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Air Albums Ranked

Air  is a French music duo from Versailles, consisting of Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunckel. Their critically acclaimed debut album, Moon Safari, including the track “Sexy Boy,” was an international success in 1998. Its follow-up, The Virgin Suicides, was the score to Sofia Coppola’s first movie of the same name. The band has since released the albums 10 000 Hz Legend, Talkie Walkie, Pocket Symphony, Love 2, Le voyage Dans la lune, and Music for Museum. After making several remixes for other acts in the first half of the 1990s, Air recorded its first EP, Premiers Symptômes, in 1995. The band released its first album, Moon Safari, in 1998. Its first single, “Sexy Boy”, was heavily played on alternative radio stations. The album received universal acclaim and became an international success. In 2000, Air composed the score The Virgin Suicides to Sofia Coppola’s debut film of the same name; in 2012, Air wrote its second score to Georges Méliès’ Le Voyage Dans La Lune. In the 2000s, Dunckel and Godin released four studio albums, including 10 000 Hz Legend (2001), Talkie Walkie (2004), Pocket Symphony (2007), and Love 2 (2009). Here are all of Air’s albums ranked.

Listen and enjoy the music of Air. Click below as you relive the songs of the hottest French rock band.

10. LateNightTales (2006)

“When I heard it for the first time, I was a little disappointed and later on I found that this is just a remix album of various songs and interprets. In this view, I have listened to it a couple of times and found though that this is a very extraordinary album that is my favorite one to listen to before I go to the bed. EXCELLENT from the beginning to the end, definitely worth a try.”

9. Everybody Hertz (2002)

“A little out of the canons you expect from AIR. However, this remix album remains pleasant to listen to. The sounds range from techno to reggae making the CD interesting and auto rip is definitely an added value.”

8. Love 2 (2009)

“Fantastic! To me this is classic AIR but more killer mid-70’s cosmic vibes than ever before. In my opinion, this album ranks right there with the band’s best works and maybe even better.”

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7. Pocket Symphony (2007)

“This is definitely a darker more atmospheric record ,with little touches of folk and sounds of the far east in several of the beautifully textured instrumental pieces. There’s a fair bit less emphasis on electronics on this album which kind of marks it apart .”

6. Le Voyage Dans La Lune (2012)

“My first non-hip hop listen of the year so far. I was surprised to find that this was actually very good. The title and cover are taken from one of filmmaker Georges Melies’ short films and this is a tribute of sorts to it. The album is scarce of vocals but the instrumentation is space-bound and very bluesy. Very well put together and each track sounds incredibly cinematic. Very good album.”

5. Premiers Symptômes (1997)

“Struggling to hear how this is so revelatory, but then again I didn’t find Moon Safari awesome. This is some cool chilled back electronic music, whose slow beats provide this warm, enjoyable atmosphere. Its production is really smooth, but this is more an EP about feel than proper melodies. At its best moments, it feels like Daft Punk for when you want to watch the sunrise, but struggles to hit that for most of its length.”

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4. The Virgin Suicides (2000)

“Air provides a psychedelic caress between the disassociative culture that gave us ambient music and the idealistic and naive world of post-war America which gave us The Birth of Cool. Synthesizers pulsate in a vast but colorless world of texture like a throbbing Ansel Adams photo; then angelic voices and soaring guitars drip from the sky like watercolor. All done with the subtlety and garishness of a flirtatious look that lasts a second too long.”

3. 10,000 Hz Legend (2001)

“A little unfocused but still highly underrated. The minimal electronic stuff does a good job of creating a serious atmosphere and the manipulated vocals added a faux-spooky retro-futuristic edge that I like.”

2. Talkie Walkie (2004)

“Another great “Air” album… again it offers a stunning atmosphere, great “typical” Air (such as Cherry Blossom Girl or Surfing on a Rocket) songs but also song that will surprise you (“Mike Mills” or “Alpha Beta Gaga”) and a great instrumental track (“Alone in Kyoto”)… it’s a album to enjoy while relaxing with the headphones on.”

1. Moon Safari (1998)

“Air’s “Moon Safari” was my entry into the world of electronica, ambient/French pop… and I was not disappointed. Like Track 7 (“You Make It Easy”) says, this ALBUM makes it easy by gently synergizing the frosty elements of electronic, pop, and jazz music to create an effortlessly blissful experience.”

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"I heard Portishead’s Dummy on the radio and thought to myself: ‘I can make that'": Air's Moon Safari is 25 years old, but still sounds like it will be made in 25 years' time. Here's the story of the greatest chillout album ever

And why you should see them play the whole album live this year…

Track by track

While Britpop and dance music fought for supremacy in the 1990s, a quieter music force was bubbling away, and took its place in the bars of Ibiza and the come down rooms in UK clubland – ' chillout ' was the new sound for the end of the century and Air were its masters. 

Chillout could pretty much be any style of music you wanted, as long as you lowered the bpm and made it calmer than its rave and high-energy dance opposites. So think classical , 50s kitsch, lounge, jazz , electronic … You name it, it would end up being packaged on a '90s chillout compilation for the masses.

Air would get there first, though, and pretty much embrace all of those styles on their debut album, Moon Safari.

Prior to Moon Safari, Air (Amour, Imagination, Rêve) was just Nicolas Godin, who had minor success releasing tracks in 1996 on French label Source and some remixes on Mo'Wax in the UK. A year later he was joined by Jean-Benoît Dunckel, after which Source asked for an album. 

Moon Safari was a tour through a nostalgic world of '70s television and classic sci-fi, all played with the instruments of those times

Air's mission was to do something different, and after being brought up on everything from Kraftwerk to Serge Gainsbourg – and with a healthy obsession for the unusual thrown in – they were almost destined to do just that. 

"Until 1994, I was listening to the radio and thinking, ‘whatever this sound of today is, it is not me’," Godin says on the Air website . "But then, I heard Portishead ’s Dummy on the radio, and thought to myself: ‘I can make that’.”

They took a love of pop culture from the previous couple of decades and created a musical backdrop for it in Moon Safari, a tour through a nostalgic world of '70s television and classic sci-fi. It was played with instruments of those times including vintage analogue synths and original Rhodes pianos , all bought relatively cheaply in France when digital synths were more in fashion and commanding the big money. 

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The resulting album came just at a time when the dance music generation was maturing into hosting dinner parties rather than PA systems in fields, and buying 'grown up' long players from bands like Massive Attack and Portishead . Moon Safari was a kitsch take for this generation, but by brilliantly not trying to be anything in particular, it ending up being everything. 

They deliberately sung in English because, "it made us sound even more French, because of our thick accents,"

Godin and Dunckel definitely played the French card with aplomb – you could almost see the album as a black and white '60s art house film – but deliberately sung in English to enforce it. "It made us sound even more French, because of our thick accents," Godin told the Guardian in 2016.

The duo recorded Moon Safari from 1996 to August 1997, starting in Godin's home studio before renting a space in a country house in Saint-Nom-la-Bretèche, with a stint at Abbey Road to record strings along the way. 

As well as the classic instruments we mention above, Air did add a few more modern touches that were very much in vogue at the time, although they thankfully didn't pay the in vogue prices, telling Future Music 's Derek O'Sullivan they paid just £40 for a TB-303 and £200 for a 909 . Lucky beggars. 

"We were using old Roland drum machines, Moogs , old Korg stuff, ARP synths and the Rhodes electric piano ," Nicolas explained, "and we also a lot of guitar effects: distortions and flangers in particular. We like the Electro Harmonix effects."

"If I want a flanged sound, I put a guitar box into the inserts on the mixer and I can control it manually," Nicolas said in the same FM interview. "It's more spontaneous that way. I don't like to have to push buttons on a rack. Many elements are flukes. We're not very good technicians, and the kind of effects and equipment we use are such that you're often obliged to hit them! So accidents play a part in our music. All the time."

We're not very good technicians, so accidents play a part in our music. All the time

Other gear they detailed included a Casiotone , clavinet , glockenspiel, several guitars, a harmonica, Korg MS20 , Mellotron , Minimoog , piano, Solina String Ensemble and a Wurlitzer organ. 

Amazingly the whole album was recorded on an 8-track Fostex D80 sync'd with an Akai S1000 and sequenced with Cubase , first running on an Atari 1040ST and later a Mac. 

The duo told Reverb.com that they then spent 15 days at Gang studio mixing the album on an SSL . "But seeing as Moon Safari only had eight tracks, there were just the eight tiny faders up on the giant SSL , so that was a bit of a gag!" Godin admitted.

Moon Safari came out at the start of 1998 to universal praise, and Air became the darlings of a new form of music. The album went on to shift a couple of million copies, selling 600,000 in the UK alone. 

To celebrate its 25th anniversary (although we make it 26), Air are playing the whole of Moon Safari on various dates across Europe starting at the end of February and finishing in July. Get more info from the band's official website .  

La Femme D’argent

Moon Safari's opener puts you straight in an Ibiza bar – or one on Mars come to think of it – at 4 o clock on the morning, and you are feeling like the coolest person on the planet, surrounded by effortlessly attractive humans and aliens. 

Rhodes piano and solid acoustic bass entwine and embrace throughout the track with Godin telling Reverb : "The Rhodes is my favourite instrument. I spent my entire childhood wondering what that sound was that I heard everywhere on TV and on the radio, but no one at that time pointed out the Rhodes."

Godin told the Guardian he used a 1960s Höfner bass put through a guitar amp for this track and played a riff to Jean-Benoît which he simply responded to by saying 'sexy boy'. "The song was about who we wanted to be; we weren’t handsome when we were younger; our friends always had more success with girls." 

The track is an undoubted highlight of Moon Safari and as its debut single, announced the band to the world, reaching number 13 in the UK chart. It's also the first track on the album to feature a vocoder: "We have four vocoders ," the band told Future Music , "but we can't tell you what they are, it's a secret!" Whisper: two of them were a Korg VC-10 and Roland VP-330 .

American singer Beth Hirsch sang on All I Need and You Make It Easy: "She made us sound like a space-age Carpenters," Godin told the Guardian. Hirsch was in Paris working an an au pair but was also a musician and songwriter, and had got a deal Rough Trade in Paris and was recording her debut EP Miner’s Son when she met Nicolas Godin in the studio. He asked her if she would be interested in contributing to Moon Safari and she quickly became involved in the project.

"They gave me an early version of the music, " she told Andy Price at MusicTech but even in that raw state I could tell the song had something special. I immediately found a melody and shortly after wrote the lyrics for it."

Kelly Watch the Stars

Godin told The Guardian , "I remember talking about who we thought was the most beautiful woman in the world. For me, it was Kelly from Charlie’s Angels, so we wrote Kelly Watch the Stars about her." If only we could all do that… 

Of course that squelching Moog bass underpins the whole track, but there's a great vocoded vocal to counter it, but Air still aren't going to tell you which one: "If you find one that we've got, you'll be able to make a record like Air," they noted to Future Music , clearly knowing that wasn't true. 

Godin revealed to reverb.com that Talisman "was actually a mix of Jean-Benoît playing on the Rhodes and me doubling the melody on the Wurlitzer 200A , so there were two electric pianos in the same track... not easy to mix."

We've included a live performance (above) from La Blogothèque in Paris in 2016 so you can, like us, use it to geek-spot some of the band's gear on stage. There are Moogs (a couple of Sources), a Solina String machine or two, a Roland Juno-60 , Nord Lead 2, Fender Rhodes , Korg MS20 , some other Korgs… er some drums. A bass. And guitars. Look we've got an article to finish ok?

Remember opens with another unnamed vocoder , solid beats, piano, delightful strings plus Theremin and Rhodes stylings take you to the restaurant at the end of the universe for afternoon tea. But just two and a half minutes later it dumps you back down to earth after not exactly outstaying its welcome. So neither shall we.

You Make It Easy

“The label encouraged us to work together more, so the guys showed me that piece of music. In a similar way to All I Need I found the melody and lyrics quite quickly and the rest of the production flowed after that,” Hirsch told MusicTech of You Make It Easy, and this is the track where those Carpenters references are easily understood. 

Ce Matin La

There's a bit during Ce Matin La where the lack of tracks used is more evident than on any other song on Moon Safari, but you know what? Give us a single string sound, what sounds like a trombone or tuba, and a simple guitar riff over a 128 track Pro Tools session any day. 

New Star in the Sky 

"I was singing about space all the time and reading Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles," JB told The Guardian. We've all been there. It turns out that Bradbury's book featured characters going on dinosaur safaris in the past. "I just loved the word 'safari'," Dunckel added. Might as well put it in the album name then. 

Le Voyage De Pénélope 

We should be feeling rather too full of Air's sweet and chilled vibes by now, but Moon Safari's joy is that Air judged its length to perfection. The lead synth here, that sounds a bit 'Vangelis' like, takes you by the hand and gently leads you to the door for your 7am journey home. That was quite a night chaps. Thanks, you sexy boys.

Andy has been writing about music production and technology for 30 years having started out on Music Technology magazine back in 1992. He has edited the magazines Future Music, Keyboard Review, MusicTech and Computer Music, which he helped launch back in 1998. He owns way too many synthesizers.

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How Air’s ‘Moon Safari’ became an elegant masterpiece of '90s electronic music

Released in early 1998, Versailles duo Air’s debut album ‘Moon Safari’ was a gentle antidote to the wave of French Touch at the time. With an emphasis on melody and mood, it became a ubiquitous soundtrack to the end of the 20th century, and still sounds inspired today. Here, Ben Cardew explores its legacy

This feature was originally published by DJ Mag North America in 2019

So much electronic music is dominated by rhythm: the 4/4 stomp of techno; the woozy pulse of dubstep; the clattering breaks of jungle and drum and bass. However, some of the best electronic music — from Kraftwerk to Daft Punk, Masters at Work to Underground Resistance — is based on a wonderful understanding of melody, creating those hooks that stick in your head at the end of the night when the legs have been reduced to a mushy pulp. 

To this list we might add Air, the silkily nerdish duo from Versailles, who combine classical melodies with heady atmospherics, Serge Gainsbourg-esque élan and more than a hint of sex. Their music laid a framework for a generation of magenta-hued chill–out bands to idle out of the woodwork in their wake.

1998’s ‘Moon Safari’ was Air’s debut album, and, to date, their defining act. If you were young at the end of the 1990s and had anything more than a passing interest in electronic music you will have heard it, soundtracking dinner and after parties, school runs, chill-out rooms and 1,001 stodgy TV dramas. So ubiquitous did ‘Moon Safari’ become, in fact, and so many terrible bands did it inspire, that Air became almost persona non grata in the 2000s, their career hobbled by the intolerable omnipresence of their debut.

And yet, when you consider everything Air had against them, it was a minor miracle they even made their breakthrough. Air weren’t particularly fashionable, for a start. Even in the mid ’90s, when Parisian music was riding the sizzling wave of French Touch, band members Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunckel resembled more the architecture and maths students they had so recently been than the fashionable men around town their peers aspired to. 

“It was the late 1990s and Paris suddenly had this incredible electronic music scene: all these clubs were opening up. I didn’t get to go to all the parties, though, because I was generally at home with my wife taking care of Solal, our baby,” Dunckel told The Guardian in 2016. “We were poor. I knew our livelihood depended on Air being successful.”

Air dreamed to be different, both visually and sonically. There was nothing edgy or unconstrained about the band, no whiff of rebellion to get the heart strings pounding, and little in the way of beats to dance to. Most of all, as a stylistic decision, Air chose to be quiet: a gentle Gallic nuzzle to the ear rather than a voluptuous bear hug.

‘Sexy Boy’, the first single to be taken from ‘Moon Safari’, is typical of the duo’s individualistic approach to songwriting, marked by an androgynous, indistinct vocal. "If we’d sung ‘sexy girl’, it would have been a disaster. ‘Sexy Boy’ felt different,” Godin told The Guardian. “The song was about who we wanted to be; we weren’t handsome when we were younger; our friends always had more success with girls.”

So Air were big, unfashionable softies in a musical decade marked by innovation, ambition and noise. It would have been easy for Air to spanner together disco samples and filters to create a French House tune that would temporarily captivate the Parisian nightclubs. What Air did was to rely on melody and timbre to make their hugely elegant point. ‘Moon Safari’ was the epitome of this, the album’s 10 tracks forming a closed loop of such melodic brilliance and galactic ambience that listening to anything else afterwards felt like scraping muddy boots on a silk-lined boudoir. These are melodies that stick in the brain like glue, suspended in zero G by a velvety ambience of Fender Rhodes, clavinet, vocoder, strings and Moog.

Countless articles have been written about the recording of ‘Moon Safari’, and you can see why: the album pulled off the difficult task of sounding both futuristic and retro, its mixture of vocoders, synths and Serge Gainsbourg bass resembling a 1960’s vision of the gilded future, a combination best heard on the impossibly lush string and vocoder jam ‘Remember’.

Album opener ‘La Femme d’Argent’ is a wonderful example of Air’s insouciant melodic brilliance. The track also features stunning bass work, sporting the kind of bassline that carries the song on its back and leaves you singing in the shower.

Air were classically trained musicians who wore their hearts on their sleeves. The atmosphere of their music was balanced by the human emotion in their songwriting. ‘You Make It Easy’, a glittering highlight, spoke of the magic of falling in love, Beth Hirsch’s vocal soaked in emotion, while ‘New Star in the Sky (Chanson pour Solal)’ seemed to inject a whole galaxy of love and wonder into four tightly-packed lines with the ultra efficiency of a haiku.

And it was this, ultimately, that separated ‘Moon Safari’ from the music that came in its wake. Among the trends that the album inspired were an international Serge Gainsbourg revival, a renewed interest in film soundtracks, and the career of Sofia Coppola, with the band scoring her directorial debut The Virgin Suicides the year after ‘Moon Safari’s’ release. You can hear the album’s influence in the work of acts like Kid Loco, Bent, Röyksopp, Crustation, Tim “Love” Lee, Cibo Matto, Sébastian Tellier and more. But what few of these acts seemed to grasp, in their search for ever lusher melodic beds, was at the centre of Air’s artifice was a beating heart. Rather than the clatter of drums, this was the rhythm that ‘Moon Safari’ moved to.

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Leave it to the French to turn retro-leaning lounge music into space-age scores.

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Leave it to the French to turn retro-leaning lounge music into space-age scores. Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunckel achieved just that, announcing their arrival with their debut album, Moon Safari by Air “French band” on January 16, 1998.

Labeled an electronic act, Air was light years away from their Gallic contemporaries Daft Punk. Instead, they crafted the perfect post-club soundtrack with dreamy, spectral soundscapes, and a jazz-like sensibility that washed away all memories and substances from the night before.

This new incarnation of “chill-out” music in electronica was also decidedly analogue, a study in contrasts that felt both nostalgic and futuristic at the same time. Armed with old Roland drum machines, vintage synths, a Rhodes piano, and even some bongos, Air oozed 60s kitsch. Some likened it to camp, others an homage, but to a young audience who didn’t grow up going to key parties and listening to Francis Lai, it felt wonderfully exotic and revolutionary.

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Listen to Moon Safari now .

Before they became purveyors of ambient pop, Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunckel were just two students from Versailles who worshipped at the altar of rock in a country that was historically blasé about the form. They played in an indie band in university before forming Air and released two EP’s in ’95 and ’96 that ended up on their Premier Symptomes compilation. Blending Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson samples with trance music, the duo already proved themselves masters of mood, but it wasn’t until Moon Safari where they showed their chops for pop craft as well with the singles, “Sexy Boy” and “Kelly Watch the Stars.”

With the exception of artists like Serge Gainsbourg , Johnny Hallyday, or Jean-Michel Jarre, not many French acts had been able to crack the international charts, but in the mid-90s, downtempo acts such as St. Germain, Daft Punk, and La Funk Mob were reinventing the French music scene and people were taking notice. As Godin recently told The Guardian , “Before we came along, French pop was synonymous with Sacha Distel. I hated it. But electronic music meant you could make cool music without being a rocker.”

Arriving during the swan song of Britpop, Moon Safari instead embraced theatricality, with its vast symphonic arrangements that borrowed equally from Burt Bacharach as it did from Pink Floyd and ELO. When it came time to record, Godin and Dunckel took a cue from their muses and recorded the string sections at the legendary Abbey Road studios with noted arranger David Whitake, who’d worked with everyone from Serge Gainsbourg to France Gall, The Rolling Stones , Jimmy Page, and Sylvie Vartan. In contrast, the rest of the record was recorded on an 8-track machine and purposely retro gear, not only for aesthetic purposes but also to challenge the duo musically.

Starting a record with a track that has a 7-minute plus running time is a bold move, but “La femme d’argent” is the perfect opener for the sonic odyssey that is Moon Safari . Beginning with soft rain over the Blaxploitation sample “Runnin” by Edwin Starr, it builds into an exquisite musical montage that proves you don’t need a bass drop to feel catharsis. This electronic crescendo is then quickly followed by the album’s breakout single “Sexy Boy” that single-handedly relaunched the vocoder into pop culture along with their other hit, “Remember.” But Moon Safari is not all android disco a la 70s Herbie Hancock. Two of the tracks including “All I Need” and “You Make It Easy” feature American singer-songwriter Beth Hirsch, whose honeyed vocals float over the acoustic and ambient lounge arrangements.

From the galloping bass line of “Talisman” to the tuba solos of “Ce Matin La,” Moon Safari is a mosaic of retro references and yet Air never limits themselves to just references, instead they create their own universe and a soundtrack to a movie that never existed. That’s what happens when you get two studio obsessives with a love of astrophysics and staying in. Moon Safari is the ultimate armchair exploration, all you need is a shag rug and decent speakers.

Following their debut, Air quickly became a critical darling worldwide and was praised for putting French pop back on the map and yet reception in their home country was not as enthusiastic. Moon Safari peaked at No. 21 on the French album charts and No. 6 in the UK. They were similarly a massive success stateside, landing a US tour, ad placements, remixes, and glowing reviews. Just a year later, they were scoring the soundtrack to Sofia Coppola’s tale of 70s suburban ennui, The Virgin Suicides , with their atmospheric opus.

Now 20 years later, it’s clear how Air profoundly changed the cultural perceptions around not only French music but electronic music in general, pushing the boundaries of both to create something wholly unique and often replicated in the decades that followed.

Purchase Moon Safari here .

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Moon Safari - 10th Anniversary Edition

By Mark Pytlik

Astralwerks / Virgin

April 24, 2008

We all know what horrors illegal downloading has wrought on new releases; one side effect of that erosion involves labels attempting to recoup those losses by re-animating their back catalogues, Mary Shelley style. Before the big swoon, it was tough to justify a reissue without a remaster, but desperate times call for desperate measures, and so lately, we've seen an increasing spate of albums re-released for no other reason than a round-number anniversary. In the cases of your Thriller s and your Pet Sounds , that's a justifiable enough benchmark-- in a way, those reissues provide the platform to talk about us and how much we've changed as much as the music. Something like the new deluxe edition of Air's Moon Safari , though, is a slightly trickier proposition.

For starters: There's the niggling question of whether Air's debut, superb as it is, really merits canonical treatment. As a collection of songs, it's endured well enough over time; after a decade, it still holds up fine. But so have a ton of other similarly acclaimed and successful records from 1998, and it doesn't seem remotely appropriate to roll out the red carpet for those either. As far as modern connect points go, there's nothing really happening musically at the moment that makes Moon Safari suddenly worthy of re-examination. If anything, with its dainty sonics and polite arpeggios, a lot of this record runs counter to the discofied and Balearic dance that's currently in fashion. Even Air would quickly abandon the cultivated library music aesthetic that characterized this record in favor of spindlier, more complicated, more sinister material. So yeah: As a snapshot of a place in time, you could do a lot worse than Moon Safari . But as something to be canonized in a three-disc set? The physics are lost on me. What, aside from the poetry of the number 10, is the exact reason to celebrate it now?

Granted, it probably wasn't Air's idea to do this, and it's certainly not their fault that Moon Safari 's legacy ultimately yielded a long list of bands along the lines of Lemon Jelly, Zero 7, Morcheeba, and Thievery Corporation, so perhaps it's fairer just to concentrate on what this reissue offers rather than the reason for it. The answer there, unfortunately, is: mixed returns. Although a robust collection featuring the original album, a disc of bonuses and B-sides, and a DVD featuring Mike Mills' 1999 tourfilm Eating, Sleeping, Waiting and Playing , this reissue doesn't offer nearly enough in the way of substantive bonus material to warrant its existence, nor does it even select the right material from that era to re-package.

The bonus disc is the biggest indicator of the lack of quality control or thoughtfulness on hand: instead of material from the duo's excellent surrounding EPs, Le Soleil Est Près De Moi and the singles compilation Premiers Symptômes (a lot of which could actually benefit from having a light shone on it), we get five live tracks-- including a horrible, thrashy version of "Kelly Watch the Stars"-- which expose Air's live approach early on as light on musicianship and heavy on grating affectation and kitsch. Of the remaining demos and remixes, only the two-minute long, string-heavy take on "Remember" (itself a resurrected B-side) and a sparse demo of "You Make It Easy" (from when it was an instrumental called "Bossa 96") are remotely illuminating. Everything else just feels incidental and reheated.

Provided you like your filmmaking mannered and slightly cutesy, Mills' documentary remains a worthwhile curiosity, but even still, I can't imagine that anyone who'd be willing to shell out the money for a Moon Safari 10th Anniversary Edition wouldn't be acquainted with it already. Aside from that, you're basically paying for the packaging; in this case, that means a DVD-sized hardcover package with a nice, if slightly unnecessary, lyrics book attached. As a case for Moon Safari as a classic record, it falls a little short. But as a nice keepsake of a lovely record, it could be worse. I guess in the end it's really just a matter of whether you're fanatical enough about this album to buy it again. Virgin's either betting (or hoping) that enough of you are.

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How we made Air's Moon Safari

‘Before we came along, French pop was synonymous with Sacha Distel. I hated it’

Jean-Benoît Dunckel, singer-songwriter-musician

Daft Punk were down the street from us in Paris and we could almost hear the music they were making when we opened the window during band sessions. It was the late 1990s, and Paris suddenly had this incredible electronic music scene: all these clubs were opening up. I didn’t get to go to all the parties, though, because I was generally at home with my wife taking care of Solal, our baby. We were poor. I knew our livelihood depended on Air being successful.

So I poured everything into it. The track New Star in the Sky (Chanson pour Solal) came about because I’d studied astrophysics and was into stars, planets and Einstein’s theory of relativity. I was singing about space all the time and reading Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles . The characters in the book go on a safari into the past to see dinosaurs. I just loved the word safari.

We recorded the strings at Abbey Road with David Whitaker , an English arranger who’d worked with everybody. We were in this legendary studio where the Beatles had recorded, too shy to even speak to the orchestra. So David took us off to his home in the countryside and we ended up discussing Rachmaninoff. He helped us to overcome our shyness and make something massive and expressive.

It was the tail end of Britpop, and people were wanting something else. We came along with this alien, psychedelic, loungecore music you’d listen to on a Sunday morning after you’d been out clubbing the night before. And one month after Moon Safari came out, we were huge.

Nicolas Godin, singer-songwriter-musician

Playing guitars loud through amps is great fun when you’re 15 and full of hormones, but French people are better at being chefs or fashion designers. Rock music is not really in our culture. But electronic music is different. When we discovered it, suddenly we had an outlet.

Someone lent me a 1960s Höfner bass, the model Paul McCartney played in the Beatles. Because I was a guitarist, I put it through my guitar amp, which gave this amazing sound: very cool and dry. One day I played a riff to JB and he said “ sexy boy ” out of the blue – and that was how we got the song. If we’d sung “sexy girl”, it would have been a disaster. Sexy Boy felt different. The song was about who we wanted to be; we weren’t handsome when we were younger; our friends always had more success with girls. I remember talking about who we thought was the most beautiful woman in the world. For me, it was Kelly from Charlie’s Angels, so we wrote Kelly Watch the Stars about her.

Unlike American or British bands, we weren’t always thinking “verse-chorus”. And singing in English made us sound even more French, because of our thick accents. I discovered Beth Hirsch , who guests on All I Need and You Make It Easy . She was my neighbour in Montmartre, and she made us sound like a space-age Carpenters.

Ever since I was a child, I’d dreamed of making a classic album – and I actually did. The night we did Sexy Boy, I knew my life would change. Before Daft Punk and us, French pop was synonymous with Sacha Distel . I hated it. But electronic music meant you could make cool music without being a rocker. In France, we’re not considered a great band. The French still have very bad taste in music.

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Air Plot North American Tour to Mark 25th Anniversary of Debut Album ‘Moon Safari’

By Althea Legaspi

Althea Legaspi

Electronic French duo Air are marking the 25th anniversary of their debut album, Moon Safari , with a tour. Launching this fall, the trek will feature them playing the album in its entirety for the first time, as they did on their recent European tour.

The 19-date tour kicks off in Vancouver on Sept. 19 in Vancouver at Queen Elizabeth Theatre, before venturing down the West Coast with stops in Seattle, San Francisco, and two shows in Los Angeles. Midwest dates include Minneapolis, Chicago, and Detroit before they head to the East Coast and then south, culminating in Austin at Moody Amphitheatre on Oct. 30.

Tickets go on sale March 8 at 10 a.m. local time, with presale available on March 7 at 10 a.m. local time.

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The original album made Rolling Stone ’s “ 100 Best Albums of the ‘90s ” list, describing their space-pop debut as “a truly obsessive  hommage  to easy listening, a sublime Eurocheese omelet. They built their music out of classic Sixties French schlock: bongos, castanets, vintage electric piano, dream-weaver synths, and shag-carpet organ straight from the soundtracks of movies like  Un Homme et Une Femme .”

Air Moon Safari North American Tour Dates Sept. 25 – Vancouver, BC @ Queen Elizabeth Theatre Sept. 27 – Seattle, WA @ Benaroya Hall Sept. 29 – Los Angeles, CA @ Orpheum Sept. 30 – Los Angeles, CA @ Orpheum Oct. 2 – San Francisco, CA @ The Masonic Oct. 4 – Denver, CO @ Bellco Theater Oct. 6 – Minneapolis, MN @ State Theatre Oct. 8 – Chicago, IL @ Auditorium Theatre Oct. 10 – Detroit, MI @ Fox Theatre Oct. 12 – Toronto, ON @ Massey Hall Oct. 13 – Montreal, QC @ Place Bell Oct. 15 – Boston, MA @ MGM Music Hall at Fenway Oct. 17 – Philadelphia, PA @ The Met Oct. 18 Washington DC @ The Anthem Oct. 21 – New York, NY @ Beacon Theatre Oct. 24 – Atlanta, GA @ Tabernacle Oct. 26 – Miami Beach, FL @ Fillmore Miami Beach Oct. 29 – Dallas, TX @ Music Hall at Fair Park Oct. 30 – Austin, TX @ Moody Amphitheatre

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