Montmartre, 1996-97: four hours, then Abbey Road strings
Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunckel cut Talisman in about four hours, in the middle of the Moon Safari sessions, after another piece refused to move. Godin later called it a pivot, one of the fastest tracks they made for the album, alongside Le voyage de Pénélope. They jammed a small riff, then handed it to the English arranger David Whitaker. What started as almost nothing came back with a string chart that sounds like a film cue, and that jump from home demo to orchestra is the whole pleasure of the track.
The album itself was slow on purpose. Godin has said the basic tracking ran from 1996 into 1997, beginning in his Montmartre apartment, where he had already been making Air sketches since 1995. They finished details over about fifteen days at Gang studio on Boulevard de l’Hôpital, with engineer Jean-Pierre Janniaud, and mixed with Stéphane Briat at Studio Plus XXX on an SSL desk in August 1997. The record only occupied eight tracks, so most of that big console sat unused. Source released Moon Safari in France on 16 January 1998. Talisman is track five, an instrumental of just over four minutes, between Kelly Watch the Stars and Remember.
The melody is two electric pianos at once. Dunckel plays the figure on a Fender Rhodes. Godin doubles it on a Wurlitzer 200A, which he later admitted was not easy to mix. Godin also plays bass and a rhythm box. Dunckel adds Minimoog, Korg MS-20, and Solina string ensemble lines, the same small kit that carries most of the album. The part that changes the room is the orchestra. Air recorded the strings at Abbey Road’s Studio Two with Whitaker, who had arranged for a long list of British pop sessions. Godin and Dunckel were too shy to talk to the players. Whitaker took them to his house, talked Rachmaninoff, and got them to accept a chart bigger than the home demo. That conversation is why the track feels expensive without losing the apartment intimacy.
This track was done in four hours. It was a little riff, and we gave it to David Whitaker, who did a beautiful arrangement. For some reason, the strings give something very luxurious and soundtrack-y, Hollywood-style. It’s very abstract. It began with almost nothing and ended up with the most gorgeous track on the album.
(Nicolas Godin, Stereogum, 2023)
There was no single, no vocal, and no video. Sexy Boy and Kelly Watch the Stars did the radio work. Talisman did a different job on the album: it stops the pop songs and opens a wider frame before Beth Hirsch returns on the later ballads. British reviewers who pushed Moon Safari into the charts often singled out the string pieces as the reason the record did not sound like the rest of the Paris electronic scene down the street, where Daft Punk were working within earshot of Air’s windows. The home recording stayed small. Abbey Road made this one track sound like cinema without a script.
Godin has said that when Air later played the album live, they left Talisman alone rather than rewriting it to match whatever record they were touring. The four-hour jam and Whitaker’s chart stayed the version. That is the useful fact. Moon Safari is full of songs you can sing. Talisman is the one that shows how far a Rhodes line and a London string section could go once the duo stopped trying to finish a pop chorus. Press play for that stretch between the hits: the album breathes differently after it.
