2024-02-25 19:43:01
For the international tour celebrating the twenty-five years of its first retrofuturist album “Moon Safari”, the emblematic French Touch Air duo began their journey on Saturday in Geneva at the Victoria Hall, as part of the Antigel Festival. He replayed this repertoire in order, enhanced with nine other titles.
A scenography reminiscent of a large cinema screen, lighting evoking Kubrick’s “2001, A Space Odyssey” and Air which enters the stage all in white as is often the case. Immediate boarding for a one-way trip to the Moon under the gaze of two white eyes with red star-shaped pupils. At the Victoria Hall in Geneva on Saturday evening at the closing of the 14th edition of the Antigel Festival, the first impressions left by the duo formed by Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunckel, accompanied on this tour by drummer Louis Delorme, are eminently cinematic, stellar and ultra licked.
They carry an almost unreal dimension, also dreamlike like the musical journey offered by their first album “Moon Safari” released in 1998, which marked its time and crossed the ages thanks to its exquisite hybridizations between instrumental orchestrations and electronic production.
The ten cult tracks from “Moon Safari”
To celebrate the twenty-five years since the release of these ten titles teleported by the global hit “Sexy Boy”, the emblematic French Touch duo visited Rouen during a residency punctuated by a first private concert on February 16. It is thus at Antigel and to a sold-out audience that the Versailles duo officially launched their international tour which notably passes two evenings at the Royal Albert Hall in London and whose duration is already being extended from day to day.
The French group Air at the Victoria Hall in Geneva as part of the Antigel Festival, February 24, 2024. [Antigel 2024 – Olivier Miche]
From the seven introductory minutes of the fantastic and psychedelic “La femme d’argent” to the epilogue consisting of “Le voyage de Pénélope”, including the other hit that is “Kelly Watch the Stars” and the rich sound of ” New Star in the Sky (Song for Solal)”, Reactive Air in its luminescent bubble stages the retrofuturism of a repertoire that is at once soft, deep, melancholic and psychedelic which has hardly aged a bit.
The melodic science of Air
Embellished with nine other titles with celestial visuals, including this “Highschool Lover” appearing in the soundtrack of the film “Virgin Suicides” by Sofia Coppola or the more rock “Venus” and “Surfing on a Rocket”, this narrative concert further accentuates the atmospheric tunes eyeing the 7th Art prized by Air and delivered between keyboards, synthesizers, bass, guitars, percussion, electronic drums and robotic voices.
Air manages to deploy this artistic coherence with a sense, even an incredible science of details, between warm melodic breaths, polar rhythms and instrumental motifs. And when at the end of the space odyssey, Air accentuates the speed and cruising power with “Don’t Be Light” and “Electronic Performers” with some stroboscopic effects, the Moon seems within reach. The public is on its feet in any case, applauding wildly under the gold of the Victoria Hall for its interstellar heroes of one evening.
Olivier Horner
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