Record of the Month: Air — Moon Safari

Source and Virgin Records, 1998. Ten songs, 43 minutes — a record made in 1990s Paris that still sounds like somebody remembering the future.

Some albums announce themselves with impact. Moon Safari arrives on a bassline.

“La femme d’argent” begins slowly: electric piano, a soft pulse, a few handclaps and Nicolas Godin’s bass moving with the patience of someone who knows the room will come to him. The arrangement has space to breathe, and by the time the drums settle in Air have established the world of the record — warm, weightless and just slightly unreal.

It is a sound that became so familiar that it is easy to forget how peculiar it was. In 1998, electronic music was getting faster, harder and bigger. Air slowed everything down, filling their debut with vintage keyboards, vocoders, French pop, soft rock, orchestral arrangements and melodies that feel instantly familiar.

The future, in Air’s hands, sounded beautifully old.

Two men from Versailles

Air were Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunckel, childhood friends from Versailles who had taken unusually sensible routes into adulthood.

Godin trained as an architect. Dunckel studied mathematics and physics, then taught maths. Music sat alongside those lives for years — serious enough to obsess over, but not yet something either man could confidently call a career.

The name Air is sometimes expanded as Amour, Imagination, Rêve — love, imagination, dream — which suits the music almost too perfectly. Their actual method was less mystical. They worked slowly, building tracks in small studios from bass, keyboards, drum machines and whatever old equipment gave them the right colour.

The breakthrough came before the album. Early singles including “Modulor Mix”, “Casanova 70” and “Le soleil est près de moi” established a language: crisp beats, melancholy chords, analogue synthesisers and a very French understanding that elegance and strangeness can occupy the same space. Those recordings were later collected as Premiers Symptômes.

When it came time to make a full album, Air kept the method lean. Godin later recalled that no song on Moon Safari used more than eight recording tracks. The limitation made every sound carry its own weight.

Then they took those home-studio constructions to Abbey Road.

A small record becomes enormous

The strings on Moon Safari were arranged and conducted by David Whitaker, a British arranger whose long career moved between film scores, French pop and records by artists including Marianne Faithfull.

Air arrived at Abbey Road with music largely assembled through instinct and experimentation. Whitaker gave it scale without making it grandiose, threading the orchestra through the electronic parts on “Talisman” and “Ce matin-là”.

Synthetic bass meets acoustic guitar; drum machines sit alongside live percussion; the vocoder voices sound oddly hesitant. The machines leave plenty of room for small human details.

Air belonged loosely to the French Touch generation that also produced Daft Punk, Cassius and Étienne de Crécy, but Moon Safari never behaved like a club record. Its pulse comes from funk and disco, yet its emotional world is closer to Serge Gainsbourg, Burt Bacharach, Ennio Morricone and a half-remembered television theme heard from another room.

It was electronic music made to live outside the club, at home or on the drive back after everybody else had gone.

Where to begin

The opening seven minutes contain almost everything that makes Moon Safari special. “La femme d’argent” has no conventional vocal and no obvious climax; it simply lets its electric piano, handclaps and magnificent bassline take possession of the room. The descending chords carry a trace of Serge Gainsbourg’s Histoire de Melody Nelson, lifted into Air’s softer and more weightless world.

Beth Hirsch was an American singer living in Paris when she met Godin. She was not brought in as a polished session vocalist. That is precisely why “All I Need” works.

Her voice is close, unforced and slightly fragile. Against Air’s immaculate arrangement, she sounds completely human, and the directness of the lyric gives the album its emotional centre. Mike Mills understood that intimacy when he made the video, following a real young skateboarding couple in California.

Then there is the sheer oddness of its pop success. “Sexy Boy” reached number 13 in the UK with a glam-rock stomp and a two-word chorus sung through a vocoder. “Kelly Watch the Stars” reached number 18 by building a pop song from one line, a bright Moog figure and a reference to Charlie’s Angels. For all its elegance, Moon Safari has a generous sense of fun.

Elsewhere, “Talisman” swells like a lost film score, “Ce matin-là” brings French horn to a melody worthy of Bacharach, and “New Star in the Sky” turns the birth of a child into a point of light. These are songs worth living with, rather than a checklist to work through.

The future that never arrived

Godin and Dunckel grew up with the optimistic visual language of the 1960s and 70s: space stations, curved plastic furniture, silver suits and the assumption that ordinary life would soon become spectacular.

By the late 1990s, that future had failed to appear. Computers were beige. Cities still looked like cities. Nobody was living on the moon.

Moon Safari turns that disappointment into a world of its own. The cover, designed by Mike Mills, shows Godin and Dunckel as elongated figures inside a pale, geometric landscape. The music does the same thing: it takes obsolete visions of tomorrow and makes them emotionally useful again.

That is why the record has aged so differently from much late-90s electronica. Its technology was already deliberately out of time. There is no period-correct digital sheen to become embarrassing, no fashionable breakbeat that traps it in a particular summer. Even at release, it sounded like an artefact from a future remembered incorrectly.

What happened next

Moon Safari reached number six on the UK Albums Chart. “Sexy Boy” and “Kelly Watch the Stars” both became Top 20 singles. Within a month of the album’s release, Air had moved from a carefully guarded studio project to an international band.

Sofia Coppola heard something cinematic in the music and asked them to score The Virgin Suicides. That soundtrack deepened the darker side of Air’s sound and began a relationship between the duo and film that always felt inevitable.

The wider influence of Moon Safari is harder to measure because it spread everywhere. Its Rhodes chords, analogue bass and weightless production fed into downtempo, chillout, indie pop, advertising music and a generation of records designed to make electronic sound feel domestic. Plenty copied the surface. Very few found the same balance of humour, melancholy and restraint.

In 2024, following the album’s 25th anniversary, Air toured Moon Safari in full. Played by human beings on a stage, it revealed what had always been inside those perfect surfaces: basslines, melodies and arrangements strong enough to stand on their own.

Why it’s our Record of the Month

We chose Moon Safari because it is one of those rare records that makes life feel better while it is playing. From the first movement of that bassline, the room becomes warmer, calmer and slightly more beautiful. It is full of extraordinary musicianship and immaculate production, but none of that gets in the way of the pleasure: ten generous, melodic and quietly strange songs that still sound wonderful nearly three decades later.

At 12 Bar, it is the sort of record we reach for early in the day, while Paris Street is waking up and the first coffees are going across the counter. “La femme d’argent” has enough movement to lift the room; “All I Need” lands differently once the shop has filled and the morning rush has eased.

This is exactly what we want our Record of the Month to be: a brilliant album to play in the shop, an easy recommendation for someone looking for their next record, and a gateway into French pop, library music, downtempo and the wider French Touch. From here you can move towards Serge Gainsbourg, Broadcast, Stereolab, Jean-Jacques Perrey, Bacharach, Morricone or Air’s own darker work on The Virgin Suicides.

Familiar, adventurous and endlessly playable, Moon Safari is a record to enjoy rather than merely admire — and one we are very happy to celebrate this month.

Sounds like: Serge Gainsbourg’s Histoire de Melody Nelson · Burt Bacharach · Broadcast · early electronic pop · a 1970s vision of the year 2000

Perfect for: late Sunday mornings · cooking with nowhere else to be · the first warm evening of spring · driving after dark · anyone convinced electronic music has to sound cold

Start with: “La femme d’argent”. Let the bassline do its work. Then stay for the whole record.

Record of the Month is our regular pick from the racks — one album to live with properly, play in the shop and pass across the counter. Come in and ask us about it.