classic, an album for everyone for all time. The Seventies retro
sophistication in which Air came packed - Mike Mills' dreamlike
video for 'Kelly Watch The Stars' and the album cover's Camper
van with wings - was just the start of the let's-just-lounge epiphany.
'Moon Safari opened a portal to sowmehere sunnier, happier and
less cynical: their own youth, to be specific. With the faint homoeroticism
of the gurgly "Sexy Boy" to one side, the taut, opiated "All
I Need" to the other, 'Moon Safari' was nebulously cinematic
and instant all at once; unconstrained by the pop song format,
but irresistibly poppy; derived from the same root as dance music,
yet more apt to elicit tears than any urge to get down. Exhibiting
Air's anti-gravity cool like a gyropscope centered amid the chaos
of twentieth-century sound, 'Moon Safari' soundtracked a thousand
fashion shows, a million dinner parties and an unquanitifiable
number of private psychedelic salvations.
The name, furthermore, seemed so ergonomically correct for the
bluesy, full-of-wonder sweep they conjured from oboslete synths,
rudely basic acoustic guitars and crackly old studio technology.
While Daft Punk's earthbound oblivion disco stomped its way further
into the dancefloor, Air took the opposing direction and bid the
world come the float among the cirrus clouds, the stars and somewhere
beyond.
***
UNDERSTANDABLY, Air now have no clue how they managed it. In it's
construction as in its final incarnation Air's second album proper
differs significantly from the first. In the interim, the soundtrack
to Sofia Coppola's 'Virgin Suicides' - which was less an indicator
of a developing sound than a barometer reading of the esteem in
which US style brokers viewed this European exotic twosome - was
'a try; a chance to try things," says Nicholas. "For
a film you look at the images and it tells you what to do. For
an album, you start from nothing."
The Nothing commenced early last year and lasted for six months.
Tarcks were made without the standard procedure of demoing, whereby
artists make rough audio sketches to be fleshed out into songs
later. They spend time in LA and located a new studio in Paris,
away from their native Versailles. "We just need a place to
be," Nicholas asserts. "We can record anywhere, in any
studio." There were five months of recording, and then a final
month, they explain, just to spend a few more the record company's
francs.
Much of the time was spent in company. Evidently Enchanted by
a Sixties aesthetic of the creative process, key to achieving the
correct "vibe" was an assembly of players marshalled
around a sole conceptual starting block: that they didn't want
to make 'Seventies kitsch music". Joining drummer Brian Retzel,
Beck's bassist Justin Meldal Johnston and guitarist Roger Manning,
then, were the "crazy people" - Beck among them - instsructed
to dance, sing, hit things and generally makes a fuss awaiting
the arrival of The Music.
"We wanted to make a sort of big band on the album, like
a crazy people being all together," Nicholas explains. "We
wanted to increase the family of Air. And Air is more some soul
and spirit, a concept of music. It's not about the people who were
on the album."
It transpires that all this was engineered in expectation of a
creative constipation which never arrived. They had been terrified
in case they weren't able to repeat Moon Safari, since Air share
the magical dreamer's unswerving conviction that music is lightning,
and themselves merely the conduit - which can be enormously frustrating
when they are relesase schedules to be met. "Since the beginning,
we are manipulated by strange force in everything that we do," says
JB, with total certitude. "We don't know where it comes from.
That's why it's very scary..."
"We arrived in the studio to do some improvisation and this
is what came out," says Nicholas. "It scares me sometimes.
I scare myself. Because we are are just the transfer," mulls
Nicholas. "Just a box to receive the idea."
And when the music spoke, they became electronic performers, diversifying
the vocoded voices on 'Moon Safari' into a new cast of robo-dialects.
For an album packed with songs, JB and Nicholas's voices are scarcely
ever there to hear, instead buried in deep-pile harmonic arrangements
percolated through modulating effects.
What's wrong with your own voices? 'Nothing. It's just... pudeur,'
Nicholas shrugs, meaning 'modesty’. "Since the beginning
we used electronic voice in a emotional way, not in a cold way," say
Nicholas. "This is the trademark of Air. When we started using
vocoder, four years ago, it was like angels' voices, not robot
voices. We use machines to play human voices. Because we prefer
to go out dressed than naked,"
Humans pretending to be robots pretending to be humans... During
the recording of '10,000hz Legend', Air listened to lots of Serge
Gainsbourg alongside Radiohead's 'Kid A', Mr Oizo's 'Analogue Worms
Attack', Phoenix's 'Untitled' and finally, tons of Kraftwerk. It
shows. Concurrent with Daft Punk's full-time morphosis into space
invaders, it's only as electronic perfomers that Air now feel able
to operate, as silicon intermediaries between the music God and
his or her people. It works best that way, JB explains, because, "when
you play the keyboard, you can feel the currents going into the
keyboard and all the message its sends through MIDI cables..." JB
muses, vision fixed in the middle distance, thoughts somewhere
else entirely. "It's coming into your mind and you are part
of the machine and and the studio and you feel good and it's all
about that, and love, and how it's cool to feel all these messages
that you send to the machine.'
'Now, my favourite musical instrument is electricity," says
Nicholas, with, appearing for a moment as if he means it.
***
SO here is the Brand New Music. JB describes 'Radio Number One'
as "a sort of pop song; you can play it on a guitar and sing
the melody - that's very pop. We wanted to do simple thing: to
make the emotion get in the ear of the people." On the 'The
Vagabond', co-written with arch psuedo-profundist Beck, that translates
as a loosely funky meditation from the porhcfront of loneliness.
On 'Don't Be Light', it means a pounding space-rock odyssey that
could be Hawkind if it weren't so polite. Sounding like nothing
less dramatic than Zeus descending to earth through parted clouds,
the 70-piece choir and string section which kicks the track off
is so magnificently pompous it's practically comical. The song,
apparently, is a stinging critique on featherweight modern culture:
"We don't know exactly what it means," JB mulls, all
quizzical and unsure. 'It's a sort of criticism on the consumer,
because they buy everthing light: the food is light, you have to
be light in relationships.'
'People eat light chips,' Nicholas helpfully nods.
'Just... don't be light, you know?' says JB
Getting in the ear of the wider public this time around evidently
involves a decidedly un-Air jokes and surrealist larks deployed
across the album, notably on "Wonder Milky Bitch" (random
line "she came to me with her muddy boots/she destroyed all
my carpets"). A twangy, Jew's harp-led "cowboy song",
it is meant to evoke tumbleweed-strewn emptiness. With a title
closely reminsicent of Chef's 'Chocolate Salty Balls', it's possibly
more suitable for a ditty about confectionery. However:
"It's about bitches," smirks JB.
'Sex,' Nicholas beams. 'Blow jobs!'
"We have discovered a lot Lee Hazlewood,' explains Nicholas,
'and this is like a Lee Hazlewood fantasme of whores and whisky." As
for the 'milky' part, JB mirthfully explains 'It's a very obvious
image. You will understand when you know it is about blowjobs.'
Considering they articulated weighty emotions more fluently than
for ages, Air new's peurility comes as a surprise. A shock even,
when "How Does It Make feel" achieves its final, soulwrenching
climax and gets truncated by a female voice chirping "I think
I should quit smoking", a propopos of nothing. While 10,000hz
Legend is informed by a kind of non-philosophy - it relied on the
some nebulous force from above guidance - JB and Nicholas are filling
gaps by cracking gags. This time around, you suspect are not taking
their own seriouness very seriously.
But there's good reason for this. Distance learning being the
principal skill of France's brightest sparks - Daft Punk and then
reinvented Chicago house without ever leaving Montmarte, Phoenix
willed themsleves into the bodies and minds of Hall & Oates,
- Air's current Serge Gainsbourg-meets-Rolf Harris and his Stylophone
incarnation owes as much to their as their assiduous appraisal
of Cleese, Palin et al as to their careful study of music's 'greats'.
In the space of a 60-minute album, Air become electronic performers,
space travellers, chronic sentimentalists, lysergic dreamers and
existential cowboys, an experiengce that's divinely comic and the
thrillingly tragic all at once. '10,000hz Legend': it's just a
greek phase they're going through.
'Really, I think, most of the band here don't take themselves
too seriously. Music is more fun,' grins Nicholas. 'You know, we
have always been Monty Python fans.' •
© Kevin Braddock 2000
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