Godin and Dunckel are family men, though vague about the number and distribution of baby-mamas. Dunckel and his girlfriend live with his three kids and her two in a loft in the 10^th arrondissement of Paris, a once-seedy, now artsy district near two major train stations. Godin has two kids, a steady girlfriend, and lives in the upscale 16^th.

Between work and family life, Godin and Dunckel by their own admission don’t get out very much anymore. They don’t exude fascination with other pop developments, in Paris or elsewhere, and they reject any association with a music scene. They are quite literally bande à part, a French term for outsiders that translates to “a band apart.”

“Even when the ‘French Touch’ started, we were the only ones to do music with no beat in it,” Godin says. “And that’s amazing, even when we are part of a movement, we are alone in this movement. Now more than ever.”

“We are more part of a culture than part of a music scene,” Dunckel says.

Typically, a stance of splendid isolation in pop is hard to back up, exposed as it is to accusations of arrogance or complacency that are all too often well-founded. So it’s tempting to scrutinize Air for signs of hubris or, at least, disconnection with daily life. Remarkably, there are precious few. Godin and Dunckel are too down to earth, too obviously true to their game, and most of all too damn intelligent.

In fact, you could fairly call them intellectuals, ones who made the most of their high-end French public education and ultimately, despite becoming full-time musicians, never renounced their original fields – architecture for Godin, mathematics for Dunckel.

That background means that when Godin talks about building a song, he’s barely being metaphoric.

“Every song has an approach,” he says. “Our music is very built with a foundation and space. The first thing that they taught me at school is [that] the important thing is not the walls but the space behind the walls. The wall is nothing. Just put two walls together and it creates a space. Because if you take a baseline and a point, the whole energy between them creates the space of the music.”

“Our music is very spacey, it’s the most spacey music I know,” Godin continues. “I don’t know if that’s a good thing of bad, but at least it’s fucking spacey.”

The mathematically trained Dunckel, meanwhile, brings to the Air tracks the tinkering of an experimentalist who knows there can be beauty in an unexpected equation.

“Theory can be really important for improving music,” Dunckel says. “You say, I’m going to do some conceptual music now, and I want to reverse what the melody will do. I want the melody to be done by the bass, the bass lines to be made by the drums… It can lead to some really weird music.”

He grows animated as he details an example: “One day we made a track, we reversed the tape, pitched it down, picked it up… We wrote it down on paper, recorded the guitar making new chords, these chords were weird because we made some mistakes, we kept some reversed tracks mixed in with some new parts – it’s a theory thing but it works. The track is called ‘Caramel Prisoner’ - it’s on 10,000 Hz. Things like that.”

By stripping down the sound on Pocket Symphony, the pair have allowed themselves to dwell on conceptual matters. “Nightsight,” the album’s closing track, offers a simple illustration. It is built on two cycles, one of four notes and one of seven. The cycles merge and separate to an almost hypnotic effect kept off-kilter by the unusual spacing.

“When the cycles just go back together it’s such a relief,” Godin says. “And we say that the system of the song is that magic moment when suddenly they go back together for [about] one second. So we didn’t want to have too much on top of it. They just separate and come back together; that’s what creates the satisfaction. It really is a theoretical thing.”

Though it might sound paradoxical, for Air, the return to theoretical basics has meant a chance to make music that they consider warmer, by which they mean more sensual, compared to Talkie Walkie, which may be their best-crafted work songwise, but they now feel lacks an overall emotional signature.

“Our music maybe on Talkie Walkie was too cold, and I like that in the early years we were more sensual,” Godin says. “So many people made love to ‘La femme d’argent.’ We wanted to go back to that vibe.”

They like the idea of listeners having sex to their work. “At least feel some sensuality, some sexiness,” says Godin. A sonic architect, he wants to remodel your bedroom, perhaps modify some other spaces in your world to make them more conducive.

In the end, it comes down to basics. Music. Sex. Fantasy. On the new album, these themes seem to join in the repeated evocation of Japan. They know Japan from touring, of course, and Godin recently took up study of the Japanese koto, which he plays on the album. But Japan is also a parallel fantasy that could etch itself, in the end, anyplace.

“It’s a Pacific wind blowing in your face,” says Dunckel, explaining the song “Mer du Japon,” one of the few that includes a vocal part. “It’s like when you are amazed by an Asian girl, by her beauty, and you are jetlagged because you are in Japan, the wind from the ocean in your face, you are a little bit dizzy, you are lost…”

The essential truth that Air is onto is that: It’s important to be able to get lost, especially when you’re a star, or when you are creative, or when you live in the city, or maybe simply when you are human at all. Like the element they chose as their name, Godin and Dunckel have perfected the art of being present and absent at once vis à vis their audience, their peers, and even their country.

Two years ago, they were awarded a top French honor and made Knights in the National Order of Arts and Letters in a fancy government ceremony, the Minister of Culture reading a citation and adorning them with the order’s official lapel ribbon. They were, as ever, slightly flattered, slightly nonplussed, and not entirely there, already reworking the event into their fantasy world, turning it to potential creative material.

Godin smiles at the memory.

“I didn’t expect it, no,” he says. “But I was always a fan of Star Wars. I wanted to be a Jedi for the Republic, and now that’s what we are: knights of the French republic. When you are an artist, things happens to you, and you transform them into fantasy.”

- Story by Siddhartha Mitter, photos by Noah Kalina

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Posted to Music Features on Tuesday, March 20th, 2007 by Scott Morrow.