Baroque 'n' Roll
With its latest album 10,000
Hz Legend, French band Air reinvents pop music for the 21st
century
By
NICHOLAS LE QUESNE Paris
French film
director françois Truffaut once said that English filmmaking
was a contradiction in terms. The Brits have been saying the
same thing about French pop music for decades. For the discerning
Anglo-Saxon music lover, the country that gave the world Jean-Michel
Jarre's po-faced pomposity and the embarrassing histrionics
of paunchy, ageing rocker Johnny Hallyday had an awful lot
to answer for.
So when
Madonna gave a Frenchman called Mirwais the job of producing
half the songs on last year's Music album, it simply confirmed
the extraordinary turnaround that has taken place over the
past four years: French music has become cool.
This week
one of the twin pioneers of this pop renaissance releases
an eagerly-awaited second album. Air's 10,000 Hz Legend is
a sprawling baroque extravaganza. In 60 minutes of multifaceted
music, it sparkles with unlikely references: Pink Floyd, cult
sci-fi novelist Philip K. Dick, Eric Satie, White Album-era
Beatles, German electronic music pioneers Kraftwerk and the
Beach Boys are all in there somewhere. But there's also impeccably
modern production and the latest computer technology. Air
transcends its influences to create something dazzlingly unique.
The duo from Versailles -a well-off suburb west of Paris -has
come up with a record staggering in its ambition, an unidentified
musical object that explodes categories and looks a safe bet
for the year's most influential album release.
"We didn't
worry about how people were going to react," Air's keyboard
specialist Jean-Benoit Dunckel explains. (Air's other half
is Nicolas Godin, who mainly plays guitar and bass.) "The
idea was simply to do the most demented thing possible."
When Air
released its album Moon Safari early in 1998, the world discovered
the awesome potential French music could have once it freed
itself from its inferiority complex. While precursor Daft
Punk remained rooted in the strobe-lit euphoria of dance culture,
Air's eclecticism hitched up '60s film soundtracks with drum
machines and spacey synthesizers to create a crisp pop sound
you could listen to outside the nightclub.
This time
around, the easy listening kitsch of Moon Safari has been
retired in favor of a dark machine-age psychedelia, undercut
with a healthy dose of tongue-in-cheek humor. The opening
track Electronic Performers sets the tone: amid distorted
guitars, orchestral flourishes and spectral choirs, disembodied
robot voices sing of love and desire.
Radio #1-the
single from the new release-is a magnificently grandiose piece
of synth pop with overtones of Queen and no concessions to
good taste. As throughout the album, the vocals are in a globalized
English that is neither British nor American. "There are some
words we just can't pronounce, so we can't use them in our
lyrics," Dunckel explains. "That gives us a strange approach
to the English language; we play with it."
The same
could be said of Air's approach to music. 10,000 Hz Legend
is a record that could never have been made in Britain or
America. Although it occasionally nods politely in the direction
of rock'n'roll, the album has clearly been produced by people
for whom Claude Debussy will always remain more important
than Chuck Berry.
The Vagabond
is a good example, opening with lonesome hobo harmonica wails
and blues guitar. U.S. star Beck provides folksy vocals to
a lament on contemporary rootlessness before the whole thing
explodes into a galaxy of dissonant synth spirals and stuttering
reverb. Radian builds slowly in layers of symphonic strings
and acoustic guitar into an achingly beautiful instrumental
anthem. Like all Air's tunes, it's a mini-soundtrack in itself,
an accompaniment for one of the many moods a day can bring.
Modestly,
Dunckel and Godin attribute their success to the decline of
Anglo-Saxon pop into sterile nostalgia and carbon-copy teen
acts. Like true Frenchmen, they cultivate a certain rebelliousness
in the face of music business orthodoxy. "The entire industry
has stopped taking risks," Dunckel complains. "The record
companies are just delivering product to radio stations. But
the current French scene is coming from home studios and that's
what keeps it free and fresh. The big business music generated
by record companies has been swept aside."
On the strength
of 10,000 Hz Legend, you have to wish them well. By distilling
our musical memories into something unmistakably-and compellingly-modern,
Air has made the 21st century look a very attractive place
to be. You'll never have heard anything remotely like it,
but then it's not every day you come across what the French
call a chef d'oeuvre.
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