Watch Flight Facilities Break Down Their Beloved Epic ‘Clair De Lune’

Flight Facilities’ 2012 track ‘Clair De Lune’ is one of the most beloved Australian electronic tracks ever. So beloved, in fact, that last year we named it as the 38th greatest Australian track of all time.

The track deserves the position: it’s an eight-minute lilting epic, with the central Claude DeBussy sample creating an elegant frame for Hugo Gruzman and James Lyell to hang the glittering ornaments from. It’s a work of understated genius.

The fact it was so successful took the duo completely by surprise. “I mean, we make pop songs, but that track was not meant to be one of them,” Gruzman told our parent site inthemix back in the day. “We make a whole lot of three and four-minute vocal tracks and people are like ‘Yeah this is fun’. Then you make one self-indulgent, eight-minute, almost entirely instrumental tune and that’s the one that hits the charts.”

They’ve discussed the inspiration behind the track before, but this week they’ve dug a little deeper — unravelling the song thread by thread in a two-part series on TikTok.

“Here’s the quick story about how we made ‘Clair De Lune’, or as some of you on TikTok seem to know it — ‘the Telstra song’,” Lyell says.

He goes on to explain how the pair first picked up the idea for the song while listening to The Darjeeling Limited soundtrack, which closes with Debussy’s ‘Clair De Lune’. They fell in love with a particular section — the low, thrumming notes at about the two-minute mark — and used that as a starting point. They then had to chop it up and take it out of a swing time signature and make it 4/4 — and slowly, steadily, with some bell plug-ins for good measure, the song began to take shape.

Watch it all come together below.

Speaking of Flight Facilities, today they announced Never Forever — a live-streamed performance of unreleased music, happening on Wednesday June 9 at 8pm AEST. You can RSVP right over here if you’re keen.