“10,000 Hz. Legend” is the new album by French chill-meisters Air. It is also the weirdest music I have heard all year.
Air rose from relative Gallic obscurity to worldwide acclaim a few years back with “Moon Safari,” a record so kitsch-cool, so Franco-fresh, so bachelor-pad seductive that everybody from teenagers to gray-haired swingers sang its praises. It was all about the Rhodes piano vibe, the acoustic guitar and the string sections. It was so laid back that parents used it for after-dinner music, and stoners liked it for obvious reasons.
Many people would probably agree that it was a hell of a make-out album, too.
We last heard from Air about a year and half ago, when they provided the soundtrack for the film “The Virgin Suicides.” A creepy pastiche of funeral organs and haunted-house vibes, it didn’t exactly seem like an official new Air album per se, but it was a wholly satisfying effort that made Air fans salivate over the pending “real” new Air album.
And now we have “10,000 Hz. Legend.” If “Moon Safari” was a cool whiff of pure oxygen, then “10,000 Hz. Legend” is a gas mask full of industrial-strength nitrous oxide.

“10,000 Hz. Legend” sounds nothing like Air’s previous work. Gone are the brief flashes of Moog, the angelic female vocals and the jazzy undercurrents. Instead, we have robotic drum-machine beats, vocals rendered unrecognizable by computers and sound effects that sound like they’re coming from the neighborhood of the Crab Nebula.
Warning: Don’t try making out with your girl to this album unless she’s a cyborg.
This album is just so weird that I’m having a hard time figuring out how to describe it accurately. Perhaps talking about some of the songs will help.
“10,000 Hz. Legend” kicks off with “Electronic Performers,” a song designed to make you think that Air have gone crazy. It’s slow as molasses, and out of the thick electronic soup that is the music, a severely slowed-down, French-accented voice intones lyrics like “machines gave me some freedom/synthesizers gave me some wings/they drop me through 12-bit samplers/we are electronic performers.” What are they talking about?
The next song is called “How Does It Make You Feel?” and it’s even stranger. While a mournful acoustic guitar plays and a choir sings in the background, a computerized voice whispers sweet nothings into the listener’s ear. That is, until the overblown gospel chorus comes around, sounding like a vacuum-sealed holdover from 1972.
Beck, he of the newfound “loverman” swagger, shows up on two tracks. “The Vagabond” wouldn’t sound out of place on Beck’s “Midnite Vultures,” and he reads a trippy poem over the song “Don’t Be Light.” He adds a welcome touch of humanity to what would otherwise sound like a rather cold album.
Other highlights include the Backstreet-Boys-on-bad-acid swagger of “Radio #1,” the Wild West tale of a blowjob provider on “Wonder Milky Bitch” and the utterly brain-warping psychodrama that is “Sex Born Poison.” Sample lyric: “Who dares to wake me?/prince from the biomass/meet my desire sensors/my atom juice of joy/you want to fuse my affective circuits.”
Listening to “10,000 Hz. Legend” basically involves one hour of feeling like your head is going to explode from information overload. It is also proof that French people get high, perhaps often. While the album is definitely an acquired taste, I would heartily recommend that you borrow it from a weird friend, fall in love with it and then buy your own ticket to outer space with Air.