4/26/2021 0 Comments Jean Michel Jarre Discography
The live version, recorded in Jarres hometown in 1987, is chosen over the studio track to evince the boundless enjoyment the shows generated at the time, in contrast with the performances in China.The Lyon-born musician had played guitar in a couple of bands, and released two electronic albums under his own name to little fanfare (including the soundtrack to the 1973 film Les Granges Brles ).
It must have been a surprise then, when a third album recorded at home with an eight-track and some analogue synthesisers Oxygne made him an huge star shortly after it was released internationally in 1977 it came out in France in December 1976. ![]() In fact, Jarre has shifted something in the region of 80m albums across his career, more than, say, Duran Duran, which is quite an achievement for a French solo artist who doesnt sing. If he has a signature tune, then it has to be Oxygne (Part IV) an instantly recognisable hook that hitches a ride on a bossa nova beat in order to explore the galaxies. Equinoxe didnt quite repeat the success of Oxygne, but sales of 10m certainly beats a kick in the teeth. In fact, Equinoxe (Part V) does what prog does best (and, despite the tracks brevity, make no mistake that prog is what it is): it takes peculiar time signatures and makes them accessible. In plain English, that means you think you can dance to it in your head, but in practice it may turn out rather differently. A million people showed up, taking Jarre into the Guinness Book of Records for the first time. Part I is split into three parts, kicking off with an exhibitionist, cocksure first movement that seems to keep reaching to the sky for yet more key changes, followed by the swishy human samples and surreality of the second, and the mechanical chuntering and sonic lack of constraint of the third. Les Chants Magntiques, or Magnetic Fields as it was called outside France, was one of the first records to feature the Fairlight CMI, a sampler that would have cost a pretty penny at the time. Listening to the whole track, you might assume it uses every other synthesiser known to man up to that point, too. This show would have been considered futuristic in London, Paris or New York, but in China it was like an alien had landed, he said later. So it created something very special between lots of Chinese people and myself. Arpegiateur written specifically for the live shows is a stunning, proto-ambient techno snippet that dances repetitively around monophonic notes, as the name implies. Its scientific, but theres also a very human tension, which is probably why it was chosen as the theme music for the erotic thriller 9 Weeks. Unusually for a live track, theres barely any crowd noise at the outset and then a flutter of appreciation at the conclusion, demonstrating how respectful Chinese audiences were at that time, in stark contrast to, say, Beatlemania. When you think after 25 years of Mao, Chinese people had no idea about western music or even western culture, they had no idea about James Dean or the Beatles or Charlie Chaplin, modern music or modern cinema, Jarre said. Blah Blah Cafe certainly has a cosmopolitan feel, evoking images of cafe culture and the hustle and bustle of metropolitan life surrounding it. The track actually began life on 1983s Music for Supermarkets, an oddity in that only one copy of the album was ever made, which Jarre had destroyed after it was played on the radio just once. That art prank was a protest at the way the then burgeoning compact disc was being marketed, and the fact music would be sold like toothpaste and yogurt. ![]() That proved to be ironic, as Jarre became an adversary of the free-for-all culture of the internet and of the dubious merits of the CD and particularly the MP3. So Quatrime Rendez-Vous is anthemic in the same way a national anthem is anthemic; its exultant and, if were honest, a little bit self-congratulatory, but then if you had a colossal light show and millions of people coming to see you every night, you might get a bit bigheaded, too.
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