@colekincart

Last Sunday didn’t really feel like October. The temperature nestled in the low 80s, the Chicago sidewalks glowed a bit longer and dinner in the West loop with friends ended up turning into a slow, golden stroll towards the Auditorium Theatre. All things considered, it was the kind of evening that practically begged for Moon Safari.

The French Duo AIR (Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunckel) took the stake on Sunday, October 5^th for the Chicago stop on their 25^th Anniversary of Moon Safari, performing the album in it’s entirety.

In every sense, the night was a celebration of the lush warm that the record has always radiated.

I’m firmly in my ‘pro-seated show’ phase (I’d even been at the Auditorium earlier that week for Ludovico Einaudi) but somehow, this show felt looser, more relaxed. The stage lighting glowed soft pinks and purples, and when the first notes of “La Femme d’Argent” came through, it felt like a slow unraveling. It wasn’t the start of a show per se, but a drift.

Something I noted throughout the performance was that the live band brought a surprising looseness, almost jazzy, something I never fully picked up from the record. It was still the same sleek electronic record I loved, but breathing heavier, and feeling cozier.

Moon Safari has been in my rotation for years, but this summer it took on new life after I stumbled upon Blue Moon Safari, Vegyn’s reinterpretation of the album for 2025’s Record Store Day. Though I’ve been a Vegyn fan for awhile now (the instrumentals on the Headache EP are my favorite)the reinterpretation felt like a natural fit. The same hazy, downtempo sensibility without overpowering the original. The two records stacked together did become my unofficial paring, right up there with my other summer essential pairing: caprese salad and fresh lemonade.

Live, Moon Safari felt familiar and new all at once. “Sexy Boy” slid right in after “La Femme d’Argent,” and somewhere in the middle I realized the famous “female” vocal I’d always assumed was a sample was actually the band themselves, pitch-shifted and distorted. (Embarrassing to only learn that now.) And while Beth Hirsch didn’t appear to perform “All I Need” or “You Make It Easy,” the duo kept her spirit in the mix, adding airy backing tracks and soft harmonies that still made room for her voice.

“Ce matin-là” came near the end of the first set, and it completely floored me. It’s my favorite track on the album and easily my favorite moment of the night. The brass-filled daydream has quietly become my own summer anthem — I’ve been listening to it all year, usually while biking home from wherever the day took me — and hearing it fill that old theatre felt like the perfect end-of-summer sendoff.

For all its retro-futurist polish, Moon Safari still feels human. There’s a warmth to it — a combination of ambient soundscapes, romanticism, and quiet optimism — that refuses to age. Seeing AIR perform it live, 25 years later, made that even clearer. Here’s to another 25 years of Moon Safari, and to the rare October nights that still sound like July.