When electronic-ambient-new age pioneer Jean-Michel Jarre was working on 1976’s Oxygene, in his makeshift home studio, he often had to tape down two preset buttons of his Korg drum machine to achieve the effect he wanted. Thanks to the breakout success of that record and its winning blend of bright keyboard melodies and warped analog synths, Jarre didn’t have to resort to such ad-hoc methods for long. Live in Bratislava, taped last year in front of more than 100,000 enthusiastic Slovakians, shows us how far Jarre has come from his old workspace. The spectacle can be experienced in numerous editions, from a concert film to a two-CD-set to a collector’s edition that includes a coffee table book.
And yet the bombast never overwhelms…
Tag Archive: Jean-Michel Jarre
At the tail end of 1976, with the majestic Oxygene, French composer Jean-Michel Jarre became electronic music’s crown prince, savior, and rock star all rolled into one. Overflowing with lush rhythms, tasty textures, and earworm synth melodies, it earned Jarre international fame and eventually sold some 15 million copies. Four years prior, Jarre was just a scrappy young buck finding his feet in a genre that barely existed; scarcely out of his teens, he was part of the pioneering electronic music collective Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM), co-founded by legendary avant-gardists Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry. By the early ‘70s, Jarre had dallied in rock, classical music, pop, and radical experimentalism, and his first album reflected it all.