AIR - MOON SAFARI @ 25

 

Celebrating it’s 25th anniversary today is the debut album from French band, Air, with their Moon Safari, which was released on January 18th, 1998. It came along at a time when much of the electronic music movement dwelt on darker and stranger atmospheres. Popular music in general seemed angrier and more aggressive with the state of alternative rock leaning more into a deranged heavy metal and hip-hop mining the “gangsta” vein. Air seemed to come out of the blue with a pristine, euphoric and magnanimous world view, bringing breezy melodies and uplifting harmonies to their take on downtempo music.

The duo from Versailles, consisting of Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunckel, came together as architecture & mathematics students, respectively, at the École nationale supérieure d'architecture de Versailles. Before forming Air in 1995, they played together in a band called Orange. Initially making a name for themselves doing remixes for other artist in the mid 1990s, the group released the EP, Premiers Symptômes, in 1995 before recording their debut album.

While grounded in downtempo grooves, Moon Safari encompassed many divergent influence and styles including: electronica, space pop, dream pop, progressive rock, chill-out, trip hop, ambient, electronic pop and space rock. In many respects, the album touches on a lot of nostalgia, but somehow manages to cast that sentimentality into a projection which feels forward looking and futuristic. This music manages to sound ahead of its time while propelling itself off of so many historical reference points. The group used a massive amount of vintage electronic gear to help create that sound and achieve the effect of both being grounded in the past and traveling into the future.

In 2008, a tenth anniversary edition of the album was releases which was housed in a deluxe book bound case containing two audio CDs, one for the original album and a second for remixes and live versions, and a third disc, a DVD including a documentary on the band and all the music videos from the album. Its legacy has remained intact as a signpost to possibilities and hopefulness.