'Air Play Moon Safari' is the French band's latest tour, as they play their intimate, retro-futurist classic album, in full, from a five-sided, white-walled, 21:9 aspect-ratio letterbox that faces its voyeuristic audiences like Hitchcock’s Rear Window property as reimagined by Californian modernists. 'It could be a home, it could be our world, our head… our architectural concept,' they say of the project.
Air play Moon Safari: the White Box stage
Designed by lighting / art director partnership Antoine Jorel and Pierre Claude, the pantechnicon installation acknowledges the band’s long-standing, creatively synergistic relationship with buildings. Before music became his full-time concern, the duo’s guitar and keyboard player Nicolas Godin studied at the École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Versailles. His father, Philippe Godin, also an architect, helped design Monaco’s Stade Louis II stadium (with French functionalist master Henri Pottier) and worked on Yamoussoukro, a new Ivory Coast capital city project commissioned by President Felix Houphouet-Boigny in the 1980s.
The dreamy instrumental 'Modular Mix' from Air's 1997 EP, ‘Premiers Symptômes’ was inspired by the work of Swiss architect Le Corbusier, while the compositions on Godin’s solo debut Concrete and Glass are described by the artist as 'square and parallel, very clean. Like a building.' Keyboardist and mathematics graduate Jean-Benoît Dunckel, meanwhile, cites Air’s greatest ever live performance as its 2016 show at Oscar Niemeyer’s UFO-shaped Amphithéâtre Coupole at Espace Neimeyer in Paris’s 19th arrondissement.
A recent show at the Jørn Utzon-designed Sydney Opera House comes a close second. For Air’s 2024 US and European tour, Godin and Dunckel’s creative team returned to architectural themes for visual reference. Playing with straight lines and white surfaces, compact, intensifying environments and James Turrell-esque light sculptures, a transportable, adjustable container of digital pyrotechnica was fabricated to encase the three live performers in a structure that echoes Richard Neutra’s Californian Stilt House or Mies Van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House.
'It’s a light box. It looks a bit like the studio on the cover of 10 000 Hz's Legend,' says Dunckel referring to the desert architecture fantasy by Ito Morabito (aka designer Ora Ito) on the band’s 2001 album sleeve. 'The box represents a frame for the Air universe. Trapped in a box together we are more tight.' Musically and socially. 'We enjoy hardware,' adds Air’s Nicolas Godin. 'We like the simplicity of the white box. It concentrates the live experience. It’s like we are in the space shuttle.'
Having already worked with The Strokes, French indie band Phoenix and rapper Disiz, Antoine Jorel and Pierre Claude created a concept for Air based on jet-age minimalism; 'technically complex but visually simple', with accents of Stanley Kubrick’s white-clad, Korova milk bar denizens in A Clockwork Orange and the movie’s frequent, visual white-outs.
The box’s walls are an electrically opaqueable polycarbonate, the semi-transparent video ceiling is made from lacquered and reflective white metal, while its floor is covered with white mirror 'dance carpet'. Everything is designed to be within the frame; there are few visible cables or unsightly monitors and no conventional lighting rigs. A plastic film in front of the box’s screen can render the performing image crystal clear or dreamily blurry.
'As kids our influences were pop soundtracks and TV,' says Godin acknowledging the band’s atmospheric, cinematic sound on Moon Safari. 'We didn’t have a pop music experience like the British and Americans. Instead, we heard music through TV and movies, soundtracks and themes.
'The French had Debussy and Satie, then rock ‘n’ roll came along, with its verse / chorus pop songs.' This, he says with a smile and a Gallic shrug, ruined everything for France. 'We wanted to change that perception but we didn’t want to copy the English or Americans. We wanted to do something continental.'
To complement Moon Safari’s sound, Air also wanted a future-lounge visual aesthetic for the album cover, Godin steering US film-maker and artist Mike Mills towards the strip cartoons in Guy Debord’s cutting-edge Internationale Situationniste journal from the 1960s for inspiration.
Some 25 years after the debut’s original release, animated renderings of Mills’ illustrations – the two band members as sexy boys alongside spaceship quarterdecks, shooting stars and interstellar salons – now dazzle the lightbox walls during Air’s live shows.
The music of ‘Moon Safari’ is still vocoder galactic and intimate, its atmosphere smoky-Parisian and fin de siècle seductive. 'The set is an invitation to come into our world, our living room,' says Dunckel '…our bedroom, even?'
'Air Play Moon Safari' is on tour throughout 2024 in Europe, the USA and Mexico
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