Air – Talisman

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. That string chart is the part the four-hour home riff did not have.

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 track 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.