If $40 a head seems a bit much for a full serving of French electro-confections, you might very well have had something more fiscally responsible to do this past Thursday. If not, you were probably starting the weekend right last night with a degustatory breath of fresh Air. Quelle élégance!
Touring in support of last year’s Love 2, French duo Jean-Benoît Dunckel and Nicolas Godin delivered an appropriately dispassionate mix of bittersweet balladry that successfully strung together the more memorable pages of their well-traveled back catalogue (circa Moon Safari and Talkie Walkie) with several accessible new entries.
Somewhere in the second half of last night’s set at the Electric Factory, Air played “How Does It Make You Feel?” from their 2001 release 10,000 Hz Legend. Essentially a cheeky experiment in DER (Digital Emotional Response) that tests the peak levels of listener identification with a disembodied, synthetically poetic HAL 2000, the song seems to be leading the witness as the lush and languorous chorus occasionally pops in to see how things are going. The detached performance of this robocoded lover boy suggest that some post-emotional scientific methodology is at work, but the immediately endearing pop-ambience of the organically posed question proves the future was probably long ago synthesized to perfection on the radio.
