TF Archives

Jean Michel Jarre: House & Techno Are Past

Author: Jonty Skrufff
Monday, September 27, 2004
"Techno and house are styles of music made for dance floors; yes, some tracks can be heard outside clubs, but we should never forget that it's music mainly made for clubs."

Sitting in a darkened Soho recording studio on a sunny autumn afternoon, Jean Michel Jarre speaks eloquently as dissects the recent history of electronic music, his heavy French accent accentuating his clearly considered opinions. And as one of electronic music's earliest and most influential pioneers he's certainly well qualified to share themnot least given his astonishing commercial success (he's sold over 55 million albums to date, most for his 1976 masterpiece Oxygene).

"What happened was that like all phenomena, house and techno suddenly started being hyped and became fashionable, so moved out of the clubs, away from their source and onto the street," he continues.

"But that change was a fashion phenomenon and that phenomenon is now behind us. It's more or less finished though but doesn't mean that house or techno for clubs are finished, because both styles are timeless and will remain."

Passionate and driven ('I'm not yet satisfied with what I've done, I consider my work to as unfinished', he stresses) he's clearly as interested in the future as he is in the past, as well as remaining prone to the occasional touch of shameless self promotion.

"When I made Oxygene and Equinox, I never thought of them as being linked to futuristic ideas or those kind of romantic visions of the future that were common in the 70s, and now we are in 2004 and that future is behind us in a sense, or rather the sci-fi space age vision is behind us," he says.

I never considered my music as music of the future, I saw it as music of today, or timeless music and I always tried to create music with that feeling that time was in suspension," he continues.

"And talking about space, my new album Aero is all about the conquest of space, but the audio space not Outer Space."

The audio space he's hoping to conquer is 5.1surround sound, the 5 speaker standard he's applied for Aero. 'Revisiting his greatest hits' (as the press release puts it) and featuring three brand new tracks, the record represents a radical leap in technology, says JM.

"I said to myself, after mono, stereo, the next step should be Aero- from one speaker to two speakers to five," he explains.

"I always dreamed of being surrounded by music and with this new 5 speaker system, that makes it like you're in a cinema, it's obviously something totally different."


Skrufff (Jonty Skrufff): How difficult was the process of recording in surround sound-

Jean Michel Jarre: "When I first thought of taking on this album as the first real 5.1 surround project I thought it would be a piece of cake (easy- slang Ed), in a very naïve and pretentious way, but it turned out to be a nightmare because I discovered it was much more difficult, maybe five times more difficult, than doing a normal album. Because exploring space in 3D sound is a unique experience. But one of the reasons I decided to become involved was because ever since Oxygene and the beginning of my career I always thought electronic music should be shared in an immersed way. I always considered electronic music to be a sensual experience, physical, almost sexual. For me it has to work on the tummy and through the skin, that's what electronic music has always been about. In a sense, I've always been frustrated by stereo, by this two dimensional flat sound it's had. So for Aero I decided to revisit some of my existing tracks, performing them note for note again. I reconstructed each track entirely to share the original idea I had in my mind when I did them the first time. It was an anti-frustration process."

Skrufff: How significant do you see this new sound standard-

Jean Michel Jarre: "It's a definite sound revolution that offers another way of listening to music and reacting to it. The CD era for me was a bad time, a<
Tags