REVIEW: Air, Moon Safari (Source/Caroline)
- Robin Lapid
I have a feeling that Moon Safari started out as an interactive movie. It's 2 a.m. and you're relaxing in the chill-out tent at a rave, exhausted from a rigorous night of dancing. You close your eyes to soak in the dark, and float through soundscapes filled with jazz, soul, and mellow splashes of old-school Atari sound effects. The sensual sounds overtake you. You'd fall asleep, but then you wouldn't hear the music.
Versailles-born Nicolas Godin and Jean Benoit Dunckel are the writer-directors of this album, weaving pastoral pop and jazz into hybrid electronic songs. They've infused their aural visions with an array of keyboard and piano sounds, hints of acoustic guitar, and the occassional whispers of a sultry French soul-singer. This music carries more sonic levity than traditional ambient -- the pop instrumentals, the moog, and the Space Invaders effects keep the mood relaxed but intriguing.
It sometimes verges on the overly inocuous and airy (no pun intended). "Sexy Boy," the U.S. radio single and perhaps the weakest track, is more droning than hypnotic, with its persistent soft-techno whines and keyboards. But Moon Safari is more a complete journey into a mood, a sum of its parts rather than a loose collection of standout singles. Just when I feel the music drifting away into weightlessness, it brings me back down to earth. "Remember" is a track you really can't forget, with elegant strings following the gentle ebb and flow of keyboard burbles. "Ce Matin La" begins almost like an ambitious Abba song, before drifting off into some breezy, buoyant sax and violins.
Someone labeled them "post-house," which is a difficult definition in the techno/ electronica realm -- a "post-" prefix here and a "-core" suffix there, and you've got a thousand different sub-genres alone. To me, it's the sound of spaceships, violins, and seductively sunny days in the French countryside, the latter of which is, incidentally, where the album was recorded. No "post-" or "-core" for me, please; just give me Air's red-wine version of dub-ambient.
