Chanson Anglais

Air: Nicolas Godin (l) and Jean-Benoit Dunckel

If French pop music were as realized as French cinema, Catherine Deneuve, not Björk, would have been the star of Lars Von Trier's brilliant musical, Dancer in the Dark. Instead, Deneuve discs such as Souviens-Toi M'Oublier and Dieu Fumeur dè Havanes inch closer to the Dimitri From Paris and Daft Punk cut-outs at Virgin Megastores around the world. Stereolab does what it can for the resistance, singing en Francais, while the Les Parapluies de Cherbourg soundtrack is always a solid bet at Bastille Day celebrations, but they can only do so much. Then there's Air.

With 1998's gravity-defying Moon Safari, a spacey, stellar, Euro-retrograding of space-age bachelor kings Martin Denny and Esquivel, Air touched down where no French act before them had even ventured: the ranks of the indie elite. Parisian garçons Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoit Dunckel's subsequent launches, '99's succulent singles roundup, Premiers Symptomes, and last year's gritty score to Sofia Coppola's directorial debut, The Virgin Suicides, only ordered up more champagne and caviar for the DJ duo. Hot on the French footware of their new, testing, testing, 10,000HZ Legend, the precocious pair are off on their first North American tour, the second show of their 16-date voyage being in here Austin at La Zona Rosa. Le sold out.

Seeing as interviews with Godin and Dunckel were like the recently rocking French thriller With a Friend Like Harry -- vanishing quickly -- the opportunity to try one's junior high/high school French on one of the unsuspecting Airs was too good to pass up. Since Godin was busy delivering his own heir, Dunckel, who was tres charmant and whose English was tres bien, and his label Astralwerks allotted the Chronicle exactly 15 minutes to ascertain why the U.S. is so full of, umm, Airheads.

Jean-Benoit Dunckel: Helllooo!

Austin Chronicle: Bonjour!

JBD: Bonjour.

AC: Comment ça va?

JBD: Ça va bien. Euh ... vous parlez Français?

AC: Un petit peu. Je parle Español.

JBD: Ah d'accord. Vous avez une nombre Français?

AC: Oui. Comme le peinture Raoul Dufy.

JBD: Raoooule Dufy. Eez a nice name.

AC: Oui.

JBD: Bon.

AC: [Clearing throat] So ... were you surprised by the success of the Moon Safari in the United States?

JBD: Uhh, yes. We were a little bit surprised and pleased, but the success was very long to come, you know. It worked over two years, three years. It was not successful at once. So, you know, it was not like a big surprise. Every day, the album was working more and more, and so it was cool.

AC: I'm trying to recall a French act that ever did as well as Air has in the United States. François Hardy, maybe?

JBD: Ummm, maybe there is Yves Montand? He was the boyfriend of Marilyn Monroe -- maybe he was not. I know that a lot of people know him in the U.S., but I don't know if he sold some records, because he was a singer, too. I don't know if [his] records worked well in the U.S.

AC: Serge Gainsbourg has built quite a cult following in the last 20 years.

JBD: Ah, yeah.

AC: Your new album, 10,000HZ Legend, reminds me of Radiohead's OK Computer in its relation to technology as both romantic and anti-romantic.

JBD: I love this album, because it's completely experimental. If you analyze a little bit the music, you can figure it's such progressive work in terms of production and composition, too, because you can find some tracks with five-beats measure. You can check that the voice is treated completely different for each track. There are many musical parameters like that, which are completely extreme and completely original. I like it a lot.

AC: Is there a concept behind it, however loose?

JBD: It was not exactly a concept, but we had some main lines to follow. For example, we wanted to escape from the retro-futuristic style of Air. I don't know if we [managed to] do it, but we have tried something more modern. On this album, we wanted to be different and original. We wanted to break, if possible, the rules of music. We wanted to do some beautiful, harmonic pop songs, but very strange. With a very strange structure.

We had this concept about doing a sort of movie, with music, because in movies you have events. When you watch a movie, you are surprised; some things are very slow, some other things are very fast and violent. We wanted to have a more extended range of emotions. That's why we used a sort of, dark, cold sound to increase the nasty aspect of the album. But at the same time, you have some very nice moments. I think we just wanted to make people travel by this album.

AC: Were you influenced by scoring the soundtrack to The Virgin Suicides?

JBD: Yes. It was very fun, very exciting. And because we were attracted by the trash-art aspect of the movie, which was not too obvious after the final cut of Sofia [Coppola]. The first rushes that she showed us was a little bit ... harder. It was about suicide. We liked so much the scenes of sex, because the girl, for the first time, is doing sex, is making sex with a boy, and so you have this feeling of love, and dirty sex melted into the same time, and we like this kind of ambience.

At the end you have -- you had -- some drug scenes, and some very soft [porn] sex scenes, too, so we wanted to play with that, but when Sophia finally cut the movie, it was more Hollywood. In one way, she made the good choice. But I think there is a kind of gap between the nasty aspect of our soundtrack and the movie.

But, yes, it was a very good experience, because we traveled in the U.S. We were in Los Angeles in a good hotel. We were supposed to do some recordings for this last album, and we did some shows for Virgin Suicides, but in fact, we were too much into Virgin Suicides, and each night we were going out with a bunch of people and it was a little bit, uhh ... How do you [say]? We were out of the music. [Laughs]

I think the record company spent too much money for the hotels, and we don't do anything except the germ of recording the CD. It was very fun, because it was in February in Los Angeles and the weather was not so bad, [whereas] in Paris it was cold. We had fun. We went out very, very late at night. We have met some people -- some girls. In their rooms. It was a little bit decadent.

AC: [Laughing] And now you're going on tour! Is this your longest tour? Only tour?

JBD: We have only done maybe 12 shows.

AC: This time it's 14 cities, 18 shows. Is touring America a little like chasing windmills in terms of ground to cover?

JBD: No, it's a pleasure. We are a little bit victims of the American dream. We begin to analyze what's going on in the U.S., you know, and the U.S. is not so good. [Chuckling] But we like U.S. We like to meet our fans. This is a big adventure for us. I think we want to discover new countries, and this is part of the dream.

AC: Is there any pressure on you to sing English? Most of the vocals on this new album are in English. French is such a beautiful language.

JBD: [Laughs] No one can put the pressure on us, except the record company in terms of marketing. In terms of art, we are independent, and we will stay independent artistically. This is the French future, you know? How far we have come from the home studio in terms of production, in terms of music, in terms of style. We just follow ourselves. If we sing in English, it's because in French, it's impossible to say "I love you" or "I feel you good" -- I don't know, something like that -- without being ridiculous.

Because in French, you have such traditional background, so many genius writers, so many poetic people, and so it is very hard to fight against the [artistic] background of France. So, we are doing some very nice poetry. English is good, because first, as we are not English, we can do some poetic sentences, because grammatically our words are not correct. The way we pull the words together is not correct. I know. [Laughs] We feel artist by doing English lyrics. We are doing this out of a psychedelic sense.

AC: In that sense, it must have been cool to work with Beck on the new album.

JBD: Yes, yes. It was exciting. As I said, we are part of the American dream, and Beck was the key person to do this kind of very roots -- American roots -- music, because he can do some interesting folk music. The songs that we were doing need this production style. It goes very well with the album.

AC: You're gonna be in Texas soon. What do you hear about Texas?

JBD: [Laughs uneasily] Dallas is in Texas, right?

AC: Dallas and Austin, yes.

JBD: I'm not excited by the Dallas series, you know, at TV. I have this vision of businessmen with cowboy hats under the sun.

AC: [Laughing] That's about the size of it. Well, thanks. Good luck with the tour. Bon chance. See you soon.

JBD: Okay, be cool.

AC: Bye.

JBD: Au revoir.