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Jean-Benoît Dunckel and Nicolas Godin are modernists. Air embrace the new. Each album is a move away from the last and a journey towards something else. Their music is intellectually stimulating yet intuitively simple; elegiac and triumphal; beyond pop and yet resolutely of it, too. Yet Air are no academically dry intellectuals either. If their music is full of French-style clichés about boy meeting girl, it’s done so playfully, with a knowing wink. They know their way round a good joke and can deadpan for the Republic.
Pocket Symphony is their fourth studio album proper and the follow up to 2004’s Talkie Walkie (although if you include their Allessandro Baricco City Reading collaboration, the Virgin Suicides soundtrack and their recent Charlotte Gainsbourg production 5:55 they could claim seven). It’s also the fourth album they have done in conjunction with English producer Nigel Godrich (“he’s so cool, he could be French,” quips Air’s Nicolas).
Pocket Symphony is, despite being a distinct step away from orthodox pop modes, a return to some of pastoral atmospherics of their now seminal debut album Moon Safari. Nicolas puts it thus: “This album is different. We decided to go back to the soundtrack music-style, with more instrumentals and less songs.”
Yet paradoxically it’s a far cry from the series of pop hits they enjoyed in 1998, with clear notes of minimalism among the clingy hooks and deceptively complex piano lines. “Increasingly, we are trying to get away from the pop sound,” says Jean-Benoit. “I suppose we are influenced by modern composers like Philip Glass or even early 20th century classical composers like Ravel or Erik Satie. The way we work is that we improvise together. It’s like magic because we always have something in common, like a new direction or desire, each time when we write a song. There’s always a conscious desire to reject the previous album.”
The most obvious difference from previous recordings are the Eastern influences – most evident on “One Hell Of A Party” – but throughout the whole set. Taking Talkie Walkie closing track “Alone In Kyoto” as the catalyst (you can hear clear influences from the British pop group Japan), the duo built Pocket Symphony around this precedent. Nicolas spent a year learning Far Eastern classical instruments the koto and shamisen, through an Okinawa master.
“We found her through the Japanese embassy,” explains Nicolas. “It took me a year to learn them.” And, according to a deadpan Nicolas, it was his Muse (what we in the US might refer to as a girlfriend) who persuaded him to pursue this direction: “We were at Café de Flore in Paris. We were drunk and she told me we should do something linked with Japan and its culture.”
Despite this organic approach, they have been embracing the joys of modern technology, seeing it as the tool that it is rather than the straitjacket it often becomes. “Now the computer is really important for us,” claims Jean-Benoit. “To start with we were totally opposed to this process because we wanted to use only analogue keyboards. But increasingly we had to admit that you can’t do everything with analogue keyboards. Also, in France, we have this modern research centre called IRCAM and it’s run by Pierre Boulez, the composer, and they are constantly inventing new plug-ins so we’ve been playing with them.”
The most surprising additions to the Air canon are the collaborations with Neil Hannon and Jarvis Cocker, though as the pair explain this was not part of a grand plan. “We met them when we produced the Charlotte Gainsbourg album, because they were writing the lyrics,” says Nicolas. “It wasn’t like, “oh let’s get some people in, who can we feature?” We met and the vibe was cool and we wrote the songs together.” Given ample Air time with which to play, Hannon and Cocker deliver brilliantly understated performances, yet still not without grit and attack and, in Jarvis’ case, quiet menace.
Pocket Symphony is Air at their most sparse, the excess trimmed to the bone as they seek to reach a simple purity in what they do, aided in their efforts by producer Nigel Godrich who, according to Nicolas, “helps us to accept simplicity, otherwise we might make the songs too complicated.” It is these delicate palettes that make the album such a delight, like the smoky aromas of Lapsang Suchong. “It’s weird because now I’m in such a different mood,” chuckles Nicolas. “Now I really have new ideas for another album. It’s cool. It’s good to do things to get rid of them. Then you have space in your mind to welcome new ideas. It’s a cleansing thing.”
Or as Jean-Benoit claims: “You can’t fight against the future.” Modernists, indeed.
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