When they formed in late ’90s, the French duo Air never intended to take their sensual and hypnotic confections of ambient pop on the road.
The music created in the studio by Jean-Benoit Dunckel and Nicolas Godin seemed almost too perfectly formed to risk the unpredictability of a live show.
But before long they started to feel lonely, Dunckel says shortly before Air’s short West Coast tour, which includes the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles on Sept. 21 and the Grove of Anaheim on Sept. 24.
“When you work for two years, and then you put out a record, and then you just see the results in the charts, you don’t meet anybody, and it’s really sad and doesn’t make sense at all,” he says by phone from Paris.
“We wanted to understand why the people like the Air music, and the kind of revelations they expect from the show,” Dunckel says. “We wanted to feel the audience around us, just because it’s more fun, and it’s a life experience.”
Of course, the difficult side of touring – getting it to sound right live – is never easy, he says.
“It’s really difficult to recreate the charm of the music,” Dunckel says, agreeing with the assessment of touring guitarist Steve Jones in a recent interview that he and Godin are “absolutely sonic perfectionists.”
On stage, the amps and speakers might distort things slightly. The mix of players – he and Godin are joined by three backing musicians on this tour – increase the odds that songs so delicate and dreamy on CD might not sound as they should on stage.
“It’s like when you speak to someone, or when you caress a nice girl, you have to make it properly, and to be charming – and it’s really hard,” Dunckel explains of the difficulty of getting what he and Godin want on stage, using an analogy so perfectly French that you can’t help but smile.
“Because it’s like to (be) graceful you have to forget yourself, which is hard to do,” he adds.
Forgetting yourself seems the perfect metaphor for the experience of listening to Air, especially on “Pocket Symphony,” the duo’s most recent CD. Making that album involved a conscious choice to step back from the more straightforward pop rock – for Air, at least – of “Talkie Walkie,” its predecessor.
“We wanted to do something less pop and more soundtrack-y,” Dunckel says. “We wanted to get some strange musical universes.
“I think that’s what the audience wants to get,” he says, later adding that on this tour, the group is playing about four songs off “Pocket Symphony,” the rest from earlier works. “Because I think people want to listen to our records when they are sleeping or traveling or relaxing. It’s not about pop.”
Air toured in support of “Pocket Symphony” earlier this year, but except for a stop at Coachella in April, skipped over California. Now the band is making up for that and also getting a chance to visit a place that both inspires and intrigues them, Dunckel says.
“When you arrive for the time in Los Angeles, you really feel like you’re going on another planet and the people are like aliens,” he says. “It’s a very strange city, but also very magic, because we love music, and we love to record music, and this is the best spot in the world to do that.”
Because of Los Angeles’ dominance in the world of music and film, Dunckel says he and Godin have considered relocating here — besides the cinematic qualities of their music, they’ve also done the soundtrack to Sofia Coppola’s “The Virgin Suicides.”
In the end, though, life in Paris is too good to leave for the more intense life of L.A., he says.
“We are Parisians and we have to continue our way of life,” Dunckel explains. “We wanted to move to Los Angeles, but maybe we will have done too much work and we may have left our souls.”
Still, trips to Southern California continue to inspire their music, he says, describing “Mer du Japon” on the latest CD as coming from a feeling Air gets on trips to the Pacific Rim.
“We wanted to recreate the vibration of the Pacific Ocean, and you feel this vibration when you are on the beach in Los Angeles or when you are in Japan, too,” Dunckel says. “
“When you arrive in Japan, it’s the same sea, the same ocean,” he says of the gentle track that his partner describes as “haiku music.”
“But it’s also because we are very charmed by Asian girls in Japan,” he adds.
But of course.
Contact the writer: 714-796-7787 or plarsen@ocregister.com
