The French electronic duo were the musical backbone behind Sofia Coppola’s startling debut. A 25th anniversary reissue saw them reconstructing much of their work from scratch.
Some creative partnerships are meant to be. In the case of Air and director Sofia Coppola, their collaboration on The Virgin Suicides was nothing if not serendipitous.
Released in January 1998, Air’s debut album Moon Safari had sent the band stratospheric, with the tracks ‘Sexy Boy’ and ‘Kelly Watch The Stars’ becoming pop culture staples. In the face of extensive promotional activity, the duo, comprising Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunckle, were becoming increasingly disillusioned and yearned to try something new.
“Moon Safari was so hyped and so trendy,” Godin notes ruefully. “We wanted to do something much darker – to do the opposite of this kind of shop music. I think people thought Air was becoming a marketing band. A lot of people thought we were DJs.”
At the same time, Sofia Coppola was crafting the screenplay for her directorial debut. An adaptation of the Jeffrey Eugenides novel of the same name, The Virgin Suicides was shaping up to be a somber, melancholic and darkly humorous reflection on disaffected youth. Unbeknownst to Air, Moon Safari was Coppola’s soundtrack of choice during writing sessions. When it came to choosing composers, they were top of her list. “She was really nervous because it was her first movie,” Dunckle recalls. “She was surrounded by LA people – people from Hollywood – and I think she was a bit afraid of that. She wanted to have something original and different.”
A mutual connection in the form of Moon Safari’s graphic designer Mike Mills, co-founder of production company The Directors Bureau alongside Coppola’s brother, Roman, led to the duo being invited to Los Angeles to see early rushes from the shoot, which had taken place in Toronto, a stand-in for suburban Detroit. Inspired by what they saw, the scoring process would reflect the band’s minimalist philosophy. They rented a house near Versailles – a bankrupt recording studio with only the bare acoustics. Drums, a potentially time-stamping element, were carefully crafted to evoke the 1970s period of the film, while an organ was employed to echo the film’s more macabre themes.
“We had this vision of the music being something dark, something kind of religious,” Dunckle explains. “We bought a liturgic Hammond organ that priests play in churches and that's why it's all over the sound of The Virgin Suicides. It's always there and it gives this kind of religious, dark, deadly aspect of the music because it sounds like a church organ.”
Using a combination of rented microphones and home-studio gear, Air achieved a sound that was simultaneously authentic to the era and unbound by modern overproduction, a constraint that was crucial to their creative process. “I don’t think comfort is good to create,” Godin muses. “It’s better when you’re in a shitty place where nothing works. When you become a big name in music and everybody's got their own amazing studio, that's when you start making music less interesting. You need to be uncomfortable to create, I think.”
With Air slated to tour in early 1999, recording began in December 1998, five months ahead of the film’s Cannes premiere. Captured entirely on an eight-track recorder, the sessions lasted a lean three months, during which time the band found themselves with enough material to populate a wildly different follow-up to Moon Safari.
“It was much darker than [the film] ended up being,” Godin reflects. “That's when I learned about editing in cinema… I saw the final movie and it was the same image, but the vibe was so different. So it's a very powerful process, the editing. When it was finished and when I saw the movie in Cannes, I really thought we didn't quite do the right music for it because our music was obviously too dark.”
It was only after Air had returned their rental equipment that Coppola reached out again, this time requesting a song for the end credits. “It was the last thing I wanted to do,” Godin laughs. “I remember seeing Robin Hood with Kevin Costner and at the end there's this song by Bryan Adams, and I thought it was so lame and cheesy. It had nothing to do with the movie. I was 21 or 22 and I had no idea I would have a musical career, but I said ‘I will never do this shit.’”
Nevertheless, Coppola knew what she wanted and, pressed for time, Godin and Dunckle returned to the studio for a weekend. In need of vocals, they turned to the only singer they knew, fellow Versailles native and Phoenix frontman, Thomas Mars, who in a twist of fate no one could have anticipated, Coppola would later end up marrying. “We showed Thomas the scene where ‘Highschool Lover’ plays,” Dunckle recalls. “It was in the scene where you have Trip Fontaine lying on the floor with Lux and there’s this theme playing in the background. So that's why he was thinking about ‘playground love’ when he wrote the lyrics”.
Eager to separate his cameo appearance from his band, Phoenix, Mars assumed the moniker of Gordon Tracks and, working alongside saxophonist Hugo Ferran, Air created the song ‘Playground Love’ based on the instrumental ‘Highschool Lover’, which permeates much of the score. Though Godin was initially hesitant, it would eventually serve as the album’s opening track; an enduring piece of cinematic music that reflects the film’s themes, while standing alone as its own melancholic love song.
With recording complete and Air unable to record new material due to touring commitments, Coppola found herself in something of a predicament. Having already excised much of the novel’s more graphic content with a view to reshaping the film into a more romantic story, much of Air’s darker material no longer fit. Working with music supervisor Brian Reitzell, Coppola set about splicing select tracks to picture in a manner more akin to needle drops found elsewhere in the film, alongside period songs from the likes of ELO, Styx, Al Green and The Bee Gees.
“Maybe she wanted to have something more close to the picture, but we didn't have the time to do that,” Dunckle muses. “We had just a video tape player and hard drives to record the music... All we could do was create a piece of music and give it to her, and she had to cut it to the picture.”
With 2025 marking the 25th anniversary of the album’s release, Godin and Dunckle decided to revisit the recordings and create a redux version using the original stems for each instrument. They soon discovered that they had lost several hard drives from the original recording sessions. “We didn't realise that it could become an interesting, well-known album,” Dunckle laughs. “But in cinema 50% of movies are lost, so doing some safeties is really important. It's part of your job as an artist to take care of your art and to save it and to regularly do some digital copies.”
The duo set about painstakingly reconstructing the missing elements. ‘Highschool Lover’ had to be re-recorded entirely from scratch using the same instruments, equipment and musicians. ‘Suicide Underground’, an ominous, pensive track built around a demo of the film’s narration, was rebuilt with only the original drum stems for reference, while its dialogue, originally sampled from a VHS, had to be separated from the original master with AI before being added to the new mix.
“We did like Peter Jackson to extract the vocals from the record,” Godin explains with a smile. “With half the other tracks it was just one instrument, or maybe two, that were missing. In the past when we used to record on tapes, you didn't lose anything, but now with the computer and the hard drives and the safeties, we still lost that stuff.”
While they share names, Air’s album remains a tantalising glimpse of what might have been – a collection of darker soundscapes that found themselves without a home as Coppola’s vision evolved. While only ‘Playground Love’, the instrumental ‘Clouds Up’ and numerous variations of the ethereal ‘Highschool Lover’ are present in the final edit, it remains a fascinating snapshot of a band exploring new sonic possibilities that would go on to shape their sound.
“I don't know if our soundtrack is good or not, but in my opinion, to do something kind of remarkable and noticeable, you have to be a little bit off,” Dunckle states modestly. “The soundtrack is a little bit off. It sounds like another thing on the album, but it pulls the feeling of the movie into something kind of different.”
0 Comments