Darkel: a breath of fresh Air

Jean-Benoît Dunckel's solo album

Paris 

29/09/2006 - 

Taking a temporary break from his Air sidekick Nicolas Godin, Jean-Benoît Dunckel has spun off into his own musical galaxy and disclosed his personal aspirations on a new solo album. This impressively rich opus, containing both danceable and cerebral electro-pop, has been released under the mystery name Darkel. RFI Musique hooks up with Monsieur Dunckel and investigates.

RFI Musique: What was the idea behind doing a solo album?
Jean-Benoît Dunckel: Darkel shouldn't be construed as something "in lieu of" or something "as a bonus to." I'm simply opening a window onto my own personal universe. Part of my reasons for doing the project were artistic ones – I needed to get these tracks out of my head so they wouldn't bother me in the future. I had no choice really!

What's the album about?
Basically, I used the tracks on it as a way of analysing my life, my loves, my anxieties, my spiritual problems and my questions about the universe. Death tends to crop up a lot on the album but not really in a depressing way, I don't think. There are sudden outbursts of love - both of the philosophical and sexual nature – treated in different ways and mystical questions about God and Jesus. The word "You" features in a lot of the songs, too. "You" might be taken to mean a wife, a partner, someone else's children or my children, but at times it refers to the public as well.

How did you go about writing the songs?
The difficult thing is knowing what to hide! Once you've come up with a key word or the basic concept for a song and decided what should remain hidden, the rest is easy.

You sweep through an impressive variety of musical styles on your album. Were you striving towards some sort of musical ubiquity?
It's just something I wanted to experiment with. I wanted to try different things to see how they would turn out, that's all!

Do you consider yourself to be more of a musician or a singer?
I'm a musician who sometimes gets carried away and sings. Sometimes that proves to be successful, sometimes not quite so successful. You never know how it's going to turn out at the start.

Are you trying to attain any particular aims with this album?
I don't have any over-riding strategy if that's what you mean. My main objective was to express myself and, as I said, get these songs out of my head. Of course, the public's reaction is always important, but I'm not expecting anything on a big scale here. I feel I've simply let loose a new sound in the musical landscape, that's all. I think I'll continue doing a lot more tracks in the future whether they take off or not.

How did your desire to work on a solo album go down with Nicolas Godin, the other half of Air?
Well, he seemed to be a bit surprised to begin with, but I sent him a copy of the album pretty soon after I'd finished and as there are quite a number of good ballads on it I think he was OK with it. Besides, we've been working on a lot of different things in parallel to Air. There was my side project, Darkel, Charlotte Gainsbourg's album 5:55 and Late Night Tales, a compilation of our personal music favourites. I think it's all been excellent for the group. It keeps the public on their toes – and us, too! It's not just a question of selling records, either, what's important is to keep creating, both musically and on a personal level, and keep learning new things. Thanks to these projects, I've learnt a tremendous amount.                  

But don't you ever worry about doing too much?
Yes, of course I do. I worry about it – and, in fact, I think I do too much but it's not something I can do anything about.

Are you planning to get out there and present your solo album live on stage?
That's impossible right now. We've got projects piling up one after the other. And going out on the live circuit requires huge investment. You have to work tremendously hard and it requires a lot of time and money, too. I have other priorities right now.

But basically you'd like to if you could?
I don't know. I don't know how I'd go about adapting the tracks from the album live on stage. I pretty much made this album just me, myself and I and I think it would be complicated to reproduce it in concert.

How do you view your career to date?
I think we've put a lot of hard work into things. We've never been content to simply sit back on our laurels. And the good thing about that is we've never been afraid of taking risks. That's something we've always done, in fact. We've branched out and got involved in a lot of special projects and that's helped us regenerate ourselves - and I think that's fantastic!

How would you say the electro scene has changed over the past ten years?
Right now what's in fashion is the rock revival, but electronic music is still going strong in the clubs and it's evolving all the time. One thing's for sure and that is that it will come back in the spotlight one day no matter what.

Does being Jean-Benoît Dunckel mean you're ever afraid of not being on the cutting-edge any more?
I've never claimed that what I'm doing is universal or will stand the test of time. I'm doing something that's right here, right now. There's bound to be a time when I'm out of fashion. All musicians go through a bit of a difficult period when the public is out of touch with what they're doing. Let's face it, it's the public who are partly responsible for making an artist. But the thing is, generations follow one another, fashions change and you can't do anything about it. The enjoyable thing will be disappearing for a while in order to come back better and stronger.

What's the best thing reviewers could say about your album?
That it's full of love! That's the basic concept behind it, after all. I wanted to put as many positive vibes and as much love into the album as possible so that when you put it on you can see it hotting up, turning incandescent - and then setting your decks on fire!

Darkel (Source Etc/EMI) 2006

Nicolas  Preschey