JB Dunckel Is Staring into the Light of a Future After Air

“The past doesn’t exist anymore,” he says plainly, before he laughs. It’s the perfect example of what he’s like in conversation: thoughtful, borderline philosophical, then in the next breath, self-aware. “We just see the past in the present, but it doesn’t really exist. For me, with my other projects – with Air and everything – I’m not… nostalgic. Or melancholic. I want to go further, actually.” He pauses, and for a second I think our phone connection has collapsed. “Maybe it’s going to sound pretentious but I try to study a new way of recording music and a new way of… of thinking what music may be. What kind of currents may flow in music in the next 30 years, you know?” That’s why, he says, he likes to squirrel himself away in the studio – ”for me, it’s like a laboratory” – and experiment.

He’s in his Paris studio as we speak, in fact, taking a break from rehearsing new material to talk to me. And that’s because the 48-year-old from Versailles is about to release H+, a solo album that will, for the first time, carry his proper name. Well, the shortened version he prefers: JB Dunckel. Yes, he first put out solo material as Darkel in 2006. And in 2011 he did link up with New Young Pony Club keyboardist and DJ Lou Hayter, who also appears on this new album, for their Tomorrow’s World project. But H+ – which you can hear exclusively here before it’s out tomorrow – doesn’t look back on all that. Named after the symbol used as shorthand for the theory of transhumanism (I’ll get to that in a bit), it’s an optimistic, somewhat floaty and contemplative body of work that sounds a bit like what I’d want from the music piped out poolside on a Mars holiday colony. The album straddles both the present and future. Lyrically, it stretches its neck into what’s to come while standing steeped in the tactile, analog instrumentation that Dunckel crafted for early Air material.

“I wanted it to sound really strong, with epic pads, epic sounds,” he says, his heavily accented voice turning breathy with excitement. “A little bit like Blade Runner, in a way. I also wanted to mix acoustic and electronic textures together – that’s what they do on soundtracks now.” He mentions loving Hans Zimmer’s most recent work, and how Zimmer is so adept at combining live orchestration with electronics. He wanted to pull that through the prism of pop – “acoustic instruments mixed with electronic production to get something really powerful, modern and glorious, you know?” He’s not done a bad job at all. H+ moves between the twinkling, cosmic slow-motion of piano-led instrumental “Ballad Non Sense” to single “Hold On,” and its propulsive sense of awe about the minutiae of love and the expansiveness of technology. A few songs later, you’re riding along the synthy slow bounce of “Transhumanity” as Dunckel whisper-sings about a potential cyborg future.

As ever, live instrumentation lends the music a warmth that’s only slightly tempered by the metallic cool of Dunckel’s obsession with how technology has the capacity to make life better for all of us. The crux of transhumanism rests on that idea: it posits that as people, we can evolve beyond the limits of our current physical form using science and technology. Ray Kurzweil, a futurist who Dunckel name-checks alongside Elon Musk as an inspiration during our conversation, popularised the notion of “the singularity: an idea coined in the 90s by sci-fi writer Vernor Vinge. In a nutshell, Kurzweil predicts that by 2029 computers will be able to think, feel and emote as well as – if not better – than we do. The “singularity” represents that moment when “man and machine” converge. As Kurzweil explained in a video from 2009, in 11 years we’ll have “reverse engineered and modelled and simulated all the regions of the brain, and that’ll provide us the software algorithmic methods to simulate all of the human brain’s capabilities, including our emotional intelligence”. In simpler terms: computers will be as smart as us in every way by then.

H+, then, turns this idea – of people fusing with machines, for the good of us all – into music far more comforting than any dystopian Black Mirror-like vision of the future. Dunckel, after all, is an optimist about all of this. “While reading about transhumanism, I said to myself that this type of science was a very positive thing; it could save humankind,” he says now. “And I feel like science could save man from death and disease and all these bad things that could happen to us. It felt overwhelming to me to know that, somewhere out there, are some nice scientists working for us, wanting to help us, you know?” He chuckles to himself, no doubt imagining these benevolent thinkers hard at work to rid the world of hunger, suffering and ageing.

Doesn’t immortality scare him, though? I reckon I’d be up for about 200 years max, I say. “Ah, 200 years would be fine,” he says, almost chirpily. “I’d like to be able to still make love. Because if you can’t make love, it’s a problem, you know?” Another chuckle. I admire how upbeat he manages to be, about humanity on both macro and micro levels. The album translates that positivity into something that flows resolutely against the ‘it’s all gone to shit, politics is trash, technology is turning us into autobots who can’t communicate IRL’ grain. Some of his calm seems to have come from not only stepping up to the vulnerability of releasing music under his name but making stuff that he’s aware sounds a bit like Air once did. “You can see the DNA of Air in this music. It’s not like an album that’s working against my past in the band.” Instead, he continues, “it feels as though I’m going on my path, where my name is my real name, and I can follow what we did with Air. It’s cool.”

I wonder whether working in the shadow of such a huge band has ever felt daunting, and made Dunckel swerve Air’s sound in his solo work (like soundtracking Fabrice Gobert’s K.O. last year and both Olivier Babinet’s Swagger and Alanté Kavaïté’s Summer in 2015). He and Godin put out retrospective album Twentyears in 2017, no doubt igniting calls for new material together. How much did he then worry about returning, on his own, sounding like this? “It was kind of weird in the beginning. The fans wanted to have Air back, but… they don’t know what Air is. So that desire was kind of disturbing for me. But year after year, I went along my way and followed my natural way of making music – which can sound like Air. So I offer that to the people: they can take or leave it.”

He pauses for a while again. “After a certain age, you get to be honest. You don’t have to worry or question yourself anymore. And you have to disturb your audience a bit, I think. You don’t have to obey the audience’s desires all the time – otherwise, you become a commercial artist. And that’s not really me. So I just follow my way.” That’s as much as there is to say about the past – Dunckel is already a few decades ahead, along his way somewhere near 2050.

JB Dunckel's H+ is out on Friday 16 March via Sony France

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