Air
Live Alcatraz Milano 03.03.2004

LA RECENSIONE

Sanremo, Big Brother, and Stallone on TV … I’d say it’s the best time to talk about last night’s concert: AIR at the Alcatraz in Milan for the only Italian date of the tour promoting their latest work, Talkie Walkie.
The AIR make electronic music. What is electronic music? Like all definitions, it can mean everything and nothing, like all labels, it can have value or no value … for this reason, we try to establish a common vocabulary between writer and reader, and with this vocabulary, we build and understand the review together.

Electronic music is that genre that is played predominantly with instruments that require electrical energy to produce any sound. But it takes little energy to produce any type of sound that our hearing can perceive, and sometimes even sounds that our hearing cannot perceive. Electronic music can be digital, generated by bits, or analog, generated by electrical waves. The first is “finite” while the second is “infinite.” A fundamental characteristic of electronic music is that it allows its composer to paint a canvas from nothing, using all the colors of the rainbow, overlaying elements upon elements, without limits of space, without limits of time, without limits of scale, and without the limits imposed by classical instruments, the guitar, the drums, the piano, which are phenomenal objects, but still have the limitation of producing a sound, variable as it may be, that is always that sound, recognizable in all its variations … I consider electronic music as the musical art par excellence (hey, no flame please) precisely for this freedom and for the ingenuity needed for a composer to create not only melodies, rhythms, verses, scores, but sounds, jingles never heard before by our ears. And those who remember Kraftwerk or Jarre from the '70s know what I mean.

But electronic music has a limit: live concerts. In reality, it’s not a true limit if one knows it, but a characteristic to understand and keep in mind when an artist performs live electronic music. Electronic music is perfection, it is complication, it is study, it is meticulous commitment and adjustment of instruments, electrical waves, oscilloscopes, switches… electronic music is not played in just any studio, with microphones, mixers, and a 4-track recorder… electronic music is sampled, sequenced, programmed, saved on floppy disks… Playing even the simplest piece entirely live would mean bringing together dozens and dozens of people, each with their keyboard, their instrument, their computer, bulky boxes, some so sensitive they would require hours to calibrate… and it would still be impossible because the perfection of electronic music imposes synchronicity at the limit of human… this is electronic music.

The AIR concert was fantastic, but above all, it was what I expected… it spanned their entire discography… it offered new arrangements of their songs… it offered splendid sound passages that a decent acoustic in the front rows made enjoyable for the ears…

Sure, almost everything was in playback … there was live drumming, which often happens at electronic music concerts… a skilled drummer can keep up … the keyboards … the guitar … well … they often had a secondary, background role … there were some noticeable mistakes but … it’s precisely the mistakes that give that live sensation you expect from a concert … Overall, it was pleasant … no special effects on stage, a concert I’d say was “intimate” and at times cold … it’s no surprise because AIR has always wanted to have this air of "pseudo culture" that leaves little room for the most outrageous fun, for jumps, for smiles, but prefers to give a melancholic sensation, sometimes almost of total detachment from reality... but this too is electronic music... a natural hallucinogenic drug for the ears. And it doesn't harm.