eMusic Review 0
At least in the United States, the French duo Air was initially lumped in with the "electronica" boom of the mid '90s, and with some reason; their first singles appeared on Source, a French label that followed in the wake of Daft Punk's "French touch," and England's Mo Wax, which paved a path between the cultures of rave and hip-hop. But the main contribution of the group's 1998 debut album, Moon Safari, had little to do with electronic music's technological focus or teleological bent. Like their contemporaries Stereolab, theirs was a retro-futurism, filtering the Space Age fantasies of the 1950s and '60s — referenced in kitschy vocoder effects and primitive synthesizers and drum machines — through a kind of laid-back funk familiar from Serge Gainsbourg and softcore porn, and adding a heaping dose of Burt Bacharach's sunny, melodic pop. In keeping with DJ culture's spirit of bricolage, their wobbly oscillators and bluesy Rhodes riffs constitute a kind of archaeology of taste, unearthing the signifiers of bygone styles and fixing them in place like dioramas; it's no wonder that the director Sofia Coppola would ask the group to soundtrack her 2000 film The Virgin Suicides. But… read more »
