AIR. It always was an ambitious name for a band, so brief and elemental. It posed from the start the question of substance, and when the French duo of Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunckel turned up in 1998 with the, well, airy electronic sketches of Moon Safari, they achieved saturation in certain circles followed by a depletion of density.

Having spawned no imitators, initiated no trends, they returned at unhurried intervals with albums mining essentially the same concept: highly produced affairs with a pop sophistication so uncanny as to cause as much wariness as listening pleasure, earning them not-quite-friendly designations like “soft electropop.”

And now they’re back, three years after their 2004 sortie Talkie Walkie, with a new album called Pocket Symphony that finds them in a stripped-down, quiet place, a minimalist project that might or might not prove a commercial risk. The “French Touch” club wave, to which they only awkwardly belonged in the first place, has long since waned. They are alone – a condition, it turns out, that they find quite appealing.

On a chilly evening, Godin and Dunckel sit in a Williamsburg photographer’s studio, letting a soggy couch support them after they’ve posed for a shoot. They’ve had a tedious day, spent mainly at the French consulate renewing passports after a misunderstanding with authorities at JFK. Godin, who has the perkier personality, is distracted at first, texting with his girlfriend in Paris. Dunckel seems part contemplative, part jetlagged.

Neither man is a massive physical specimen, but both are attractively lanky and appear comfortable in their skin and relaxed-European garb: jacket, dark pants, open shirt. They are, to put it simply, French – casually, fluidly so, but leaving no doubt as to their cultural provenance. For this writer, who happened to grow up in France about the same time Godin and Dunckel did, it’s an uncanny blast from the past.

And so is their music in a lot of ways. There’s a retro, romantic underpinning to their work – a self-conscious effort to put themselves outside trend and time. Critics pin on them pop labels – post-Kraftwerk synth-electronica, post-Gainsbourg French existential pop, and the 1990s “French Touch” club music – but they resist all designations.

The influences they credit are not performers but composers – Erik Satie, Olivier Messiaen, Philip Glass – and most of all the soundtrack composers of their childhood like Ennio Morricone and Michel Colombier. A fascination with film scores is key to the Air sensibility and results from the pair growing up with a typically French cinema habit.

As epiphanies go, Godin likens the first time he heard Morricone’s soundtrack to Sergio Leone’s spaghetti-western classic The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, in its life-changing effect, to an American first hearing the Beatles in 1964 on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”

“I think for a French kid watching these movies was the biggest shock you could feel when you were a teenager or child,” Godin says. “Because pop culture isn’t a French thing, but music soundtracks are a strong part of French culture.” He cites composers such as Georges Delarue, who worked with Jean-Luc Godard, or Michel Colombier.

There’s a retro, romantic underpinning to their work – a self-conscious effort to put themselves outside trend and time.

Growing up, Godin says, “You can’t be French and say I’m going to be hip hop. As an American teenager you can dream of hip hop, but as a French teenager it’s ridiculous. But we have these soundtracks. That’s why we go more into this orchestral music.”

That premise, of course, is open to challenge – after all, there’s a profusion of quality French hip hop – but it indicates from where Air is coming. They are, in a sense, space-age cultural conservatives, purveyors of a nostalgic electronica in which lyrics are optional, song structure is secondary, and the priority is the establishment of a sonic haven where you can be free with your fantasies, just like at the movies.

“Normal people go to the cinema and that’s the way they get moved,” Dunckel says. “And so I try to model this emotion and make music with it, and have the same effect. What I take from a movie, I put it in some speakers, and that’s the basis of Air’s music, I think. People just listen to our music and they think they are in a movie.”

Air have one actual soundtrack to their credit, the 2001 score to Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides. It was their second full-length project and seemed a departure from the proper progress path for a new pop group. Looking back, it may have proven a rare chance to score a full movie from a clean slate rather than assemble a package of songs “inspired by” the film, as is increasingly common.

It’s an approach they’d like to revive, although probably not with Coppola: “She’s doing less and less in terms of traditional soundtrack,” Godin says. “She works with a guy who collects a lot of songs and puts them in the movie. We prefer the traditional approach.”

Dunckel picks up: “I think that when you do a soundtrack, your heart is more full and your mind is more open, and anything is possible. But when you do an album, it’s more formatted. Even before you start you feel more limited, because it’s songs. When it’s a soundtrack, it can go in any direction; there’s no rule.”

Some people like songs, of course – even Air, when pressed to discuss specific tracks. Still, they are coming back to the wide-open soundscapes of their early work. Principally instrumental and, on the whole, a relatively quiet album, Pocket Symphony lacks the agitation of 10,000 Hz Legend or the crisply packaged pacing of Talkie Walkie. It makes no apologies for the minimalist serenity that may drive antsy listeners up the wall, but that reflects the state of mind of the duo, who are now deep in their thirties.

“Every record reflects where we are,” says Dunckel. “It’s amazing. I can read all my life looking at the records we did. Moon Safari was innocence, 10,000 Hz was tortured…”

Asked how they’ve changed, Dunckel answers by means of a projection.

“I think there is always this girl that we are speaking to,” he says. “Like the average woman, or the girl that we would like to have, or that we have just had, and it’s this freeform shape, this woman that we are talking to and is always there.”

“At the beginning she was a brunette,” Godin interjects. “Now she’s a blonde.”

“At first she was only there to pass a good time with,” Dunckel continues. “But now she is a mother. She has to be able to face maternity.”

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