Photo by Wendy Bevan

“It’s like musical telepathy when were are in the studio,” explains Nicolas Godin, one-half of the French electronic duo Air, who along with Jean-Benoît Dunckel, are responsible for making atmospheric easy listening music popular and downright sexy. “We communicate with music and sounds – we don’t even talk.”

Outfitted in quintessentially French, too-dapper-to-be-American attire, Godin and Dunckel sit on opposite cream-colored couches in the cavernous conference room of the EMI offices located in Manhattan’s Flatiron district. After rejecting coffee that’s deemed excessively bitter from the café downstairs – New York City baristas obviously don’t have the same finesse as they do in France – Dunckel asks in his distinctive he-pixie voice, leaning forward inquisitively, “Do you know what is the moon?”

Puzzled, I shake my head.

“Do you know what it’s made of?”

Uh oh, I thought as I shuffled my notes nervously. No one said this was going to be an outer space-themed game of 20 Questions.

Pop quizzes aside, Air always had galaxy-sized ambitions. From the moment they launched the now-classic debut Moon Safari in early 1998, this Parisian twosome helped shift the electronic music paradigm from excess-driven and garish to elegantly elevated. Instead of the sloppy Day-Glo visions leftover from the rave-era and the ubiquitous half-baked trip-hop grooves of the mid-aughts, songs like “La Femme d’Argent” and “Sexy Boy” introduced an old-meets-new aural aesthetic composed of gravity-defying soundscapes. Conjuring dreamy visions of space travel and sci-fi themes, Godin and Dunckel took swoony keyboards, samples and state-of-the-art sounds to starry heights, creating a quiet yet sensuous revolution that sparked an international cult following – and a whole lot of make-out sessions.

“In our music, there is a deep love – some real love translated into sounds,” Dunckel answers when questioned about the between-the-sheets action he’s helped to incite. “I know it’s a cliché, but a lot of people are still coming backstage and saying, ‘Oh, you know, I must admit something: Don’t tell anyone, but I met my girlfriend with your music and we made love a lot with your songs,” he trails off with a secret smile.
“And here is our child and you have to take care of it – thanks, guys,” Godin chimes in.

But Air is more than just great music to get down to. Godin and Dunckel, who have been playing together since they were teenagers in Versailles, have an intuitive sonic synchronicity that translates into delicious pop with an incredible emotive quality and innovative psych-rock leanings. The duo’s distinct brand of retrofuturism seamlessly merges the cutting-edge technology of today with the archaic instrumentation of yesteryear.

And then there’s this great obsession with the moon – a subject that has permeated Godin and Dunckel’s music for the past 15 years. While the gigantic natural satellite has served as a muse for artists since humans were able to artfully articulate, Godin and Dunckel have treated the celestial body as a recurring inspiration and a metaphor for life, love and the merging of the rational and fantastical.

“Our generation grew up with the idea of the moon very strongly in our culture,” opines Godin as he drums his fingers on the large glass table in an almost-tribal sounding percussive beat, as the untouched coffee shakes to the rhythm. “When I was a child, we were sure that in the year 2000, we would be in space with laser guns. We grew up with that fascination and so when we do music, we keep this dream alive. Because basically, this was a lie. We have been cheated – nothing like they promised happened. Now we have the iPad and that’s it – we are not in space. It’s how we learn how to dream and escape and to project ourselves in the future.”

It’s this type of wide-eyed idealism and romantic nostalgia that makes Air so irresistible.

Holed up in their studio and musical sanctuary – filled to the rafters with vintage keyboards, including a Memorymoog that lived through the rock and roll debauchery and bad hair of Mötley Crüe’s heyday – Godin and Dunckel exist in a beautiful, Technicolor bubble, making the sound they want without compromising their creative vision, even if that means never reaching stratospheric success.

“With the kind of music we do, if you want a bigger audience, [then] you have to make it less and less sophisticated,” Godin suggests thoughtfully as he sits back on the couch, popping a piece of mint gum into his mouth and tossing his locks from side to side. “I think the more vulgar you become, the more big you can become – and there’s a level of vulgarity we don’t want to reach. So I think we have personal reasons not to be more successful.”

And while they might be modest about their achievements, it doesn’t seem like a mere coincidence that the duo were approached last year to write the original soundtrack for the newly restored 1902 silent film Le Voyage Dans La Lune.

The century-old piece of filmic history is loosely based on the novels From Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne and H.G. Wells’ The First Men in the Moon and was directed by fellow Frenchman Georges Méliès who employed cutting-edge special effects for the time. Considered to be the first science fiction film ever made, the Le Voyage dans la Lune collaboration seemed like a fated project for Air – like lunar-centric bookends to a career informed by the exploration of musical space. It was a pairing too perfect for this world.

Méliès, a turn-of-the-century auteur, had conceived Voyage to be the first-ever blockbuster film and worked independently by funding the ambitious movie himself. When his studio went bankrupt, the color version of Méliès’ sci-fi masterwork went missing, lost in obscurity – much like the luminary director who left the movie business altogether and died in 1938.

Recovered in Spain in desperate shape, archivists began the painstaking scene-by-scene restoration of the film that would last 12 years. The film, without color or sound, is an almost comedic relic of a bygone era, with Belle Époque costumes and sometimes-cartoonish action sequences.

With the addition of the bold, psychedelic-inspired hues and Air’s moody futuristic soundtrack adding emotive depth and of-the-moment resonance, the original motion picture takes on new life and an almost-sinister quality.

With only a month to compose the soundtrack before the film’s premiere at the prestigious and star-studded Cannes Film Festival, Godin recalls how he green-lit the project without hesitation. “We accepted right away because Méliès is such a myth and, especially for us, because all of our music for the past 15 years has been inspired by the moon. I saw it as a sign or destiny or something.”

While their music-making is a more exacting science, it’s this type of instinct that seems to rule Air’s professional universe. Godin and Dunckel always make crucial career decisions by letting serendipity and chance guide them.

“I think we have a lucky star somewhere because [on] each album, we do collaborations and we are never really responsible for the input of these things,” continues Godin from his seat on the abnormally low couch. “We never look for it and, each time, there’s like the magic phone call or we meet someone at a party and it’s like we had no clue five minutes before that such a thing would happen.”

With a film this legendary and steeped in so much cinematic history, it seemed like a risky and controversial choice to approach the soundtrack using a future-focused aesthetic. While it may have seemed logical or safer to imbue the cinematic relic with era-appropriate sonic accompaniment, it never crossed Godin’s and Dunckel’s minds to play it safe – or to downplay their distinctive sound to fit the feature.

Instead, they saw the soundtrack as a rebirth and resurrection rather than a look at a historical piece of art. “I think when Georges Méliès did the movie such a long time ago, he didn’t know that the sound would exist in movies one day,” coos Dunckel. “And for this reason, this movie can now travel through time. It’s as if a piece of art can be born again, so I think that for us, we felt like we had to give a new life to the movie to match the new colors, the new feeling.”

According to Dunckel, not everyone embraced this creative direction. “I remember when we were at Cannes, there were some people talking about the movie and one of them said, ‘Oh, I didn’t like at all the music,’” he recalls. “I asked him why and he said that it should have been like the music from before and that it was too anachronistic. When he said that, I was glad because that was exactly what we wanted to do. We wanted to shock people and to be bold.”

The subject matter of the film couldn’t be more relevant for Air, who worked non-stop, living and breathing the Georges Méliès film that, until now, has never been shown to modern audiences in color or with sound.

The two were so inspired by Le Voyage Dans La Lune that they expanded the 14-minute long soundtrack into a full-fledged Air album of the same name, allowing these lunar fanatics to recount the voyage with their own narrative.

“If I want to tell the story of the trip to the moon myself, I would need at least 35 minutes – the length of an album,” explains Godin. “This is the musical language I know how to speak. There are certain aspects of the moon that weren’t in the movie that were very important to us and we wanted to put this on the record.”

It’s been three years since Air released their last album Love 2, which had moments of brilliance but received mixed reviews in the press. An amalgam of art-rock freak-outs and Godin and Dunckel’s signature breathy melodies and amorous-inspired atmospherics, it seemed like the prolific duo was running out of new material with the failed-to-launch effort. A creative push and an auspicious omen was what they needed – and Voyage is what they got.

“We always need something to feed us creatively,” explains Dunckel as he pushes the discarded coffee away from him. “Méliès was like a sign, and inspiration for us.”

Godin agrees: “He brought magic back into the studio. Because nowadays, the music world is kind of strange and it’s hard to find inspiration. When I was a child, I wanted to make records because I thought it was a magic thing to do. Méliès brought this magic to us – it was a good reason to make an album.”

On the rainy Tuesday evening before I meet Godin and Dunckel, Le Voyage dans la Lune made its New York City theatrical debut to a packed house at the Museum of Modern Art. The room was filled with media types, music fans and members of the all-girl Brooklyn-based electronic pop band Au Revoir Simone who collaborated on the creepy-cool track “Who Am I Now” inspired by the ultra-spooky soundtrack for Rosemary’s Baby. Featuring dark, phantasmal French and English call-and-response vocals and suspenseful bursts of rumbling percussion, this ominous song – that’s found on the album and not on the soundtrack – is an exciting sonic departure for Air.

“Working with Jean-Benoît and Nico was so much fun,” gushes vocalist and keyboard whiz Erika Forster of Au Revoir Simone. “They are open to and listening for whatever spontaneous magic happens in the studio, which is really similar to how we work, so it was super harmonious to join forces with them.”

Air also enlisted Beach House’s Victoria Legrand to sing on the celestial and cinematic “Seven Stars,” a song that conjures the glimmering ascent from the earth to the moon.

“We wanted to express the concept of the moon – the surface is very rocky and there are many volcanoes and craters and caves,” Godin says about selecting this gravelly-voiced songstress for the tune. “And we wanted to have this kind of voice that could express this – a dark mineral-like voice, and the texture of her voice is like that.”

While the film and the album may tell different versions of the same trip to outer space, Godin and Dunckel made sure to write the soundtrack and the album in the same way that Georges Méliès made the movie – by embodying the director’s independent vision and methodology.

“It’s a homemade process and I think Méliès worked in a very independent way and invested his money to build his own studio and that’s exactly what we did,” says Godin. “And so when we did this album, we wanted to work the way he used to work, so we wanted to conceive everything ourselves.”

Friend, collaborator and Phoenix frontman, Thomas Mars says much the same. “They created this amazing studio in Paris and they made everything themselves,” he explains over the phone from Los Angeles. “So it makes a lot of sense to me that what will come out will be so personal in the end because they worked on every possible stage of the process.”

Mars, who lent his vocals to the bittersweet song “Playground Love” from Air’s ‘70s-inspired soundtrack to The Virgin Suicides, also notes how this whimsical twosome are not only a product of their moon-obsessed generation, but also of their Gallic culture. “They are both extremely French. I don’t think there’s anyone more French than them,” he says with a playful laugh. “And it’s a timeless vision of France. But they are very complex guys and they are very mysterious, and I think that’s part of the appeal.”

Although Air embraced the task at hand and completed the project without any outside influence or help, it was not always easy, nor was it a process they will most likely ever repeat again.

“I don’t know if I liked it,” admits Godin with a grimace. “I did it just because of the experience of making it, but it was too many things to think about. At some point, I was very sick and scared of making wrong decisions. I really went crazy. So for the next movie, I definitely want more help. We are really proud of it, but it was a lot of worries.”

As the interview comes to a close, and after Godin and Dunckel joke about how my questioning felt like group therapy, Some Kind of Monster -esque line of questioning, I am left with one last important question: Why the name Air?

“It was quite instinctive,” says Dunckel, not really explaining anything at all, as he pulls up his quirky striped socks. “It fits the style of the music. Like if you hear this music, it’s the perfect name for it.”
“One day, I saw this quote in the newspaper or magazine in the States,” adds Godin. “They were describing our music as a Frisbee that never lands and I thought it was exactly that. The name wasn’t made for a reason – it just feels so good with this kind of music. It was almost perfect, ya know?”

Not quite as perfect as the aptly timed release of Le Voyage dans la Lune, which dropped on a full moon.