AIR - Premiers Symptômes

AIR - Premiers Symptômes
Label - Source (FR)
Released - 1997
Style - Future Jazz, Space Rock, Lounge, Ambient, Electronic, Downtempo, Trip Hop

This EP is my favorite AIR production to date. Even after a million listens, it still sounds fresh. Classic 70s-style lounge instrumentation, excellent songwriting and very spacey pads/effects create gorgeous audio atmosphere. Standout tracks for me are "Modular Mix" and "Les Professionnels." But they're all superb.

(from AIR discographie):
A molecule of air is invisible and weightless and evasive to the hands grasp. Like the early singles of French band Air. Translucent and dreamlike and dispersed into the world between '95 and '97. Virtually impossible to get hold of. Until now. Premiers Symptomes is a collection of the gentle, fluid, langour of Air's first, perfectly formed, pieces. Featuring seven pre-Moon Safari moments in the evolution of Air. It includes "Modular," their musical gift to Le Corbusier's hypothetical Modular Man with its effervescent scrolls of Rhodes, like oxygen bubbles rising through water. "Casanova 70," a soothing, beatless ode to filmic sensualism. For "Californie": "We were imagining a man in the desert in California" says Jean Benoit Dunckel, "He was walking a lot and and he wanted to drink and he had no water. He is very thirsty and near to dying, suddenly he sees the long wide sea in front of him and he is very happy."

Produced before they had a studio, in Nicolas Godin's compact apartment, somewhere on a steep street in old Paris, these eloquent tracks articulate the innocence of Air's beginnings. "Premiers Symtomes was a sort of experimentation," muses JB. "It was a special, special time. When we made this record it was with very little equipment and we were completely unknown."


Tracklist:
1 AIR - Modular Mix (5:59)
2 AIR - Casanova 70 (5:53)
3 AIR - Les Professionnels (4:32)
4 AIR - J'Ai Dormi Sous L'Eau (5:42)
5 AIR - Le Soleil Est Pres De Moi (4:52)
6 AIR - Californie (2:27)
7 Alex Gopher - Gordini Mix (Brakes On Mix) (4:22)

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