Air, Moon Safari
Today is a cleaning up and partying day. I’m not entirely sure that Air are going to make the best cleanup soundtrack in the world, but if I’m following the rules I have to listen to them next, and while I am working on some new songs, I’ve listened to them so much as a thinking exercise or as a default from the alphabetical list that I’m a bit sick of them, even though they are clearly works of genius (wink wink).

It really is getting things done music though, albeit in a calm and measured manner – there’s an expectancy that of course you’ll do what you need to and all in good time.

This was kind of ubiquitous in 1999 or thereabouts, wasn’t it? I became aware of “Kelly Watch the Stars” on a Brits 97 compilation though, a boyfriend at the time said it was rubbish, boring, just went round and round and round without doing anything. It’s only in the last couple of years I’ve started to realise how much I like that kind of music, and while I’m not holding up Air to Steve Reich, Terry Riley or even the great and glorious Donna Summer, I can see a link here. That’s what happened to the avant-garde, it put on some glitter heels and had some fun and came back to us as disco and dance. I’m sure I’ll go more into that on another entry though; enough of Air is “traditional” soul song writing that it wouldn’t support too deep an explanation of that particular point of view here.

I know that Air is comprised of two French blokes, who are the singers in-between? What do Air do? Are they the orchestrators? Something happens halfway through the album to lead you into that lovely song Ce matin la, with its really filmic strings and that rather fussy trombone solo. I remember hearing this song somewhere when I was a student, what in it was to convince you that you were living in the 1990s? It seemed instead like something from Glen Campbell, or some theme from a terribly old soap that a grandmother would watch, something on at three in the afternoon featuring lots of blonde dependable women she still wished herself among the ranks of. Probably set in the rolling countryside, where sexual relationships amounted to an understanding look or nod as children ran in long grass. The wah-wah guitar does pull you out of all that rather…

The album’s over, all of a sudden. It lulls you into a calm, this sense of all-in-good-time and yes as the album finishes, I finish vacuuming, dusting, putting things in their proper place and am almost ready for another coffee. You are held in a security then woken up. Quite a cruel trick really.

I read recently an article about Mark Titchner, who did those great Orwellian posters I saw at the Arnolfini a while ago, and heard him refer to his earlier works as “ambient paintings”; in that, as he explained, you didn’t’ really notice the painting, it just lent something to the room. There’ll be more room to go into this when I reach the Brian Eno end of the CD collection currently controlling me. Perhaps that’s what happened with listening to Moon Safari, except Kelly Watch the Stars and Ce matin la have wormed they way into my head by dint of repetition and beauty and envelope me in their ambience. My room is clean now anyway.