Jean Michel Jarre

The French touch in the age of the cosmic couriers. The contact between two distant worlds – experimental electronics and pop music – that finally began to speak to each other, laying the groundwork for exciting rendez vous to come.

Jean Michel Jarre is an alchemist even before being a composer and musician. A daring alchemist, in an era when the "ideological" barriers between genres were thicker than the Iron Curtain. He too, therefore, would not escape the axe of hardline critics, ready to glimpse behind his gentle features the demonic shape of the "popularizer", much as had already happened to the heretical Kraftwerk who had swerved onto the autobahn of synth-pop.

What is certain is that, in 1976, electronic music was still almost synonymous with cold, angular sidereal scores bordering on atonality, the preserve of a narrow audience of avant-gardists. A glorious scene, yet one already showing signs of fatigue. The Teutonic wave of kosmische musik made by Klaus Schulze, Tangerine Dream and company was by now curling back on itself in the undertow. Enter French oxygen, breathing new life into the scene, under the banner of a majestic grandeur. Because young Jean Michel, scion of blue musical blood (his father Maurice was a great composer, author among other things of the soundtrack to "Doctor Zhivago"), was ambitious and aimed for the big target: to make electronic music for the masses, without emptying it of its ethereal, metaphysical suggestions. After all, his time spent at Pierre Schaeffer's Groupe de Recherches Musicales, pioneer of musique concrète, allowed him to master the material with confidence.

It was not, then, a matter of flirting with the song format, of introducing sung parts or vocoders of any kind, but of grafting the melodies and rhythms of popular music onto the traditional framework of electronic suites. Perhaps using entirely analogue instrumentation, to shape a more intricate and melodious sound. The idea, as simple as it was brilliant, would yield the best-selling French album of all time, with 12 million copies sold worldwide.

And yet nothing hinted at such a triumph. The twenty-seven-year-old Jean Michel had to his name only the flop of his debut album ("Deserted Palace", 1972) and an obscure stint as a lyricist working for chansonniers such as Christophe and Françoise Hardy.

So "Oxygene" was born at home, in the truest sense of the word: recorded in the dining room of Jarre's apartment, converted into a studio, near the Champs Elysees, on a shoestring budget, it was snubbed by several record labels and nearly ended up shelved for good, until his friend Hélène Dreyfus, herself a former student of Schaeffer, convinced her husband Francis, owner of the small label Disques Dreyfus, to release it.

The instrumentation, however, was cutting-edge for its time: Farfisa and Eminent 310 electronic organs, the Korg Minipop drum machine (capable of recreating Afro-Eastern, Latin American and dance rhythms), the Arp 2600, the Ems Synthi Aks, the Rmi harmonic synth, minimoog, mellotron, plus a Revox echo unit to fill out the sounds of the VCS-3, one of the first European synthesizers ever made, bought in London.

Buried among keys, cables and dazzling sound machines, Jarre did almost everything himself, translating his idea of oxygen into six movements for a tracklist with no titles (itself a commercial gamble at the time), for a total of 40 minutes of entirely instrumental music.

It was the sinuous proto-synth-pop of the single "Oxygene (Part IV)" that pushed the album up the charts, destined to become an electronic evergreen and a fixture of TV theme tunes and news bulletins: a melody as immediate as it is hypnotic, wrapped in a shell of polar ice (the video immortalized a march of penguins in Antarctica), amid gusts of silicon wind and catchy beats. It would prove hugely influential, spawning countless clones filtered through electro-pop, space disco and techno.

But the whole work should be considered a single, uninterrupted suite (the tracks all bleed into one another), driven by a multi-stylistic attitude that exploits every shade of sound and every trick in the electronic arsenal of the era. Thus the spectral overture unfolds amid water games, cosmic vertigo and polar shivers, with the funereal wail of the Ems Synthi Aks (a kind of simulator of the legendary Russian theremin, the oldest electronic musical instrument) evoking post-atomic scenarios. Then the delayed eruption of astral howls over a gaseous cloud kicks off "Part II", a reckless space gallop through laser effects, echoes and meteor showers: the synth traces the main melody, backed by the obsessive, creaking cadences of the drum machine, until the sound mutates, turning alien and dark, and the cosmic effects give way to gusts of stellar wind, sandstorms and deathly choirs. Nature and humanity, then, counterpoint the icy rigor of the machines.

Even the C minor interlude of "Part III" keeps the suspense high, staging a solemn march marked by the synth's dark rumble and the Aks's shrill whistle.

The lengthy "Oxygene (Part V)" takes its cue from the minimalist lesson of Tangerine Dream: a handful of minor-key chords, liquid, dreamlike ambient atmospheres (not far from what Bowie would sublimate a year later on "Low"), a celestial keyboard lied; then a pitch-dark bass pattern, played on the moog, gradually forces its way through, exploding into another frantic gallop that finally dissolves into the waves of an artificial ocean. And so, on an endless, deserted beach, amid stormy swells and the shrieks of synthetic seagulls, the "impressionistic" apotheosis of "Oxygene (Part VI)" is celebrated: rarefied beds of synths and polyphonic sequencers frame another epic melody, propped up by the prancing, almost "Latin" rhythm of the drum machine and counterpointed by the sound of wind turning into sea surf, for a farewell of poignant intensity.

Despite the immediacy and the melodies, no ray of sunlight filters into Jarre's landscapes, which remain distant and melancholy throughout. Nor is the message of the famous cover art, by painter Michel Granger, any more reassuring: it depicts a gigantic human skull inside a disintegrating planet Earth, almost a premonition of the nightmare, ever-present in the '70s, of the ecosystem's devastation at the hands of some future technocratic civilization. Oxygen, by contrast, stands as the symbol of Jarre's cosmic "pantheism", a romantic, naturalist neo-humanism also shaped by his literary studies.

Despite its naivety and its inevitably dated sounds, "Oxygene" remains a classic to this day, the cornerstone of a new "French way" of electronic music, pictorial and orchestral, steeped in Mediterranean overtones. It's a shame that after the two other fascinating sagas of "Equinoxe" and "Magnetic Fields", Jarre gradually lost the magic touch, ending up crushed in the grip of his own megalomania, amid pharaonic shows built on light shows, lasers and fireworks, and self-celebrations well past their sell-by date, like "Oxîgene 7-13", which in 1997 attempted an unlikely sequel to that first, memorable symphony for synthesizers.

The numbers, however, remain firmly on his side (80 million copies sold between albums and singles, the record for the largest concert attendance ever, set during the "Oxygène in Moscow" performance, watched by an estimated 2.5 million spectators) along with the pride of having stormed "the symbolic Bastille of musical conservatism" (Alessandro Fantini, "Le 24 ore del cosmo"). And after years of inexplicable neglect, the French virtuoso would eventually reclaim his rightful place in the pantheon of electronic pioneers, bolstered too by a renewed moral authority over a new generation of artists (from Air to Daft Punk, from Moby to Autechre, not to mention the more recent Fuck Buttons) who would not fail to pay him tribute.

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16/05/2010