Track Listing

1. Electronic Performers
2. How Does It make You Feel?
3. Radio #1
4. The Vagabond (Featuring Beck)
5. Radian
6. Lucky & Unhappy
7. Sex Born Poison (Featuring Buffalo Daughter)
8. People In The City
9. Wonder Milky Bitch
10. Don't Be Light (Featuring Beck)
11. Caramel Prisoner

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #10172 in Music
• Published on: 2001
• Released on: 2001-05-29
• Number of discs: 1

Amazon.com
Previously Air's Jean-Benoit Dunckel and Nicolas Godin made softcore collages of Pink Floyd-ish synth tones and droning French lounge pop. 10,000 Hz Legend goes further out, attaining new heights of cheesy, Space Odyssey-like computer music. Like Kraftwerk skinny-dipping with French nymphet Jane Birkin and Star Wars's R2D2, Legend swells with mad robo-love, following a computer romance amid droll tributes to vacant pop culture. Beck's appearance on "The Vagabond" proves the Loser only works well solo, making Air disappear on their own album. The absurd "Radio #1" and the sappy chorus in "How Does It Make You Feel?" could snuggle beside Celine Dion's latest yawner. But there is magic: "Radian" is a Cluster-like orb of cooing flutes, gentle rhythms, and a ghostly vocal. "Electric Performers" offers clunky electronic beats and the lines "We are the synchronizers / Machines give me some freedom." The catchy "People in the City" sounds like Mirwais producing Serge Gainsbourg, while "Don't Be Light" recalls electro Krautrockers Neu! Feeding us Moog merengue and Reese's Pieces rhythms, Air remain sweet computer boys to the core. --Ken Micallef

From URB Magazine
After the runaway success of their Moon Safari debut, Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoit Dunckel surprised many with their score of Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides. The yin to Safari's yang, Suicides disappointed fans of Air's lighter, more accessible side. 10,000Hz Legend takes Moon Safari's pop sensibilities and Virgin's claustrophobic cinematics and mashes them together into an album of thickly layered soundscapes topped off by typical Gallic charm.

The opener, "Electronic Performers," is vintage Air, all swelling synths, gloomy piano, distorted vocals and random bleepy bits. "How Does It Make You Feel" swiftly follows, a dash of Spiritualized-meets-Pink Floyd heroin rock with what sounds like Stephen Hawking on vocals. Collage cowpoke Beck turns up on "The Vagabond," adding his drawling vocals in a murky mix of harmonica, acoustic guitar and Midnight Cowboy blues. They explore Far-Eastern soundtracking on the first half of "Radian," switching gears to grind into some sexy machine funk on "Lucky & Unhappy" and then shifting into fuzz-rock guitar with "Don't Be Light."

"People in the City" is a metallic slow-grind, like the tango done at half speed by a couple of drunken Pentium computer chips, while on "Caramel Prisoner" we get a dreamy comedown of half-remembered refrains, plundered riffs and washed-out chords. Throughout, Air manages to be melancholy and uplifting in equal measure. Living up to that old adage "talent borrows, genius steals," they seem to nick bits from everybody and nobody, producing songs that mix a disparate collection of familiar bits and pieces into a fresh and original blend.

Kieran Wyatt

Customer Reviews

A must
When people get over moon safari they may get to appreciate this great set of songs.Why anyone would want another moon safari bewilders me.Buy this record and enjoy it for what it is,a fantastic journey someplace new.I love it. Lets hope Air keep reinventing.

Enjoyable avantgarde
I don't think I've ever heard anything quite like this album. It's a strange blend of spaced out dreamy sequences and egging, throbbing rhythms, electronic blips and old and proven run of the mill studio instruments.

If I were a musician I wish had the imagination to make this album.

Air hissing out
Despite songs like "Sexy Boy" and "Remember," "Moon Safari"'s greatest strength seemed to be its commitment to the retro-futrism of doing an electronic album that sounded dated by a good twenty years. Aside from those songs, it all flowed wonderfully, a tightly cohesive effort that drifted through the subconscious.

On "10,000 Hz Legend," the duo decides, "Screw that, let's make a mess!" And so it is. A mess, I mean. They try too hard, succeed too little. They bring in Beck to little avail (hell, the early part of his track is just, well, Beck); they rip-off Radiohead for no good reason; and they miss the mark by 10,000 miles on "Radian," an overwrought, treacly little piece of refuse begging to be stuffed into a B-side collection that only hardcore fans could admire.

That Air emerges on the other side with almost half a listenable album is a miracle in itself. That the listener is left with this as the follow-up to "Moon Safari" (not counting the very good soundtrack for "The Virgin Suicides") is a gyp. This is what's convenient about the digital age: not only can anyone produce sub-par electro like this any time they want, but the consumer can illegally download it, ween the four or five tracks worth keeping, and chuck the rest into the Recycle Bin.

Best cuts: "People in the City," "Wonder Milky Bitch," "Radio #1," "Don't Be Light"