One of the many things that makes music great, at least in the mind of the individual, is the time and place of it's finding and the memories it evokes of that time and place.
For me, Air's Moon Safari is resplendent with such memories: It reminds me of a whole bunch of people. It was one of the first albums I copied onto a CDR, then again onto mp3. It reminds me of the time I left a ring on the cooker on for 4 days and returned to find that the house hadn't burnt down….
But this LP being the key to memory cab files isn't the reason I rate it so highly. I rate it so highly because it's a very, very good record.
Moon Safari is a tranquil sea of peace and harmony the like of which Bono might be able to install on Planet Earth if only he took his sunglasses off. Tracks like Remember & La Femme D'Argent are pure dreamtime bliss rooted in the soil. They're both steady and reliable. In fact they sound almost agricultural, but beautifully human. There's melancholy, heartbreak, stomp, pop and feeling and you can't see the seems…
So many ambient records try oh so hard to define some kind of state of electronic bliss, yet they nearly all fail miserably. Sure they're full of gentle synth washes, blurpy blips and smooth vocals drenched in reverb, but few conjure up much other than chill out rooms in nightclubs or the strange world of a lazy robot party..
Much like The KLFs Chill Out, Moon Safari goes for the jugular without thinking about drugs or nightclubs. Moon Safari is like true and proper ambience; like a summer Sunday dreaming in the garden with acoustic instruments and a radio and birds and…
It's a classic and since emerging from the Brit Pop drenched late 1990s Moon Safari has lounged alone on Tranquillity Island. And since then no leaky ships have even come close…
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