Air’s Nicolas Godin Preps Debut Solo Album Contrepoint, Shares “Orca”

Nicolas Godin has released seven albums as half of Air. This year, he’ll release his debut album Contrepoint via Because Music. He’s shared a video for the album’s opening track “Orca”, which was directed by Sean Pecknold (brother of Fleet Foxes frontman Robin Pecknold). 

Godin was inspired by the work of pianist Glenn Gould’s performances of Bach when making the album. Each track uses a different Bach piece as a jumping-off point.

A press release points out that though Air haven’t split up, Godin says, “We weren’t surprising ourselves anymore, like other bands after ten years or more. The big challenge for an artist is to have a reason to be, because there are already plenty of records out there. I’d made a statement with Air and I wanted to go back to the classical world, to grow up musically, to renew myself.”

Pecknold said of the video:

When I first heard this song, I was like: Whoa…. this rules. Then I listened to it for a few days on repeat with my eyes closed. It felt like some sort of instrument battle, and I kept thinking of the ways they visualize music in Japanese play-along video games. I also kept thinking of the opening for a science show from the early 90’s  called 3, 2, 1 Contact. Because the song moves so fast, I thought it’d be cool to do a quick-cut montage as this was the opening song on the record. That lead to the idea to create a graphic visual loop for every sound we hear in the song.

Air’s last album Le Voyage Dans la Lune came out in 2012. 

Comments are closed.