Love is in the Air

Air are touting their new album as a ‘rebirth’. Paul Sullivan chats to Nicolas Godin about their brand new studio, growing wise and how – despite their best efforts – they can’t stop sounding like Air.

It was ten years ago that Nicolas Godin and Jean-benoît Dunckel drifted on the scene with their coruscating, cockle-warming debut Moon Safari. As inaugural albums go, it was quite the sonic statement. The prevailing downtempo sound at the end of the nineties was still defined by introspective, sampladelic trip hop acts like Massive Attack, DJ Shadow and UNkLE. Then suddenly, here was this pair of elegant, floppy-haired Frenchmen with a sound every bit as life-affirming and breezy as their name suggested.

After a decade of urban music that reflected anomie and angst, Air’s music-for-reveries came as an enlightening experience, allowing us to indulge in a little romance and some gentle escapism for a while. Ten years and several albums – The Virgin Suicides soundtrack, 10 000 Hz Legend, Talkie Walkie, 2007’s Pocket Symphony – on, the duo are back with a fifth album that sees them move (or at least try to) away from the trademark ethereality that has made them such a household name. The new record, intriguingly, is called Love 2.

“It was time to start a new love story,” explains Godin. “We felt Pocket Symphony was the end of a cycle. When Moon Safari exploded 10 years ago, we travelled a lot and met musicians and producers, singers and songwriters, collaborated and had lots of side projects. We wanted to get back to the feeling of being in our bedroom, back to that intimacy. I have a lot of nostalgia for those early times and it felt right to start something new. So we built our own studio and took all the kit we’d assembled over the last 20 years and went crazy.”

Some of the key differences with creating Love 2 include the use of a spanking new Paris studio (they’d previously recorded in rented places) and the avoidance of big name guests (Beck and Jarvis Cocker have been collaborators in the past); the only other person on the album aside from themselves is drummer Joey Waronker, who does a stellar job of supplying extra swing and groove. The other notable difference is the absence of their regular producer, Radiohead / Zero7 don Nigel Godrich, which must have been quite a leap for the band. Was Godrich’s presence and input sorely missed? “I miss him as a human being and a friend, and for sure many things could have been better,” laughs Godin, “but that was not the point. This was about rediscovering the essence of the band. It was important to make a record for ourselves, and ask ourselves along the way: “Why do I want to do this? Why would I want to make a record right now?” These kinds of questions don’t depend on a producer or anyone else, they depend on your heart and mind.”

The net result is that Love 2 does sound a bit like a break from the old routine, especially after the mega-mellow Pocket Symphony – but not that much. True, opener (and single) ‘Do The Joy’ sounds fresh and invigorating with its loping, krautrock rhythm and heavy Moog action. And there’s extra weight and funk in tracks like ‘be a bee’, ‘Eat My beat’, and the DJ Shadow-esque ‘Night Hunter’. “It’s the most upbeat album we’ve done,” asserts Godin, “which is a direct result of the new freedom we found. We just don’t feel like making slow music any more, maybe because we’ve made too much of it. The last album was influenced by Eastern styles, more Japanese or oriental music. This one is more located in the equator, in South America or Africa. It’s a return to the roots, but on the other hand it’s of course very different from Moon Safari.”

That’s as may be, but tracks like ‘Heaven’s Light’, ‘So Light Is Her Footfall’ – which is way too easily read as ‘So Light Is Her Football’ if you’re not paying attention – and ‘Sing Sang Sung’ are typical weightless air confections, the kind of insouciant soufflés that the band have long been serving up. In fact, for all its nuanced differences, Love 2 remains unmistakably an air album. Godin replies with a defeated chuckle. “We try very hard sometimes to make a different-sounding album but it always ends up sounding like us. We don’t really know what to do about that.”

Incredibly for a band so popular, the air sound hasn’t managed to yield many copycats, something Nicholas puts down to the band’s unique way of approaching music. “In France we don’t have pop music in our culture so much, so when we throw ourselves into music we don’t think about writing songs like normal bands do. We don’t care if something comes out as a song or not, which I think is very French. We like pop and pop songs, but we don’t have that tradition. This gives us a lot of freedom. We can have classical music on our albums, for example, and it creates a very thin line that is hard to emulate.”

It seems so long ago that Moon Safari’s gentle fireworks exploded inside our eardrums. yet for the band it has “all gone so fast – it’s felt like being inside a tornado. That’s why we want to do things for fun again. We don’t want to suffer from having a career. It’s now time for some wisdom.”