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propelling itself off of so many historical reference points.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.
