On his own and with groups such as Air, Starwalker, and Tomorrow's World, Jean-Benoît Dunckel is a mastermind of stylish, sensual, and ethereal pop. His 2006 debut album Darkel shared the hazy atmosphere and lush synth passages of his work with Nicolas Godin, but also explored Dunckel's fondness for more straightforward pop and rock. He established himself as a composer with the score for the 2009 film Cyprien (in 2020, he was nominated for a César Award for his music for Summer of 85). After Air disbanded in 2012, Dunckel's projects ranged from the playful electro-pop of the 2013 self-titled debut album of Tomorrow's World to the more whimsical genre-mashing of Starwalker's 2016 eponymous full-length. When he returned to his solo career, Dunckel revisited the sounds he popularized with Air, crafting weightless pop on 2018's H+ and pondering sci-fi futures on 2022's Carbon.

Before becoming a professional musician, Dunckel was a math and physics student at the Conservatoire in Paris. He also played in the alternative band Orange, which also counted architecture student Nicolas Godin among its members. Once Orange disbanded, Dunckel and Godin formed Air in 1995. The duo soon earned acclaim for 1997's debut EP Premiers Symptômes, which collected their early singles and was ultimately certified gold in the U.K., and for the following year's full-length Moon Safari, a platinum-selling hit in several European countries.

While working with Godin, Pulp's Jarvis Cocker and the Divine Comedy's Neil Hannon on Charlotte Gainsbourg's 2005 album 5:55, Dunckel embarked on a solo career. Choosing the moniker Darkel as a twist on his surname (which means "dark" in German), the project's self-titled album appeared in September 2006. Following the release of Air's 2008 album Pocket Symphony and the tour supporting it, in 2009 Dunckel composed the score for the film Cyprien.

When Air went on hiatus following 2012's Le Voyage Dans la Lune, Dunckel founded the sci-fi pop act Tomorrow's World with New Young Pony Club's Lou Hayter. The duo released its debut single, the Suicide-meets-Shangri-La's "So Long My Love," in September 2012, and its self-titled album in 2013. Additionally, Dunckel founded Starwalker, a duo with Bang Gang's Bardi Johannsson, that issued its first EP, Losers Can Win, in 2014. He also returned to Darkel with 2015's Man of Sorrow EP and composed the soundtrack for the film The Summer of Sangailé. In 2016, Air reunited for a tour supporting the career retrospective Twentyears. That year also saw the release of Starwalker's self-titled full-length. In March 2018, Dunckel released H+. His first album under his own name, it revisited the atmospheric electronic pop he introduced to the world over 20 years prior. Two years later, his music for François Ozon’s Summer of 85 earned a nomination for the César Award. Also in 2020, Dunckel collaborated with visual artist Jacques Perconte on a series of concerts where he improvised music to the digital images Perconte created. When the pandemic put an end to concerts, Dunckel moved his experiments to the studio, taking inspiration from his hope that science and technology could find solutions to the world's problems. The results were June 2022's Carbon, an impressionistic and introspective set of songs featuring a cameo by Au Revoir Simone's Heather D'Angelo. ~ Heather Phares, Rovi