Important Technical Features

• Use of 8 track digital multitrack (to give ‘fewer creative decisions’)
• Use of vintage keyboards e.g. Casiotone, Korg MS-20, Moog Minimoog, Fender Rhodes.
• Analogue drum machines e.g. Linn 9000, Linn Drum, Roland TR909 and CR78.
• Use of a variety of analogue synthesis (e.g portamento, filtering, resonance)
• Noise shaping – white noise altered by filters (cut off frequency, resonance)
• Vocoders – characteristic analogue vocoder sounds; use of Korg VC-10 and Roland VP-330 for melody lines

Track list

1. La Femme D’argent
2. Sexy Boy
3. All I Need
4. Kelly Watch The Stars
5. Talisman
6. Remember
7. You Make It Easy
8. Ce Matin La
9. New Star in the Sky
10. Le Voyage De Pénélope

Background and context

The tracks that made up Moon Safari had been built slowly, though some ideas had been conceived in the various flats, houses and small studios that Nicolas and Jean-Benoît routinely found themselves in. Most of the major writing work took place at Studio de Saint-Nom on the outskirts of Paris.

“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.”

While Nicolas applied his academic studies of architecture to the arrangement of the music, building rich frameworks for tracks such as La Femme D’Argent, Kelly Watch The Stars and Le Voyage de Pénélope, initially these musical structures were assembled with the imposed restriction of using an eight-track Fostex D-80 recorder so as to avoid digressing too much away from the core ideas.

Beth Hirsch tells us that fundamentally, their initial ideas were created with real instrumentation.

“The underlying content of their music was eclectic and they liked working with real instruments. From what I listened to, it was afterwards that the more electronic elements were brought in.”Beth Hirsch

The record’s relaxed feel – often described as ‘loungecore’ or ‘ambient electronica’ – incorporated a wide range of sonic textures, generated with an assortment of hardware that included a Casio Casiotone, a Korg MS-20, Moog Minimoog alongside the unmistakable Fender Rhodes.

Godin’s use of classic equipment, particularly the second-hand 1960s Hofner bass was another important hallmark of the record, with its distinctive ‘cool and dry’ tone discovered when he plugged it into a guitar amp instead of a traditional bass amp.

His sultry, weaving bass plays an integral part on the record, often (particularlily on La Femme D’Argent) becoming the lead instrument in the arrangement. Acoustic guitars feature, as do live and synthesised strings. As Beth recalls, the writing and recording process was as similarly relaxed as the album’s feel…

“The making of Moon Safari was very slow. The guys knew that they had to make the record their way. I remember them saying there was a lot of pressure on them to get it done as quickly as possible, but they resisted and did it on their terms. The way I was used to working was much faster and I was highly impressed by their focus and level of detail. Also their understanding of song structure. They really know how to build very solid music.”Beth Hirsch

The music that became one of the album’s standouts, All I Need, is characterised by the addition of Beth Hirsch’s vocals.

We ask Beth if they and she worked together to craft the melody. “No, the melody was mine just as the music was theirs. But our parts inspired each others. I remember trying some background vocals and they said, ‘You’ve got to sing those BVs (background vocals) everywhere!’ We worked off each other.”

Godin and Dunckel’s relative inexperience in the studio actually served the duo well when it came to approaching sound. Instead of using traditional rack-mounted effects, the pair would plug in their keyboards and synths to a range of pedals originally designed for guitar, creating a distinctive and unique flanged, distorted and tonally shifted treatment, while the lush and ornate string sections (notably on Talisman) were a combination of the Solina String Ensemble, generated and some live strings which were recorded by David Whitaker at Abbey Road.

Jean-Michel notes “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.”

While the band embarked upon building the painstaking instrumentation, Beth recalls that the lyrics of All I Need were inspired by that time in her personal life.

“It was the mid-90s and it was a great time to be in Paris and I was having, on the whole, a wonderful time, discovering music and other artists, and how amazing the whole scene was. That’s what I tried to express in the lyrics of the song.”

Air’s satisfaction with this, their first collaboration with Hirsch, led them to record a second for the album, You Make It Easy. Beth recalls that,

“the label encouraged us to work together more, so the guys showed me that piece of music and 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. The inspiration for You Make It Easy came from a little summer romance I had at the time. It was a nice time and a good story. Since it was happening to me, it was easy to write and it all came together in a seamless way”.

Though many often mistakenly attribute the classic Sexy Boy vocals to Hirsch, it was actually the sound of both Godin and Dunckel singing into a series of vocoders (a Korg VC-10 and Roland VP-330). Sexy Boy would become one of Air’s signature songs, being the first single from the record. The infectious melodies, androgynous vocals and dark strut of the distorted, stabby rhythm making it an instant classic that demanded radio play.

Once the tracks were recorded, the marketing begun and Beth Hirsch recalls that, “they had a great machine behind them. From what I remember, they had their label (Source) in Paris, a bigger label behind that in the UK (Virgin) and the US was also greatly involved. There were so many players and components that were giving it everything they had. That aspect was impressive to me, coming into the industry fresh. They knew it was going to be a success. They were confident and very happy with it. It was exciting.”

Released in 1998 to a relatively muted response in their native France, but massive success and critical acclaim in the UK (then just sweating off the last remnants of Britpop), the record would become an almost overnight modern classic. It’s aural textures were gentle, but fascinating, making it an easy buy for devotees of wildly different genres, from house and jazz to indie. It was a ubiquitous sight on CD racks over the next few years.

Jean-Benoît told Stereogum that, “People thought that we were DJs, and they thought there were a lot of samples on the album which is totally wrong. There are no samples; it’s all played live. So it’s true that people didn’t really know what we were at the time, but we are musicians. We were really playing and we were playing with other people, too.”

20 years on from the record’s release, Beth Hirsch still thinks fondly of Moon Safari. “The music itself, I think, stands the test of time. As for my personal favorite songs, I just loved L’Femme D’Argent. When I heard that for the first time, we were listening in their studio in the forest and I was like, ’Wow, they are special artists and this is going to be a very special record’. I’d never

heard anything like it before. I also loved New Star in the Sky, which Jean- Benoît dedicated to his son. It was very sweet.

“The time period felt ‘greater’ than us and the album reminds me of that,” Beth concludes. “The impact that All I Need has had on people over the years, along with the memories that they share with me about it have been incredibly humbling and heartwarming.”

At its outset, AIR — an acronym for “Amour, Imagination, Rêve” (love, imagination, dream) — was a one-person project. Nicolas Godin, then an architecture student and amateur musician, was asked by a childhood friend to write a song for a compilation to be released by Source, a small French independent label. ‘Modulor Mix’, a tribute to Le Corbusier, was recorded on Godin’s Portastudio, and appeared on the Source Lab album in 1995. With several remixes, it was re-released on British label Mo’Wax in 1996.

Following this small success, Godin asked his friend Jean-Benoît Dunckel, a classically trained pianist and then a maths student, to join him in AIR. Together, they produced further ‘maxi-singles’ for Source, with titles like ‘J’ai Dormi Sous L’eau’, ‘Les Professionnels’, ‘Casanova 70’ and ‘Le Soleil Est Près De Moi’. Mainly instrumental, downtempo and nostalgic, all of these were still recorded at home, with vintage instruments: Rhodes electric piano, Solina String Ensemble, Moog and Korg MS20 synths, vocoder and organ. Dunckel, Godin and their friends added drums, percussions, guitars, bass, tuba…

“We had no money at this time, so we bought the most affordable instruments available: analogue synths from the ’70s. We completely missed the ’80s/’90s ‘digital synth’ period, in fact. So it’s true we had a very personal sound, but it was by default,” says Nicolas Godin.

All of these memorable songs, reminiscent of artists like François de Roubaix, Jean-Jacques Perrey and Ennio Morricone, were originally released on maxi-singles or on compilations, but have since been reissued on the Premiers Symptômes compilation CD. Godin and Dunckel also worked on remixes for artists such as Neneh Cherry and Depeche Mode.

“We could choose from around 20 keyboards, always ready to use… and place them as we wanted.”

Finally, in 1997, Source asked AIR to record a whole album. The duo spent several months in a recording studio near Paris called Studio de Saint-Nom, and asked a friend — freelance engineer and former Plus XXX assistant Stéphane ‘Alf’ Briat — to work as a sound engineer on that project.

Dunckel and Godin wrote their songs and recorded their basic tracks on a Fostex D80 in Saint-Nom, then added some elements in Gang Studios in Paris. They then went to London to record strings in Abbey Road, arranged by English veteran and living legend David Whitaker — a dream come true for them.

Moon Safari delved deeper into the ’70s mood, with picked electric Fender bass, Rhodes piano, handclaps, analogue synth effects, electric organ, drum machine, Mellotron, and songs like ‘Sexy Boy’ and ‘Kelly Watch The Stars’ — a reference to the TV series Charlie’s Angels — were heard on every French radio station. An instant classic, Moon Safari has sold more than three million copies worldwide.