Jean Michel Jarre - A Dream as Long as a Keyboard

The little boy from Lyon who used to watch from his balcony as circus orchestras passed by; the child absorbed in devout listening to the solos of jazz musician Chet Baker; the fledgling painter who agonised over compositions laid on silent canvases, dreaming of the colours of musical waves; the budding guitarist playing in some unlikely high-school rock band — none of this hinted at the destiny awaiting him as the guardian deity of synth-pop, the mass musical phenomenon that would mark the last decades of the twentieth century, and to which his name is still associated today, whether as praise or as insult.

On paper, Jean Michel Jarre's life would seem the typical story of an artist's son predestined to follow in his father's footsteps — if it weren't for the fact that Maurice Jarre abandoned him at the age of five to pursue his career as a film-score composer in Hollywood and start a second family. In some way, it is precisely the absence of his father that keeps Jarre from passively absorbing his artistic influence, leaving him free to venture alone into the unexplored territories of musical avant-gardes so far removed from the classical symphonism of his father's most celebrated scores (above all those for "Lawrence of Arabia" and "Doctor Zhivago"), while at the same time nurturing that melancholic, mysteriously introspective streak that would become the dominant key of his mature work. It's no coincidence that his fascination with music originally arose as a rejection of the classical conception of academic notation. Impatient with the pedantic classical piano lessons he was given at school, Jarre instead learned, from the performances of jazz saxophonists Harchie Sheep and John Coltrane which he attended with his mother at the Parisian club "Le Chat-qui-Peche", how music could translate emotional states and visual suggestions directly, without the crutch of technical devices or sung lyrics. He thus found a first outlet for creative freedom in painting, exhibiting works inspired by the abstraction of Pierre Soulages and the surrealism of Joan Miró and Yves Tanguy at the Lyon gallery "L'Oeil Ecoute" ("the Eye listens", a phrase that fits the future "Jarre-ian" style rather well), and in the rock music that in the Sixties had become a vehicle for anti-conformist ideas, playing guitar in the rock bands Mystère IV and The Dustbins. It is the simultaneity of these two creative impulses that drives him to search for an expressive method capable of resolving their apparent incompatibility under the sign of a new, as-yet-uninvented form of synaesthesia. Following in the footsteps of Erik Satie, John Cage and Terry Riley, Jarre first experimented with tapes played backwards or mixing the sound of the guitar with flutes, prepared pianos, percussion and noise effects, before moving on to radios and rudimentary electronic devices.

In 1969 this persistent urge to break out of the "confines" of traditional music finally opened the doors to Pierre Schaeffer's "Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM)" in Paris, founded in 1958 by the guru of "musique concrète", who set the hyperrealistic evocative power of pure sound against the cerebral nature of written composition. Schaeffer's figure comes to fill the artistic void left by his natural father, marking the true beginning of Jarre's career as a composer: that same year he released his first 7-inch of "concrete" music. On the two sides of the vinyl, "La Cage" and "Eros Machine", with their sobbing, metallic micro-melodies smothered by orgasmic moans, percussive arrhythmias and grinding mechanical growls (anticipating in sound the biomechanoid atmospheres of H.R. Giger's paintings), present themselves as manifestos of a new and extreme aesthetic concept founded on the "Nullpunkt" of conventional music, pushed back into that dark cosmic womb where the only difference between noise and sound lies in the intention behind its production. The single sold a handful of copies and, as would also happen with the following album, Deserted Palace, from 1972, its importance would be confined to being the quiet preamble to what would later become a systematic tendency to shape atmospheric textures through ingenious puzzles of effects (anticipating the "noise music" school), in which ethereal easy-listening hooks could be encased.
Two years later, this new stylistic vein, bolstered by the growing use of primitive synthesizers discovered at the Research Group — such as the EMS Synthi AKS and the legendary Moog modular — found expression in what is the first composition for electronic instruments to have the honour of accompanying a seven-movement operatic ballet, inspired by the colours of the rainbow and staged at the Palais Garnier in Paris in 1971.
Although the complete version of "AOR" was never released, it's reasonable to assume that its structure bore the mark of Karlheinz Stockhausen's teaching (whose studio in Cologne Jarre attended in 1968), built on sinuous dissonances and shifting timbral and tonal envelopes, as can be heard in the movement "BLEU", performed for the first time 31 years later during an impromptu session at the Bourges festival.

Not even Deserted Palace, his first solo album released the following year — really more a kind of "library" of video-game-like motifs ante litteram, effect samples and wobbly, saccharine jingles played on an EMS and a Farfisa organ — manages to escape being anything more than a mosaic of experiments incubating traces of future suites, such as "Windswept Canyon", with its epically nostalgic andante and its gusts of sidereal wind foreshadowing Oxygene, or "Music Box Concerto", where one can glimpse the melodic seeds of "Equinoxe 8" and "Magnetic Fields 2".
The themes composed that same year for the soundtrack of Jean Chapot's film "Les Granges Brûlées" belong to the same vein, once again featuring crude pseudo-romantic little tunes stumbling between electric buzzes and chirps, and even an excerpt of "Windswept Canyon" renamed "L'Helycopter" (confirming a habit of recycling material that would later become almost standard practice for Jarre), over which only the dejected march of "La Chanson des Granges Brûlées" stands out, in which for the first time a female voice answers the melodic phrase with angelic vocalisations.

As if to exorcise the commercial neglect to which these exploratory works condemned him, in the years leading up to the international breakthrough of Oxygene, Jarre agreed to try his hand at the song format, writing lyrics and music for Christophe, Françoise Hardy, Gerard Le Norman and Patrick Juvet. "Le Mots Bleus" (translation: "The Blue Words"), written for Christophe and apparently dedicated to his future life partner Charlotte Rampling, not only reaffirms the synaesthetic dimension within which his forthcoming audiovisual syntax would take shape, but also represents the sole creative high point of this brief detour as a lyricist, to which Jarre would return (in a more opaque, disenchanted way) only in 2000 with the album Metamorphoses. Directing the show staged for Christophe's concert at the Olympia, however, gave him the chance to test out his "circus-like" and "Felliniesque" idea of live performance, which he would put into practice in far more grandiose fashion in the Eighties: in particular, the piano that soars through the air during the singer's performance recalls the dreamlike scenes devised by Salvador Dalí in 1945 for Alfred Hitchcock's film "Spellbound".

But by 1976 the small studio set up within the walls of his own kitchen was finally ready for the creation of his magnum opus. It was Michel Geiss — the maitre à penser of hardware, sound engineer and musician, contacted after one of his lectures on "analogue synthesis" — who came to the aid of the daring twenty-eight-year-old, his expertise shaping the sonic blueprint of the first suite ever conceived and performed for keyboards and analogue interfaces.
Over the course of the suite's 41 minutes, recorded on an eight-track multitrack, the airy soundscape of Oxygene (which from this point on would come to define the essence of the "Jarre-ian" style) unfolds in the floating vertical layering of the vaporous sounds of the VCS3, the supernatural magnetic choirs of the Mellotron (an instrument patented in Italy), the A.R.P. and the EMS Synthi AKS. The futuristic versatility of the AKS (a slim keyboard that would appear in almost every subsequent album up to Metamorphoses) allows him to mimic the humanoid wail of the Theremin in the first and third parts — one of the first great gems of electronic instrument-making, invented by the Russian Leon Theremin in 1927, which Jarre would start using live from the "Oxygene Tour" of 1997 onwards. What in "Windswept Canyon" had worked as a "concrete" translation of an auditory and visual state, achieved through a naive artificial reproduction of the whistling of air suggesting the spasmodic surging of wind through the bowels of the earth (foreshadowing the evocative "ambient" music that would be codified the following year by Brian Eno) — from the very first movement of Oxygene instead expands into a more refined and coherent allegory of a pantheistic condition, embodied in the theme of oxygen understood as the elemental intermediary between the planet's "pre-Socratic" components: air, earth, water, fire. This is a cosmic pantheism rooted in the DNA of his cultural upbringing as a student passionate about "Sturm und Drang", about that Goethe-inflected idealistic philosophy tied to the notion of Sehnsucht, and about the Nordic pantheism of Novalis and Brentano — an interest confirmed, among other things, by the comparative study on Berlioz's and Goethe's "Faust" he wrote for his literature degree.
The six movements that make up the work, reminiscent of those of the fantasy-ecological ballet "Aor", mark — across the passages that serve as transition tracks (the most effective being the one between the first and second parts, where sidereal howls enter in delay over a pulsing chirr of gaseous dust particles) — the evolution of an innate vitalism into a mystical-organic phenomenology. This is achieved partly through a "melodic metaphysics" animated by essential musical motifs that progress into the sonic translation of living forms at a prokaryotic stage, as heard from the opening of the first part, built on glacial, crescendoing pulsations to which the cosmic-nostalgic entrance of the AKS adds a timbre of supernatural quality and poetic transcendence; and partly through a visually allusive spirit pursued via painterly resources of ambient effects, intensified by the reverb of the EMS and the echo of the Revox, no longer relegated to the rank of atmospheric accessories (like the gusting wind in Pink Floyd's "One Of These Days" and "Shine On You Crazy Diamond"), but genuine impressionistic extensions of the lyricism embedded in the leitmotif. Exemplary in this respect are the swarming abyssal whistles that amplify the overtension built up by the dull hammering bass, and the mysterious phrasing that introduces the explosion of the "main theme" in the second part; the synchronised breathy accents at the end of the key five-note bar in the mystical fourth variation of the far more lightweight riff from Gershon Kingsley's "Pop Corn"; and the brilliant, almost painterly pairing that opens and closes the sixth part, between the echoing cries of seagulls and the same gust of wind that turns into the sea's undertow, counterpointing the verse like a self-sufficient instrument — so much so that only at the very end of the track, isolating the two effects, can one recognise them as simple "noises", colours that only come alive in contact with one another, exactly as happens in the paintings of Hartung and Soulages.
Listening more closely, the entire harmonic and tonal framework of Oxygene reveals itself as a carefully controlled transposition of the juxtapositions between bands of colour and fields of differing tone, treated as chromatic frequencies capable of evoking the idea of "sea", "air", "earth", "sky". Michel Granger's cover art — a globe flayed to reveal a human skull (a pre-existing painting bought on Rampling's suggestion) — serves both as graphic packaging and as a visual amplification of the album's visionary nature, offering a symbolic key to the work that channels its poetic abstraction into a macabre indictment of the environmental issue that would only become pressingly topical in the decades to follow. The disembodied, weightless harmonies of "Oxygene Part 4" and "Oxygene Part 6" sound like epitaphs for that lost harmony between humanity and ecosystem which would go on to become a recurring subject in the music of Nordic artists such as Björk and Sigur Rós.

But the planet-wide success of Oxygene, which with its 15 million copies sold still remains the best-selling French album in the world, is merely the first chapter of a kind of "cyber-ecological" trilogy that would be completed, over the span of five years, with Equinoxe and Magnetic Fields.
Inspired, according to Jarre, by the studies on heliocentrism by Copernicus, Kepler's laws of planetary motion, and the alternation of day and night, Equinoxe reworks the melodic textures and impressionistic progressions of Oxygene into a more considered and solid eight-part rhythmic-harmonic architecture. A more nebulous and contemplative side A, in which watery, resonant tableaux of gloomy pictograms follow one another — as in "Equinoxe 2", where the electric cries and sea undertow of "Oxygene Part 6" return — is counterbalanced by the optimistic and lyrically pantheistic character of side B, dominated by the cosmic radiance of the anthem "Equinoxe 5", which, like "Oxygene 4", was destined to become the album's lead single. The symphony opens with a rarefied, majestically melancholic first movement woven over a crescendo of crepuscular syncopations, so much so that it could pass for an outtake from the first part of Oxygene (we'll find it modernised and reinforced with orchestral timpani and snares fifteen years later, in the first part of Chronologie), sketching out the overture with its dual symbolic function within the alchemical structure through which Jarre refines the hermetic-magical quotient of the previous work, shaping its mirrored extension.
"Equinoxe is conceived to reflect the passage of the twenty-four hours of the day," Jarre revealed in an interview at the time, "since each part of the musical work represents different moments of day and night. I'd like listeners to use my album at various points of their day, or when they're going through different emotional states." The second part of Equinoxe exudes the same miasmic darkness as the sonic transubstantiation of the alchemical stage of "nigredo", the "blackness" of the spirit, once believed to be a symptom of an excess of black bile in the body's fluids, a typical manifestation of the lunatic, melancholic, visionary temperament, and a stage preceding the later degrees of the purification of matter (Dürer represents it in the famous engraving "Melencolia I" in the form of an eclipse, and Duchamp in "The Large Glass" through the brown substance of chocolate).
Jarre shows he has closed the gap between a mere attunement to universal moods and their active translation into musical narrative. Music and narrative spirit merge in the abstract purity of this sonic flow, born from treating shifting states of mind as the driving forces of artistic introspection — a fusion rarely found in other composers, who often settle technocratically onto familiar topoi (as in the case of Walter Carlos's electronic rendition of Bach on "Switched-On Bach", with no personal poetic investigation whatsoever).
For his part, Michel Geiss once again plays the role of deus ex machina, satisfying the insatiable Lyonnais by replacing the vocoder with a modified ARP 2600 capable of producing "robotic" sounds that could be shaped according to the desired harmonies. In the second part, Jarre has him emulate a choral croaking that evokes misty skies and ancestral fog (a nod to Dürer's birds?), which could suggest a flock in flight over a spectral landscape, echoing the "ectoplasmic soundscape" dotted with slap-back-echo percussion already heard in Oxygene; in the fourth part, he can be heard warbling like a cybernetic tenor over the ebb and flow of the main theme, which dissolves into a mist of watery confetti (the presence of electronic congas just before the final reprise adds a touch of arcane astral tribalism to the version performed for the 1979 video), before finally descending into the depiction of a lullaby of frogs at the close of "Band In The Rain", the introduction to the eighth part. Reinvigorating the sonic weave is the revolutionary "Matrisequencer 250", a marvel of practicality and creative flair that Geiss built by upgrading the Oberheim digital sequencer, enabling real-time control and expansion of the bass lines that, from "Equinoxe 3" through to the eighth part, surge upward with the unease of a fable-like andante, beaded with the soft bubbling of an alchemical alembic, overflowing into the exasperated, sidereal vertigo of the fourth part, almost anticipating the more turbulent, hypnotic tempos of the future "trance music".
Once the hazy pantheistic lethargy of the second part has faded — sealed by the AKS solo over the undertow effect of "Oxygene 6" acting as a keystone to the next section — and after the evening-like waiting piece of the third, filled with the funereal tolling of dreamlike bells, the chrono-emotional journey from "nigredo" to "rubedo" suddenly arches upward into the leaden seven-note flight supported by a rhythmic choreography of synthetic tambourines signed by reverberating cymbals, surging impetuously into the central score — an almost "karyokinetic" evolution of the phrasing of "Oxygene 2" — introduced by the piercing whirls of the vocoder and the ARP 2600, over which the track pours itself into esoteric-decadent figures, before giving way to the album's second tranche within a rain-soaked tableau vivant.
The matrisequencer keeps the polyphonic game going until the seventh part, musically celebrating the biorhythm of daytime existence in all its polymorphic animation: the phase of "citrinitas", marked by yellow, the third-to-last stage in the ascent from the darkness of the formless to the liberating brilliance of light and ideality, emerges from the epic-ancestral motif of "Equinoxe 5", a pseudo-liturgical hymn in honour of a futuristic high-tech ecosystem, the majesty of the transition from matter to form, a condition of total interaction between spirit and nature, played out in two stages across the sixth and seventh parts with the inevitable contribution of the Eko ComputeRhythm, building an electro-picaresque interlude in the sixth (a lively, disenchanted wait with its sparse handful of Korg notes) and the return of the AKS as soprano, accompanying the driving, fearless refrain of the seventh part, echoing back to the mystical unease of the fourth. Indeed, the theme's extension finally spends itself in one last chromatic splash, anticipating the attainment and overcoming of the final step towards the completion of the alchemical opus. Worth noting is the cinematic digression of "Band In The Rain" (a sort of hypertextual nod to "Amarcord") that opens "Equinoxe 8", drawing directly on remote "Felliniesque" childhood memories of circus bands. The rhythmic-symphonic sweep of Equinoxe was rewarded with sales of seven million copies and the staging of the first concert, held on 14 July 1979 in Paris at Place de la Concorde, where it was performed alongside the six parts of Oxygene in front of a million people.

Fortunately, the honours and accolades that crowned this commercial triumph — such as the Grand Prix du Disque for Oxygene, being named Person of the Year by "People" magazine, and entering the Guinness Book of Records for the concert with the highest attendance — did not stop him from continuing his personal research in that enclave between mass-market music and experimentation in which artists like Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream had sterilely run aground. The Eighties opened under the sign of the Fairlight, the first digital synthesizer-sampler, of which Jarre became a privileged owner alongside Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush.
Magnetic Fields, completed in early 1981, offers the third incarnation of the Jarre-ian concept of a pictorial, esoteric synth-pop living within the dichotomy between catchy, radio-friendly tunes and enveloping, thesis-driven polyphonic suites. Curiously similar to the way tracks are split on Pink Floyd's "Medley", while side A presents a long, 17-minute proto-techno ride driven by mesmeric arpeggios and clattering percussion, where psychedelic voices and reworked jet-engine roars on the Fairlight conspire to evoke mysterious spatio-temporal vastness, side B proceeds in a more uncertain, discontinuous manner, ranging from the dreamy yet childlike run of notes in "Magnetic Fields 2", carried by the hammering rhythm of a sampled typewriter (paying homage to Schaeffer's lesson), through the mechanical chiming of the third part, to the melancholic ballad of the fourth part which, via the rushing sound of a train on its tracks, dissolves into the metatextual incoherence of a parodic rendition of a "last rumba", kicked off by the sound of a jukebox needle settling onto the vinyl.

Thanks to the absence of verbal content carrying any subversive ideas, in Asia Jarre's music was preferred over the more biting sound of English-speaking rock bands and played constantly on local radio, to the point of persuading China to invite him to give the first tour by a Western artist in the post-Maoist republic. The diary in images and sounds of this unrepeatable adventure, experienced in the spring of 1981 between Shanghai and Beijing, took the form of Andrew Piddington's documentary film and the double album Concerts In China, released in 1982.
In fact, largely a "studio album" (due to the technical difficulties encountered during the live performances), the two records revisit some of the finest moments of Jarre's still-slim back catalogue, leaving out Oxygene and indulging in pseudo-acoustic rearrangements and jam-like excursions such as the one tacked onto the end of "Magnetic Fields 2" and "Equinoxe 7". Standing apart from the reworkings of traditional Chinese tunes such as "Fishing Junks At Sunset" (mistakenly credited to Jarre in the album's liner notes) are the tracks composed from scratch: the bold staccato of "Orient Express", the irresistible psychedelic embroidery of "Arpeggiator" (later used by David Lean to score a steamy scene in "9½ Weeks") and "Souvenir Of China", an elegiac snapshot conceived on the way back from the tour, introduced by the voices of Chinese children and paced by the clicks of a Polaroid camera (the very photos printed on the double album's sleeve covers).

In a musical landscape now in turmoil due to the growing emancipation of electronic instruments, which were helping to shape new styles such as the oblique mix of art-rock, electro-dark and new wave found in Depeche Mode, Dead Can Dance and the Cocteau Twins, Jarre pushed his gaze even further, giving birth to what is perhaps his last truly significant work. From the ashes of "Music For Supermarkets", a one-off release whose master tape was literally burned at the end of a historic auction at the Hotel Drouot, where it was bought by a certain Mr Gerard (who had woken from a coma to the sound of "Souvenir Of China"), the phoenix of Zoolook was born. Just as "Music For Supermarkets", originally composed as a soundtrack for a contemporary art exhibition, implicitly positioned itself as a response to Brian Eno's ambient philosophy, so Zoolook openly challenges Eno and Byrne's "My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts", fleshing out the sparse sketches of the "art piece" album with a multitude of voices recorded around the world by ethnologist Xavier Bellanger (the fifth part would turn into "Blah Blah Cafe" and the seventh into the second part of "Diva"), and which Jarre himself offered up to pirates during its one and only broadcast on French radio. The album also marks Jarre's first extensive collaboration with artists from the most diverse areas of contemporary music: from Adrian Belew of King Crimson, who grafts the powerful picking of his electric guitar onto Jarre's expanses of drones and pads, to Marcus Miller, who punctuates the beats with his looming bass, from the blazing drums of Yogi Horton to the alien phonemes of Laurie Anderson, who duets with the hallucinatory parade of Fairlight samples on the sci-fi-tribal track "Diva".
While in the work of Eno and Byrne, as in contemporary records by Art Of Noise and Yello, human voices are manipulated as "uncanny" effects around which to build tracks caught somewhere between theatrical song and Dadaist divertissement, on Zoolook they are treated as genuine instruments, reproducing basses, horns, strings and arpeggios to the point of evoking a phonetic, multi-ethnic orchestra in the masterpiece of post-Wagnerian, cinematic dynamism that is "Ethnicolor" — a roughly twelve-minute suite divided into three movements that stands as the creative peak of the album, and indeed of Jarre's entire career.

With the monumental Houston concert of 5 April 1986, celebrating NASA's 25th anniversary and the 150th anniversary of the city and the state of Texas, a twenty-year arc of mega-live shows begins, one that would lead Jarre to increasingly subordinate his meticulous work as a studio composer to his role as the "Fitzcarraldo" of grand multimedia happenings, an arc that would close with the 2006 concert among the dunes of Merzouga.
Evidence of this new hierarchy of priorities in his modus operandi can be found in the very genesis of the album Rendez-Vous, hastily recorded in a little over two months by recycling and expanding earlier material: the third track of "Music For Supermarkets", a spasmodic arpeggio redolent of cosmic music, reinserted as the third movement of "Rendez-Vous 5"; the nagging two-note chord from the song "La Belle et la Bête", composed in 1975 for Gerard Le Norman, repurposed as the foundation of the imposing, Orff-like operatic construction of "Rendez-Vous 2", punctuated by a minimal, poignant solo modulated by the cold bellow of the Italian Elka Synthex — the same instrument used to perform the theme of "Rendez-Vous 3", exhumed from "La Mort du Cygne", another song written for Le Norman; and the melodic phrase of the famous "Rendez-Vous 4", a clear reworking of the one intoned by the synthesised voice of "Zoolookologie".
Caught between futuristic baroque flourishes, electro-orchestral hybrids and pseudo-jazz touches, the album turns out stylistically unresolved, living more through its individual parts than as a unified work, built around the fleeting concept of the sumptuous memorial concert staged among the half-built skyscrapers of downtown Houston in honour of the astronauts who died aboard the Challenger a few months earlier (standing apart is the touching ambient-jazz interlude "Ron's Piece", dedicated to the late astronaut and saxophonist Ron McNair). The second entry into the Guinness Book of Records, with a million and a half spectators scattered around the immense drive-in venue beneath pyrotechnic storms, earned him a second major staging for the concert dedicated to the Pope on the occasion of his visit to Jarre's home city of Lyon in October of that same year.

The following albums, Revolutions, Waiting For Cousteau and Chronologie, also fall in line with this new creative agenda, adapting — with mixed results — to the now-established practice of pairing long electro-acoustic suites of epic sweep with radio-edit-style tracks that waver between pop-rock formulas and world music. The umpteenth neo-symphonic suite, split across side A into an "Ouverture" and three parts of "Industrial Revolution" built on the clanging, ferrous sounds of the Roland D-50 evoking the relentless, driving rhythms of the industrial age, is followed by "London Kid", a saccharine vintage-rock ballad carried by the electric guitar of Hank Marvin, leader of the British Shadows, whom Jarre had admired back in his Mystère IV days; on side B, launched by a long Turkish flute solo, "Revolutions" stamps and snorts behind an alienated, vocoder-treated voice in a growling techno-rock that suited perfectly the choreography of whirling dervish dancers and giant pop-art backdrops devised for the visionary concert held in London's Docklands on rainy nights in October 1988.
Donning the role of film director more than that of composer, the London live show marks the crowning achievement of his ambition to reach the point of fusion between stage design and music, with obsessive care given to the design of the floating stage, equipped with keyboards and instruments inspired by the decadent future aesthetic of "Blade Runner" on one hand and the organic-baroque look of "Dune" on the other, even though for Jarre the entire production of the event, plagued by bad weather and bureaucratic headaches, amounted in practice to "shooting 'Apocalypse Now' in one night."

On Bastille Day 1990, "Paris La Défense – Une ville en concert", besides marking his third entry into the Guinness Book of Records with an audience of two and a half million people, also represents the last successful concert conceived on the scale of an entire city. The "land-artist" approach devoted to uniting past and future, already applied in Houston, Lyon and London, takes shape here in the symbolic integration of the new La Défense district into the old urban fabric, linked at a distance to the Arc de Triomphe through the intermediate placement of the pyramid-shaped stage from which Jarre unleashed the warhorses of his discography, amid a riot of fireworks, skyscrapers turned into multicoloured organisms, and dancing Caribbean-style puppets.
The three new tracks from the album Waiting For Cousteau, dedicated to oceanographer Jacques-Yves Cousteau's boat "Calypso", cover only a quarter of the entire performance, inexorably carrying the live show, amid a crescendo of furious percussive exhilaration from the steel drums played by Trinidad's Amoco Renegades, towards its kaleidoscopic final apotheosis. A bold substitute for the classic suite is instead the album's title track, a cryptic and oceanic 46-minute ambient "audiosphere" in which mournful piano echoes ripple above immeasurable stretches of seething effects and drones (a piece that Robert Rich's "Somnium" would later recall, in homage to this enigmatic Jarre-ian gem).

"Equinoxe 2.0" could just as easily be called Chronologie, a concept album born in 1993 on the back of Stephen Hawking's book "A Brief History of Time" (although in truth "Chronologie 4" and "Chronologie 5" had actually been commissioned by the Swiss watch company Swatch). The eight parts of this stylistically heterogeneous suite, with its wavering narrative ambitions, unfolding between audio-scenic interludes of creaking clocks, update the 1978 masterpiece to the new musical trends of the 90s, intersecting the grandiose "space opera"-tinged opening of the first part with the relentless "dance" of the second, where Jarre seems to parody himself with overwrought organ staccatos descended from that of "Equinoxe 4", and with the more somber, rigorous mood of the sixth, which in its own way derives from the mesmeric motif of "Magnetic Fields 4".
Except for Patrick Rondat's electric guitar, the album is governed entirely by the analog sound of old and new keyboards, a reversal of course confirmed four years later with the mannerist sequel to Oxygene. In between comes "Europe in Concert", Jarre's first attempt to abandon the by-now tired "City in Concert" formula and embark on a genuine tour, without giving up the gigantism and mirabilia that had by then become the trademark of his multimedia "enterprise".
In 1995 Jarre treats himself to his third Bastille Day, this time at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, limiting himself to rearranging his old repertoire alongside the more recent tracks from Chronologie.

Very little of the innocent minimalism and bewitching sui generis intuitions that had contributed to the timeless fortune of Oxygene survives in the following seven parts of Oxygene 7-13, released in 1997 and dedicated to the memory of Pierre Schaeffer, who had died two years earlier. It's a revisionist continuation of the 1976 suite that lingers between moving self-quotations and blatant reprises of old themes, such as the weeping melody of the Aks from "Oxygene 1", set into the ninth part, the dreamlike radio format of "Oxygene 4", replicated in a trance key in "Oxygene 8" (4+4), and the wobbly rhythm of the rhythmin' computer from the melancholy "Oxygene 6", on which the thirteenth part closes (though it borders on plagiarism, with the 4 notes of "Oxygene 7" tremendously reminiscent of Vangelis's "Blade Runner End Titles"). Michel Geiss makes his last appearance here in the credits, opening with his departure from the Jarrian team a long string of defections, starting with his wife Charlotte, until then his muse and official photographer for all his concerts, through to many of his longtime collaborators, including Francis Dreyfus, the jazz record producer who had thought he'd sell no more than 50,000 copies of that songless record named after a gas.
The fourth entry into the Guinness World Records, with three and a half million people attending the Moscow date of the "Oxygene Tour", sets the seal on the end of an era.

In this sense, the return to a song-based dimension on Metamorphoses was meant to serve as an emblematic tabula rasa from which to launch the second phase of a career already nearly thirty years old. But the pharaonic showcase for the record, the phantasmagoric concert held in front of the pyramids of Giza on the night of January 1, 2000, carries almost the weight of a prophecy: a thick fog literally sends months of work on the projections intended for the pyramids behind the stage up in smoke. It's the haze that settles over Jarre's artistic and private life. The album's many female guest appearances - from Natacha Atlas, who warbles through the long single track "C'est la vie", amid Arabesque strings fluttering over dance-flavored arpeggios, to Laurie Anderson, who returns on "Je me souviens", this time delivering a nocturnal enumeratio of phonetic pictograms in one of the album's few genuinely original moments, to Sharon Corr's violin on the Kraftwerk-esque "Rendez Vous a Paris" - aren't enough to rescue the fortunes of an album whose lyrics lack real poetic cohesion and whose music struggles to sketch the transcendent atmospheres of the past with the same intensity. "Miss Moon" stands apart, a curiously dark-chill-out instrumental track that is also a final, worthy piece of musique concrète, with the sound of a watering can holding down the entire rhythm section like a metronome beneath the disembodied vocal virtuosity of Dierdre Dubois.

Seven years would pass before Jarre released a new studio album, losing himself among dreary side projects: the aborted "Rendez Vous In Space" album, conceived together with the Japanese Tetsuya Komuro, born and buried at the New Year's Eve concert in Okinawa in 2001; Geometry Of Love, from 2003, a collection of stilted lounge tracks recorded on computer with soft synths for the "VIP room" of Jean Roch's Parisian club; "Interior Music", a tedious assemblage of effects for the Bang & Olufsen chain; the stale avant-gardisms of the 2002 "Printemps de Bourges" live recording; and the chilly electro-jazz improvisations of "Session 2000", released to settle his contract with Dreyfus.
In the age of Air, Daft Punk, Moby and Röyksopp, to whom Jarre had ideally passed the torch, none of these works was any longer capable of keeping the "standard-bearer of electronic music" flag flying high. After launching holophony with the 5.1 sound of "AERO", an anthology of tracks fished out of Oxygene and Chronologie, plus a Robert Miles-style rework of "Je me Souviens" as the title track (the tour planned to promote it would fall by the wayside, shrinking to just two dates, within the walls of Beijing's Forbidden City in 2004 and in the port of Gdansk in 2005), Teo & Tea, conceived around the evolution of a love affair, is the final act of a process of self-negation dictated by the unbearable weight of his own legend. The childish minimalism of the dated, saccharine eurodance of the single is merely the consequence of a "Dorian Gray" syndrome that at times puts Jarre back on the road of "Deserted Palace" - tracks like "Gossip", "Chatterbox" and "In The Mood For You" sound so clumsy and threadbare that they recall his first experiments with the EMS and the Farfisa, but without the playful purity of the young musician venturing into unknown territory (indeed, almost all the sounds and grooves are presets of the new Roland MC808, programmed by DJ Tim Hufken).

Jolted awake by the commercial disaster, Jarre moves quickly to contain the damage, taking refuge for the second time in the past. The remastered version of Oxygene, performed for the first time with philological rigor across all its parts using the analog "old ladies" in September of that same year, alongside trusted collaborators Francis Rimbert, Dominique Perrier and Claude Samard, has the bittersweet flavor of an inevitable self-commemoration. The concerts that follow, from the Théâtre Marigny through to the old/new "Indoors" tour of 2009-2010 in European city arenas, stretch the duration of an all-too-obvious liturgy to the point of absurdity. With the content and propulsive drive of the pioneering era exhausted, Jarre's musical revolution, like all great artistic upheavals, has fossilized into the strata of cultural history, leaving only the performer on the surface, free to go on tinkering with his own toys. A bit like that little boy from Lyon who, from his balcony, used to dream of the wonders of the circus, chasing its sounds lost in the air.

The past never entirely disappears, and continually accumulates in the present, the French philosopher Henri Bergson asserted in a 1913 lecture. It's an inner conviction that Jarre restates in his own way in 2015, translating its bio-artistic implications into notes and, above all, sounds on the new album Electronica: The Time Machine, the first installment of that audiographic feature film with which the composer, after six years of "indoor" touring and two "outdoor" shows in the old pyrotechnic style held in Santiago de Compostela in 2010 and in the Port of Monaco in 2011, agrees to come to terms with leitmotifs - not only musical ones - that have underpinned his life and thought across 67 years.
Buoyed by a newfound productive discipline and experimental verve that had seemed to have mummified inside those Giza pyramids in front of which he'd staged his last "pharaonic" concert to welcome the third millennium, with this colorful parade of 30 new tracks staged in psycho-physical collaboration with as many musicians, Jarre now tries to redeem himself from a decade and a half of erratic artistic drift.
It's no coincidence, then, that the cast of this previsualized film, narrated through the audiograms of a soundtrack of lived time, brings back the very same Laurie Anderson who (after their first collaboration on Zoolook) opened the tracklist of Je me souviens back then, Proust-like, spelling out the pictograms of memory - whereas here, over the cartoonish ringtone groove of "Rely On Me", she lends her icy, sardonic phonetics to a smartphone that has become the custodian of its owner's memory and identity. Likewise, repeatedly evoked on the 2000 album as evokers in turn of the "electroacoustic French touch" that Jarre had injected into his homeland through their landmark work "Moon Safari", Air are enlisted as co-directors of a programmatic track that is at once a dreamy apologia for the "synth-etic zeitgeist" and an exemplary micro-documentary on the historical evolution of electronic music. From the handmade loop made with razor blades and tape in the manner of the elder statesmen of "musique concrète" - splicing tape samples into a single reel running around a microphone stand in sync with the rhythm of the Korg Minipops, forerunner of modern drum machines - to the ghostly wail of the EMS Synthi AKS of "Oxygene" fame, passing through new ethereal soft synths like the Monark, right up to closing with the Animoog for iPad, the "medium" that blends the shifting hues and voices of "Close Your Eyes" - both the vocoded voices of Air and those of real and virtual instruments - what remains is the desire to trace perspectival vanishing points within a familiarly alien landscape, one explored many times before from different latitudes and altitudes over the past forty years.
Jarre can direct and juxtapose, in endless myth-making combinations, settings, stories and characters, each free to express its own distinct identity beneath a shared analog-digital troposphere, where it seems entirely natural for a vintage British rocker like Pete Townshend of the Who to coexist with Lang Lang, the virtuoso Chinese interpreter of Bach and Chopin; for the young DJs and producers Boys Noize and Gesaffelstein to appear alongside veteran Vince Clarke, co-founder of Depeche Mode and the mastermind behind Erasure and Yazoo; for the famed director John Carpenter to share the stage with the techno-psychedelic duo Fuck Buttons and the synth-pop outfit M83.
Arpeggios and sequencers weave through and envelop the entire run of tracks, sometimes as counterpoint, sometimes as the very load-bearing structure of the composition itself, as happens on "Zero Gravity", an emblematic, testamentary track woven together with the late Edgar Froese of Tangerine Dream, to whom the album itself is dedicated. If, on the one hand, the absence of gravity and of a defined melodic center of gravity isolates this track from those that precede and follow it, on the other it also makes it a parameter of jarring contrast with the more pop-radio-oriented collaborations, such as the childlike "If..!", tailor-made for the honeyed vocals of pixie-ish Little Boots, the Lancashire singer-songwriter who emerged on the dance-pop scene via YouTube; the melancholically pompous, Coldplay-flavored alternative-rock-tinged anthem "Glory", which pairs the electrified voice of M83 frontman Anthony Gonzalez with the enveloping crystalline arpeggio of "Chronologie 1" and "Globe Trotter"; the blustering, overblown dance-rock escapology of "Travelator Part 2", delivered over the top by a Townshend parodying himself; and the soft, elegiac, regret-steeped chant from Moby amid the swelling geometric weave of loops and bloodless carpets of sound on "Suns Have Gone".
Hyperspatial odysseys and off-the-rails crossings run especially through the two mini-suites "Automatic", a solemn divertissement led in its first part by a Vince Clarke toying with rigorous robotic punctuation and steampunk music-box riffs, before giving way in the second part to a game of variations that Jarre reprises by fusing the theme of "Chronologie 4" with that of "Je me souviens" and "Aero", lifting the track off over Erasure-style sharp electro-song articulations; and "The Train & The River", the album's true cinematic "denouement", haunted by the ghosts of Pierre Schaeffer, John Cage and Erik Satie, where Lang Lang's rain-like impressionist piano colors, pattering away, find themselves chasing, as a pure sonic entity on par with thunder, wind and the river's rumblings, the sequencer which Jarre, at the controls, speeds up and slows down like a neurotic train conductor. All of this is in keeping with the broadly cinematic tone the project has, one already established by the earlier "Question Of Blood", composed with the more gothic-rock Carpenter of "Escape from New York", a track that would certainly have benefited from a more gradual, extended development of the melodic idea around which Jarre's soprano-like voice and agitated arpeggios swirl in an anguished crescendo before breaking off too soon.
The musical phylogeny of the Jarrian genome finds its clearest expression combined with the sumptuous ceremonial psychedelia of Fuck Buttons, who pour the interstellar drifts of early Pink Floyd's "A Saucerful Of Secrets" and "Echoes" into techno's dark metallic frenzy. Even more than the opening "The Time Machine", erected like a cyber-gothic spire atop a cathedral of "mellotron choirs" with Hamburg's Boys Noyze; more than the hammering post-industrial march that passes through evanescent darkness alongside Gesaffelstein on "Conquistador"; more than the headlong revisiting of trance, embellished with seasoned craft, on "Stardust", paired with his "little brother" Armin Van Buuren; or the fraught gestation of the languid, uncertain operatic trip-hop of "Watching You" (delivered by cesarean over two years with the reclusive 3D of Massive Attack) - it's the majestic lysergic organ mass of "Immortals" that proves how the logos of symphonic-electronic epic coined single-handedly by Jarre is still living protoplasm in the making, capable of being revived and given new life four decades on.
In any case, until next spring, what comes to an end for now is only the first column of this portico built before the timeless, ever more crowded temple of a transcendent and carnal obsession called "Electronica".

On The Heart Of Noise, released seven months after The Time Machine, Jarre allows himself poetic licenses so bold and sly as to justify boldly dissonant pairings of styles and artists, ultimately conveying a sort of disorienting "acousmatic" vertigo over the course of a full sequential listen to all 18 tracks, almost giving the impression that the whole album is the hypertrophic appendix of Metamorphoses.
The only thing suggesting a faint atmospheric cohesion is the title track itself, which, born from a restless "ritournelle" escorted by dark, trembling percussion, arches to ideally embrace the whole quadruple album while also building a "Tibetan bridge" toward the interplanetary unease of the 1970s and 80s suites. The contribution of French minimal-techno newcomer Erwan Castex, aka Rone, shines through in the first part of the track in a reverential role, helping weld together the cardio-symphonic phrases of what presents itself as a classic overture steeped in mournful "Blade Runner-esque grandeur" and electrical fibrillations picked up somewhere between Aphex Twin and Royksopp - only to retreat in the second part, where Jarre takes command, detonating the melody inside a frenzied dance spiral that finally sinks into a whirlpool of white noise. Jarring yet effective in its solid early-90s synth-pop single quality is "Brick England", a track in which the stylistic emulation of the guest collaborator borders on mimetic virtuosity, giving free rein to the iconic voice of Neil Tennant, who chants with resigned detachment about a bleak neo-Dickensian England where walls and cities are endlessly torn down and rebuilt, while Jarre carves out a brief "keytar" solo to pick the refrain back up and drop the song into his own personal techno-British dimension, painted back in 1988 with "Revolutions" and especially the "Destination Docklands" concerts.
Quite esoteric and unresolved in its expressive aims, "These Creatures" slows the relentless pace of the tracklist up to this point, laying the sample-like warbles of American Julia Holter over an Edenic air sketched with delicate sequencer work and celestially solemn carpets, trying in every way to evoke the states of grace of early Kate Bush, Elizabeth Fraser and Enya. As if picking up the last line Holter leaves floating in silence, in comes "As One", an anthemic remix of the endless Afro-rock track "Come Together", released in 1992 by Scotland's Primal Scream, which slides in on the back of a long, jubilant moan paying homage to the one that opened "Ethnicolor", only to turn, unlike that earlier track, into a far more generic Europop sports-event anthem decorated with brief sung sections from an Eiffel 65-style vocoded voice. By contrast, "Here For You" marks a return to a faint socio-anthropological undercurrent, a song performed by the aristocratically atonal voice of England's Gary Numan, an exponent of 70s and 80s electronic new wave, set over yet another carefully controlled spool of heavy "poptronic" palpitations, aiming to describe the frequent "non-relationships" conducted at a distance between social-network users. But the timid hint of cultural criticism that, with Numan, might have taken on far more psychotic inflections is interrupted by the symphonic-cinematic conspiracy theorizing of "Electrees", which, with its majestic, starry crescendo traced along an arc of modular arpeggios, gong explosions and children's choirs, unfolds like the prologue to a soundtrack that German composer Hans Zimmer and Jarre nonetheless prefer to sketch only "in nuce", as a hypothetical mash-up between the scores for "Interstellar" and Daft Punk's "Tron Legacy".
Over the years, as his role as a UNESCO spokesman and later his presidency of CISAC (the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers) became established, Jarre has made less and less secret of his ideological positions, and on several occasions has not shied away from publicly supporting politically "liminal" figures such as Julian Assange and Edward Snowden - wanted internationally, the former for the "WikiLeaks" scandal, the latter for leaking data from the American National Security Agency (NSA). Purely on the musical level, "Exit", a neurasthenic techno-dance flight boiling over with samples and sound-design effects, absolves itself of ever actually finding an "exit" - that is, an aesthetic resolution - qualifying only as a frame for the central monologue by Snowden, whom Jarre meets in person in his secret Moscow hideout to record his voice and face as a warning against the indiscriminate surveillance and manipulation of private data by government agencies. A further departure from "political correctness" is also found in the provocative rap of "What You Want", built on the percussive loop of "Magnetic Fields 2" with Canadian Peaches, whose colorful career has always been founded on the systematic mocking of sexism, as is the sarcastic, jagged dream-pop nursery rhyme that shaggy Sebastian Tellier - the loony cabaret chansonnier of French new wave who has self-proclaimed himself "Jarre's son" - dedicates to the erotic doll "Gisele", with her cold plastic skin, all "body and no soul", a satirical portrait of a contemporary world devoured by hedonistic materialism and the amoral abuse of technology.
In "Swipe To The Right" the theme of alienating idiosyncrasies tied to technological bulimia recurs one last time, thanks to the performance of New Yorker Cyndi Lauper, living embodiment of 80s pop culture, who, with adolescent emphasis, "de-sings" the superficial precariousness of romantic relationships in the age of "Tinder", the app that reduces interaction between strangers - who delude themselves they can flirt in exhibitionist anonymity - to the time it takes for a "swipe to the right". Split into two parts, the song's long "outro" brings Jarre's keyboard back to the fore, weaving a sinuous, dissonantly-keyed variation on the melody over the rhythm of "Oxygene 6", quoted right down to the addition of sea surf, a self-tribute dictated by the "audio-self-referential" nature that in many ways forms the substratum of "Electronica".
All of which proves how Jarre's instrumental, avant-garde vocation still struggles to fully bend to the declarative demands of sung lyrics. And so, as a token of rediscovered harmony, 19 years after the controversial "Toxygene" (excluded by Jarre from the remix compilation dedicated to "Oxygene 7-13"), the elective partnership with London's The Orb is rehabilitated and sealed with "Switch On Leon". Though it bears no connection to Wendy Carlos's "Switch On Bach", the piece offers a convincing didactic-Dadaist digression through the history of electronic instruments, reshaping and interweaving in a whirling protoplasmic carousel the voices of Russia's Leon Theremin, virtuoso Clara Rockmore - the performer who first gave the instrument musical dignity by playing arias by Saint-Saëns and Bach on it - and the legendary Robert Moog. At the eye of this hypersonic tornado throbs a menacing cosmic bassline, around which otherworldly stammers gather and stumble about alongside the howl of the indispensable Theremin, hinting at a spectral melodic motif, before the sinister "Hellzapoppin'" agonizes and frays amid disturbed frequencies and radio static. From the collaboration with Yello, the shrewd Swiss picaresque masters of signature sampling, one might have expected an equally unbridled cascade of noise-based inventions; instead, the track "Why This, Why That, And Why" turns out to be a spoken, theater-song-style version of a text that had already been arranged, before meeting Jarre, as a more conventional ballad with acoustic guitar accompaniment. In this second incarnation, Dieter Meier grumbles pensively with his powerful hard-boiled-detective rasp over the existential questions of the human condition, astride a despondent andante that Jarre loosens between verses with the return of the children's choir from "Glory" and "Electrees" to dramatize the staccato of the main melody.
Lighter and more self-satisfied are the duets with Detroit DJ-wizard Jeff Mills, who, together with Jarre on "The Architect", becomes an archistar of sound, designing and erecting an imaginative, diaphanous residential compound made of swarming sequencers and polychrome drum-machine windows lined with lashing strings; and German producer Siriusmo, with whom, on "Circus", the Lyon-born composer ventures into evoking the folkloric, fairy-tale atmosphere of the circus world in a sophisticatedly naïve little tune that spirals in on itself over a syncopated clapping beat.
Third from last in the tracklist comes the return of the "revenant" dandy Christophe, singer of the "mots bleus", the "blue words spoken with the eyes", back in that distant 1974 that marked Jarre's first success as a lyricist. This time, the Italian-French Daniel Bevilacqua lends a limping acid-blues march an English-accented falsetto that could be the frustrated voice of that same lover, now grown old, waiting to declare himself to his beloved at the tolling of the evening bells - that beloved who now "wraps herself around him and lets herself be wrapped in sorrow" as he makes his funereal way down death row. A sung "Doppelgänger" of a Jarre never so openly disenchanted and decadent, with his hallucinated harmonica wailing in the track's coda amid sobbing percussion, Christophe ultimately performs a shamanic ceremony to invoke and recall "tranches de vie", passions, sufferings and "paradises lost" in the shadow of that "finis vitae" which Jarre experienced firsthand with the deaths, within a few months of each other, of his parents and his longtime producer Francis Dreyfus. It's the following "Falling Down" that sets out to ward off the nihilism implicit in the "memento mori" of "Walking The Mile", an artificial regression to youth in which Jarre imagines collaborating with his twenty-year-old self on a pseudo theme tune for a 1970s manga anime, hovering between the cartoonish mood of Daft Punk's "Interstella 5555" and a carefree 16-bit video-game jingle.
At the end of this Homeric crossing aboard his autobiographical Tardis, Jarre finds himself lost in the absolute, liberating silence of deep space. Like an astronaut adrift in the film "Gravity", he wonders whether, in space, it's truly possible to tell up from down, repeating to himself, with solipsistic bewilderment, that he's falling downward as he drifts through altitudes unknown to Earth's gravity, perhaps in search of the authentic beat of his own heart, sealed - and at times disguised - across more than two hours by so many musical pacemakers and bypasses lost in the infinite variety of sounds and noises: "The Noise Of Heart", precisely.

Setting aside the commercial constraints that every internationally famous artist must, to varying degrees, submit to - especially after selling 15 million copies of his debut album and setting the still-unbeaten record for the best-selling album in French music history - the eternal return of "Oxygene" is accepted by Jarre with a stoic resignation that makes it somehow more natural and inevitable than the tautological genealogy of the many "Tubular Bells" forged between 1973 and 2003 by his British counterpart Mike Oldfield.
For this third, entirely instrumental, roughly 40-minute installment, the title "Oxygene 2016" might perhaps have been more fitting than Oxygene 3 (2016), in keeping with the title chosen for another unexpected and equally hoped-for/dreaded sequel, "Blade Runner 2049", whose recently wrapped filming aims to picture Rick Deckard's Los Angeles in a later era of that same imagined world.
Jarre finds himself saddled with the thankless mission of paying tribute to himself while avoiding self-cloning or unintentional counterfeiting, on the hypothesis that the twenty-eight-year-old Jarre who composed the original "Oxygene" in the kitchen of his cramped Parisian flat on Rue de La Trémoille had been catapulted into this 2016, right in the middle of electronic music's sprawling, cross-genre explosion and its many generational revivals, where 70s disco and 80s pop get composted and remixed on the very same hotplates as dance, techno, trance, house, trip-hop and the whole vast, at times unintelligible, EDM melting pot.
From the very opening of part one - three rising bass notes, modulated twice on a Moog, before the "in medias res" detonation of a harsh, cutting sequencer - a deep break is marked with the more undulating, dense atmospheric coils in which the Bach-like air of the 1976 overture used to flocculate. Only a pensive, spare refrain on an unexpected electric piano, alternating with a fibrillating, spatial octave excursion, offers an initial reassurance as to the presence of a rarefied melodic "trait d'union" - one that, however, from here to the twentieth part, is limited to glimmering at a distance behind stratocumulus clouds of fluttering Eminent pads and white noise shifted, via VCS-3 and Swarmatron hits, into crackles, gasps, drips, puffs and gusts. The track evolves in a fluid crescendo in which the faint motif coils in on itself, taming the sequencer's tempo shifts in cahoots with crystalline arpeggios and dark jabs of Elka Syntex, itself a new color on the "Oxygene" palette. The modest eruption of the classic Korg Minipops percussion base in the fifteenth part seems to redirect the flow into a hesitant psytrance pulse, carved out of a sidereal silence bordering the one in which the dreaming nightmares of Tangerine Dream's "Phaedra" swim, conceived solely to drag us, after an incongruous gaseous pause, into a more deliberate and structured "score", like the opening screen of an 80s video game. The strings that circle and orbit drowsily in the background of the sixteenth part seem to be chasing the theme of Chris Hülsbeck's "Turrican 2".
In turn, a large part of the tortuous noise sequences that cut through this track (and part 19) - just when it seems about to take off into a sumptuous intergalactic ensemble, perhaps bolstered by Mellotron choirs or the hellish barking of the theremin - come from the anguished tropospheric dome Steven Price created for the film "Gravity". Glimmers of the mystical "esprit de finesse" that informed the original Oxygene flash through these long transitions, shaped with the restraint of a sober John Zorn of "musique concrète", who delights in stretching the listener's wait as far as possible, plunging them into gloomy sonic basins pierced by scattered, inquisitorial notes.
Rather exogenous and surreptitious after these disorienting opening 19 minutes, part 17 arrives, an astral electro-lounge cotillon unveiled as the encore during the October 4 concert at Cardiff's Motorpoint Arena, complete with a three-dimensional animation of Michel Granger's land-and-sea skull rotating onstage like a planetarium. The work's only shrewdly melodic hinge, placed, as it is, at the opening of side B of the vinyl in the same manner as previous Jarre hits, it makes no secret of wanting to be the third and final reincarnation of the 1976 classic, recovering its dance-pop morphology and extracting the Eminent riff played for the bridge to yoke it here to a more elaborate two-voice refrain, led by the warbling sound of the MicroKorg - already used thirteen years earlier for the long solo on "Geometry Of Love" - and the mighty final notes of the jubilant 1986 "Rendez Vous 4". A shortened counterpart to the ambient movement of "Oxygene 5", part 18 sees the diamond-like three piano Rhodes notes sprouting from the first track resurface, now dispensed sparingly over a poignant, gaseous host that could virtually go on for another ten minutes, laying claim to being the extension of its direct emotional kin, Brian Eno's "An Ending (An Ascent)".
From the prototypical "Windswept Canyon", found on 1972's "Deserted Palace", descends the levitating trance march of part 19, initially put forward and then dropped for the "Stardust" collaboration with Armin Van Buuren.
We're now in full quasi-cinematic mode: in the distance, the melancholy rumba of "Oxygene 6" (which closed the first masterpiece) sails and fades amid thunder and the damp threats of a storm, like the "Band in the Rain" that opens "Equinoxe 8", pointing with meta-narrative wit to a return to that same beach, now emptied of the sea's surf and the chirping of gulls, awaiting the final holocaust that will sweep away the last traces of earthly life. The purgatorial staircase of strings and organs, echoing those Hans Zimmer stretched toward the black hole of "Interstellar", rises with mournful operatic grandeur in the final 5 minutes, and amid trilling laments drags and consumes, along with itself, all 20 parts in the small crackling bonfire where the last molecules of oxygen are burned.
There is the whole weight of the forty years that passed between that December 5, 1976 and this December 2, 2016 in the desire to find shelter from the anxiety of being condemned to repeat oneself. That's why, among the many pauses and gaps in which unresolved themes and sounds are left to vibrate and evaporate, Jarre whispers the funereal spell of an epic whose foundational nature has defined a style and an artistic attitude, an "élan vital" that has transcended the author's intentions, outlasting the musical phenomenon and the fleeting trends of the decades.

At the twin milestone of his seventieth birthday and fiftieth year in music, Jarre returns with psychoanalytic zeal to work through the persistence of the memory of what remains the most artistically accomplished work in his discography: the eight-part suite Equinoxe, which on its release in December 1978, riding the long wave of Oxygene's success, had already racked up a million and a half advance orders.
Even so, one might well speak of a "disintegration in effigy" in the case of this Equinoxe Infinity (2018). At the striking of the third commemorative anniversary marked out by his contractual calendar, following Oxygene 3 in December 2016 and the hagiographic compilation Planet Jarre in September 2018, the Lyon-born composer resorts, in effect, to a far-fetched escamotage to dodge the ritual obligations of a mass celebrated "in memoriam" of the bestseller, deconstructing and resignifying it by reclaiming what used to be the envelope of signifiers built around the musical material.
The ten movements of Equinoxe Infinity, now accompanied by titles like chapters in a book or on a DVD, appear and dissolve into one another, pacing out the scenic timing of the soundtrack to a hypothetical CGI film about the adventures of cold binocular hominids resembling the hieratic "moai" of alien civilizations, or perhaps replicants, robots, anthropomorphic drones, whistleblowers or spy bots.
A theme already sketched out in various tracks on the collaborative double album Electronica, that of a future dominated by the exponential evolution of Artificial Intelligence and the Orwellian omnipresence of technology, here takes on the contours of a hyper-textual "roman à clef", a novel in sound and image that, in Manichean fashion, aims to evoke (rather than narrate) the human condition teetering on the edge of an ever-nearer future - modeled as much on the optimistic epic of science fiction by Asimov, Clarke and Spielberg as on the dystopian one of Philip K. Dick, James Cameron, the Wachowskis, and the more plausibly sinister one of the "Black Mirror" series.
Even more unusual for Jarre is the semiotic prominence given to the packaging and the entire visual superstructure which (more than on previous albums) seems to want to override and justify the listening experience itself. The decision to create two versions of the artwork rests on the random principle whereby online buyers are kept in the dark as to which of the two covers they'll receive - just as it's not within human power to determine whether the future will be the Edenic one symbolized by observers standing erect in a pastoral setting as Easter Island-style moai, or the post-apocalyptic one represented by the glowing radioactive haze of the Las Vegas where Deckard takes refuge in "Blade Runner 2049", where a Magritte-like bureaucrat, his head dissolved into a plume of smoke, faces off against the archaeological remains of the observers.
That this affinity with the psychological climate of K. Dick's world, brought to the big screen first by Ridley Scott and then by Denis Villeneuve, is no mere coincidence is demonstrated by the first two tracks that serve as an antinomic introduction to "Equinoxe Infinity". With its five notes soaring repeatedly through an ancestral audio-dromo lashed by oceanic implosions and digital trills, the overture conveys the imposing hydro-geological atavism of a planet undergoing terraforming, in the spirit of the mournful magniloquence of Vangelis's "Blade Runner" and "Soil Festivities". The restless re-emergence of the Beethoven-like chromaticism from the first part of "Equinoxe" creeps in beneath the dramatically dissonant variation of the melodic phrase and the baroque hammering of cymbals that exhausts the movement, giving momentum to "Flying Totems". In its opening notes, the motif picks up the epic-triumphant theme of "Industrial Revolution Part 2", unfurling it into the form of a more measured, jubilant hymn that, over tight bass arpeggios and metallic counterpoints, raises a logarithmic paean in the name of the CS-80, weaned by the master from Volos.
Starting with "Robots Don't Cry", the album almost "ex abrupto" sets off along the "Route 66" of Planet Jarre. The 6/8 of the Korg Minipops drum machine from "Oxygene 2" bursts onto the scene to escort the brooding jamming of a Mellotron tasked with filling the track's chrysalis, varied midway by gaunt piano notes dripping over an Eminent prairie that picks up the sorrowful, enchanted air of "Chronologie 6".
Reduced to timid cosmetic nods, the ties to the '78 work weaken further in the following "All That You Leave Behind", a reflection on the legacy each of us leaves at the end of our earthly journey, where the melodic fabric atomizes into a cinematic three-note motif, hurled into a "bouillabaisse" of death-knell barks, bell-ringing and rain effects, saddled to a subdued rhythmic andante soon swallowed by dark stormy warnings.
It's hard not to associate the angelic restraint of the transitional chapter "If The Wind Could Speak" with the "Band In The Rain" that opened the eighth part of "Equinoxe". With its indecipherable, childishly androgynous babble flitting from the left channel to the right before finally plunging into a lively splash of sea spray, it takes on the role of a playful interlude between the first and second halves of the album, alongside the equally playful "Infinity". The surgical graft of Europop onto the melodic verve of Harold Faltermeyer, Ace of Base, Skrillex and Avicii, draped in the pearlescent glissandos and radiant string staccatos of "Equinoxe 5" whipped up in "Orient Express" style, serves as an efficient, depressurizing interlude, one that even makes forgivable the crude reprise of pre-delayed vocal samples traceable back to a satirical Fairlight demo from "Zoolook".
Riding digisequencers, we slip, from the knowing retro-kitsch of a VR video game found in "Infinity", back into the gloomy cyberpunk of "Machines Are Learning", in which the pulsing sequence that ran horizontally through the fifth, sixth and seventh parts of "Equinoxe" transmutes into a frothing culture of bionic chromosomes, from which sprout in turn the robotic cries of the first forms of artificial consciousness. Flowing along Jarre's own personal "endless river", the course of this dense sonic stream already meets its estuary in the seventh movement, the studio version of the eponymous "overture" played in a more acoustic style to open the live show at the Coachella festival in April 2018. Swept into the album's compelling flow, the track finally comes to maturity, making sure that the aggressive sweep of five notes answers the brighter ones of "Infinity" within the imperious techno-electro superfetation of Depeche Mode's "Sounds Of The Universe". The portal onto the epochal shift swings open and shuts again, leaving the listener lingering on an orbital platform powered by a reflective pizzicato of strings that, beading with drips and airy vocalizations, traces the anguished waiting phase that will be stretched "ad infinitum" across the calculated infinity of the closing track.

"Equinoxe Infinity" goes on to make real the core of the concept that sees humans now close to grappling with creative AIs capable of expressing themselves by writing books, directing films and composing original music. While the existence of programs able to edit video and create abstract paintings in complete autonomy is by now an accepted fact, the recent unveiling of a virtual anchorman almost indistinguishable from his human counterparts gives the "modus creandi" of the final movement a philosophical weight less self-referential and gratuitous than it might sound. The algorithm that handles the mixing of the various "stems" - the constituent sound cells of the album - reshuffling loops, arpeggios, effects and short melodic motifs according to parameters entered into the software (intended for release as a free app) generates only one of the infinite potential versions of an amniotic audiography sitting somewhere between the "glurp" of Robert Rich and the psychedelic ambient of Brian Eno, The Orb and The Future Sound of London, tracing its roots all the way back to "Speak To Me" from "The Dark Side Of The Moon".
Toward the end of the cosmogonic crescendo that disintegrates and reintegrates the stem-cell tangle of these 40 minutes, the impression sets in that the potential infinity reaching toward the conquest of the "singularity" - that is, the harmonious integration of the human psyche with the computer - is precisely what has driven Jarre's research since his beginnings at Schaeffer's GRM, and that this album is the final physiological testament of half a century of autogenic training.
Far beyond being a sequel or a reboot, the "requel" of Equinoxe arrives like the unexpected stroke of an oar sent rippling across the river of Time by a seasoned argonaut of sound, while other contemporaries, long since veterans, have already sat down on the riverbank for some time now, unaware of - or indifferent to - the whirlpools brewing the spiral of a Transhuman Future. A "coup de théâtre" that a replicant Samuel Beckett might perhaps rename "Waiting for A.I.nfinity".

Three years later comes Amazonia (2021), a kind of "Jacquard loom" woven by Jarre to serve as the soundtrack for the traveling exhibition organized by the Philharmonie de Paris, which brings together photographs taken by Sebastião Salgado in the world's largest rainforest; it can be experienced (rather than simply listened to) outside its contingent role as a para-musical overcoat for a collection of still images.
Jarre seems to work to ensure that the algorithm coded for the "Eon" app (released in 2019 for iOS & Mac), designed for the virtually infinite, and for each user unrepeatable, recombination of grooves, percussive patterns, effects and melodic themes synced with corresponding artistic spectrograms, is subjected to a sort of targeted "hacking". A sabotage meant to reprogram its autopilot and redirect its dynamics onto the geolocating waves of that photo-plasmic distillation coagulated in the black and white of Salgado's "spectrographic" Amazonia.
Part esoteric metagrammatical "calembour" of a failed composer, part playful poetic riddle of a pre-surrealist chafing against genre conventions, in the French writer Roussel's book "Le vingt cinq juin", "the twenty-fifth of June", set in a fictional African country reached by an expedition that sailed from Marseille, is the date-as-sound around which the bizarre rituals staged in honor of Emperor Talou unfold during the arrival of a storm. Thunder, rain showers, rustlings, seethings, crackles, chirps, buzzes, gusts of wind - long the background tones of his sonic ecosystem - are now diluted by Jarre, together with tapes from the archives of Geneva's Ethnographic Museum, into the Petri dish of his own personal "phantasmatic" vision of an Amazonia never physically visited, but felt and evoked through the proxy of photographic emotion around an eternal "vingt cinq juin", a place in time that is, first and foremost, sound, breath, hallucination, dream, pulse, life force. A "locus solus" of auditory memory that has run beneath the surface of his music ever since the second movement of "Magnetic Fields 1" and "Ethnicolor", in the deliberate pop sublimation of "musique concrète" experimentalism, and which here returns to center stage with renewed (sub)conscious awareness of its own timbral "uncanny".
Freed from its subservience to the Brazilian photographer's lens, repeated listening to the album (particularly in its binaural version) rewards the more attentive audiophile with the surprise of a "centripetal" journey taken aboard an invisible funicular, suspended a few meters above the watery murmur of an Amazon River that is an ancestral artery from which songs, dances, laughter and native voices emanate beneath a sky scraped by the roar of airplanes - mercurial intruders of that technological civilization bent on desecrating and cannibalizing the age-old sacredness of the forest and its inhabitants. It's only natural, then, that in this "psychogenic" audio-reproduction of a vast primordial habitat, a living synonym and "analogon" for humanity's unconscious, Jarre himself gives himself over to a kind of self-psychoanalysis whose formal outcomes come close to those of reading Rorschach inkblots, automatic writing and hypnotic trance. From the tribal-like tolling of the "Oxygene"-era Korg Minipops, skipping along in pursuit of the murmurs and buzzes lost in the vegetation, to the two grave, uneasy notes of "Oxygene 7" that embody the sense of precariousness of the Latin American biosystem; from the feral shrieks fished out of "Volcanic Dance", composed for the multimedia shows in South Africa, to the ethno-dance-rooted vocal arpeggios closer, at times, to Eno and Byrne's "Mea Culpa" from "My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts" than to "Diva" or "Woolloomooloo" from its aboriginal counterpart "Zoolook" - the metasonic game thus structures itself into an exotic atlas of the imagination where paths, ravines, clearings, villages and waterways have no relation to one another except in terms of engrams.
Behind the deceptive format of the classic ambient album, destined to be relegated to the role of wallpaper music, lies, in short, the impressionist etching of an Amazonia recovered, with the studied randomness of a Max Ernst collage, from the self-regenerating combinatorial reiteration of "Eon"'s cyclical impulse.

The following project, Oxymore (2022), is an ambitious tribute to the French composer Pierre Henry, who had died a few years earlier. For Jean-Michel Jarre, choosing as the title of a "posthumous twinning" a figure of speech built on the poetic force of contradicting two terms represents both an opportunity to reaffirm the dual nature of his musical style - always amphibious between avant-garde and classicism - and the ideal polysemous solution for giving a kind of circular finality to his own creative adventure, through phonetic allusion to that cornerstone of electronic music from which, for industry insiders and the general public alike, his name remains inseparable, almost like a surname. Between Oxygene and Oxymore, the transmutation of the final two syllables doesn't just encapsulate the "historical" span of 46 years marked out by 22 albums and hundreds of concerts attended by an even more staggering number of spectators, but also, and above all, the immeasurable span of psychic time that Henry and Jarre have captured and preserved in the intangible amber of a metaphonetic dimension, where the neume - the graphic note - comes to dissolve and be reborn in the concrete abstraction of sonic noumenon: sound in itself, purely conceived.
Oxymoronic, then, is the very substance of the suite: a fibrillating digital blending performed by archichef Jarre at Radio France's Studio Innovation, using samples drawn from an analog archive of voices, gasps, chirps, drafts, clicks, clangs, micro-noises and jagged metallic tollings that Henry had collected for what (like the never-realized duet with David Lynch) was meant to be one of the collaborations included in the mammoth choral project "Electronica". Oxymoronic, the ambition to entirely free the aesthetic value of the sonic experience from its visual corollary, even as it remains, more than ever, the foundation and atmospheric treasure chest of an aesthetic-scenographic "sandbox" embodied by the Escher-like optical art of the cover and the VR city of "Oxyville", modeled in the comic-book "grisaille" of a 3D crossover between "Sin City" and "Futurama" - whose theme tune by Christopher Tyng is, not coincidentally, a variation on the "Psyché Rock" Henry composed back in '67. Oxymoronic, the composition's being physically habitable, and therefore artistically complete, only insofar as it's experienced through the twenty-nine speakers of a Dolby Atmos system - one that the majority of listeners, equipped only with headphones, will have to make do with sampling in the approximate emulation of binaural audio.
Acting as the projectionist of his own film, assembled from sound effects, music and noise exactly as Henry would have wished, from the very opening of "Agora" - where the elder statesman's voice emerges from the elemental swarm of an otherworldly metaverse like a master of ceremonies (a device first introduced in 2001's "Rendez-vous in Space" using Arthur C. Clarke's voice, and later picked up by Daft Punk in "My Name Is Giorgio") - Jarre makes it immediately clear that the following 47 minutes will skirt around, and more often than not cross entirely beyond, the known boundaries of "musicalized" music. Bouncing, spinning and fluttering over dark, discontinuous pulsations and tonal fields hurled with the mystical frenzy of a Pollock possessed by the playful "daimon" of Art Of Noise and Matmos, the tracks slosh and ebb one after (and inside) another, solidifying, liquefying and composting themselves amid rusty cog-wheels and viscous labyrinths of dance, orchestral rock, drum and bass, industrial techno and trip-hop rhythms and moods, in which sub-melodic drips infiltrate and evaporate the moment one feels the ear has finally caught and tamed them.
Alongside the harsh "Brutalism", chosen as the lead single and subjected to a first round of remixes credited to Martin Gore and Deathpact, it's the restless eponymous track, the gritty "Zeitgeist" and the stormy "Epica" that stand out most clearly above the ceaseless sizzle of the biomechanical maelstrom, thanks to a more carefully controlled arrangement of grooves, basslines, corpuscular arpeggios, progressions and harmonic granulations that, garnished with the inevitable "Zoolook"-style phonemes, allow them to lay claim to a more deliberate musical self-sufficiency. And it may well be in that anguished, asphyxiating exhalation that underpins the spasmodic rhythm of "Zeitgeist" that "the spirit of the times" lies hidden, the key to interpreting an era stifled by pandemics, climate crises, information wars, special operations, sociopathy and warning signs of nuclear apocalypse. Even before the virtuality of artificial realities, finding shelter in music's Edenic metaverse can, ultimately, already be in itself a way to free oneself from the dyspnea of the contemporary world and escape the embolism of the soul. A way to find that extra gulp of air kept safe inside the secret oxygen tanks of a "photo-phonetic" imaginary. The missing gene of a "metaversal" DNA that the listener can - and must - discover, closing their eyes once the headphones are on, to silence the oxymoronic din of the world and breathe "More Oxy(gene)".

By repackaging a year later, in the format of a "studio album", what is de facto a collection of remixes - or, to use the actual title, "reworks", collaborative reworkings of tracks selected from Oxymore - Jarre seems to want to document his own continuing influence on the contemporary music scene, celebrating the "collectivist" value of the aesthetic antilogy contained in the term "oxymoron" that underpinned the ambiguous, divisive project dedicated/inspired by the tenets of "musique concrète". The artists summoned by the "Jarre algorithm" to revisit - or rather, "rework" - side by side the tracks from his previous album on Oxymoreworks (2023) had to justify their presence within this third, apocryphal chapter of Electronica by each trying to extract a melodic motif, a rhythmic binder or a personal sonic gradient from the "machina machinalis" of a dissonant album, assembled in the absence of catchy phrases and a unifying musical theme.
In the hands of Martin Gore", who in this new Jarrian anthology ideally picks up the baton from ex-Depeche Mode member Vince Clarke, co-author of "Automatic" - the Berlin-style roughness of "Brutalism" converts into an imperious, dense techno-dark digression, while for ambient demiurge Brian Eno the metaversal impetuousness of "Epica" is sublimated into a placid, airy, sequential drawing-out of voices, served up over the syncopated psychedelic trot of jungle. For his part, the elusive Deathpact returns the favor to Jarre, who in 2021 had honored him with the first remix of his career, for "Split Personality", by filtering "Brutalism" into a cavernous, monotonous dance-trance diorama. The second version of "Epica" bears the wistfully dreamy signature of French 79, who scaffolds a dazzling array of rotating arpeggios around a couple of stray notes snatched from the original track's final breakdown. With Adiescar Chase, the playful lightness of "Synthy Sisters" firms up into a neoclassical, cinematically-tinged variation that stands out among all the reworks for the deliberate compositional care with which he rearranges the synthetic vocalizations over the measured melancholy of a piano and an amber-hued string pad.
More perfunctory and distracted, on the other hand, is the techno-ambient reinterpretation Siberian DJ Nina Kraviz offers of "Sex In The Machine", seasoned with a muted robotic chatter that's clearly meant to emphasize the cybernetic sensuality Jarre had already evoked. And it's again from the frenetic European techno scene that the sluggish pulsations with which French producer Irene Dresel lines "Zeitgeist" come, stretching it into a long, murky little march that adds little or nothing to the dark urgency of the source track.
But perhaps it's thanks to the intraspecific quality of their respective sonic dimensions - already confirmed, after all, by the jubilant "Stardust" from the first "Electronica" volume - that the "Epica Maxima" built by Armin Van Buuren out of the seething remains of Jarre's eponymous track manages to claim pride of place on the tracklist, counterbalancing with its diamond-cut trance framework the redundant noise-based abstraction propagated by NSDOS in the second remix of "Zeitgeist". By thus exhuming from the track's acousmatic stratigraphy an elegiac melodic intuition not unlike the one that animated "Vintage" - one of the few inspired moments of that Teo & Tea produced by Jarre during the creative-crisis era that preceded his 2015 rekindling - the Dutch DJ pays tribute to the master without sinking into imitative flattery, and, together with almost all the other guest stars, ensures that the whole project doesn't end up being merely yet another cross-promotional compilation imposed by contractual constraints and deadlines.

Oxymoreworks stands, in its own way, as further proof that the tracks along which Jarre has resumed traveling at full speed still have, despite the thousands of figurative and literal kilometers already covered, other and (one hopes) even more memorable musical stations yet to reach.

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