Pitchfork

Ora capisco cosa si prova ad ascoltare i Looper quando non si conosce l'inglese. Do you understand this sentence? It says, "Now I know what it feels like to listen to Looper when you can't understand English," as translated into Italian by Google. And what I mean by it is this: If you don't know Italian, I wouldn't recommend picking up this record.

City Reading is a collaboration between Air and writer Alessandro Baricco, in which Baricco reads text from his novel, City, to Air's backing tracks. The three explain how it went down in the liner notes:

"City is a book. The idea was to read some pages of it aloud, in a theater full of people, with musical accompaniment throughout. We did this in Rome, in November of 2002. It went well. The audience applauded, and we enjoyed ourselves. So the idea became: to make a CD in which a voice is reading, surrounded by music. We recorded the CD in Paris, a month later. We enjoyed ourselves. Now the idea is to make a video game. But we're not really sure about that."

I don't doubt that this pairing set the Roman throng cheering. Air's tasteful, wistful, and occasionally mournful tunes are an intelligent compliment to a reading, and their decision to mix lots of acoustic guitar with organ, flute and sound effects subliminally bonds with the plot (City is a trilogy of surreal, poetic Westerns.) And however Baricco's prose reads in his native language (an English translation is included in the CD booklet), there's no doubting that he has a fantastically great speaking voice-- clear, rhythmic, musical and dramatic. It was, I'm sure, an inspired pairing.

All that, however, isn't enough to add up to repeated listens for me, because I can't follow it. I tried scanning the English translation of the text while listening, but it didn't interest me. Baricco's voice is very high in the mix, so much so that focusing on anything but him speaking the words is impossible. Even so, it probably wouldn't matter much if the mix were more music-oriented. Somewhere back there, behind Baricco's purr, Air's tracks sound nice enough, although the cues they've constructed are obviously repetitive and meant as a soundtrack to something more important.

Though I get off on the pure sound of language as much as the next guy, I still don't find City Reading entertaining. I'm not complaining, really. It is what it is, and there's certainly no reason why Air should feel compelled to pander to my embarrassing monolingualism by working with, say, an English writer. All I can say is that City Reading is essentially a book on tape with high production values in a language I don't understand, and that, even if it were released in an instrumental version, it wouldn't be particularly breathtaking. Caveat emptor.