SOUND ON SOUND compilation | Jean Michel Jarre OXYGENE 30 Years + ELECTRONICA + OXYMORE

Jean Michel Jarre

To celebrate the 30th anniversary of his hugely influential hit album Oxygene, Jean Michel Jarre has produced an audacious DVD performance of the entire piece in a manner never before attempted.

If anyone can lay claim to having raised the popularity of instrumental electronic music to the level of stadium rock it is Jean Michel Jarre, renowned for spectacular live shows featuring lasers, fireworks and other unforgettable visuals. As well as selling more than 60 million records worldwide over the last 30 years, the Frenchman has made it into the Guinness Book Of World Records, on three separate occasions, by attracting huge concert audiences, the most recent comprising 3.5 million people.

There have been many other historic milestones in Jarre’s career. He was, for example, the first composer to introduce electro-acoustic music into the Paris Opera House and the first Western musician to tour China. From a technological perspective, he has also been at the forefront of new developments. He was among the first to embrace the 5.1 medium with his album Aero, and his latest DVD, Live In Your Living Room, is the first release to use a new breed of 3D technology developed for the latest home-theatre cinema systems.

Small Beginnings

JMJ is undoubtedly a great showman, entertaining millions with state-of-the-art stage theatrics, but before becoming a household name, he spent many years creating experimental electronic music

30 Years Of Oxygene

using tape-loop effects and some of the first analogue synthesizers, for a time under the guidance of the visionary French composer Pierre Schaeffer. By 1977, Jarre already had a couple of albums and a film soundtrack under his belt, but it was the reception received that year by Oxygene that was responsible for his ascent to international stardom. The LP’s success was remarkable, given that it is a fairly minimal instrumental concept album recorded on a tiny budget in not much more than a well-equipped home studio.

“I really did it in a kind of home way using what, I think, was one of the first home studios,” Jarre reflects. “I just had three or four synthesizers and was using a Scully eight-track and a mixture of Ampex 256 and 3M tape. The whole album was done on just one eight-track and you can hear that in the piece — it’s quite minimalist and I think that contributes to its timelessness.” Remarkably, the album went on to sell an estimated 12 million copies and produced the instantly memorable ‘Oxygene IV’, one of electronic instrumental music’s most iconic themes.

So why re-record the classic, rather than simply re-release it for its anniversary? Surprisingly, the idea has been on Jean Michel’s mind almost since day one. “Actually, I got this idea to re-record the album very early after I recorded it because, although I was OK with the music, I always thought that I could have had better conditions for the recording process. It has nothing to

do with analogue versus digital: even analogue-wise I thought that I could have better preamps and things like that. When the digital era exploded at the beginning of the ’80s I said ‘OK, I’ll do that one day,’ but for me digital was, for quite a while, not as good as the analogue processing by a long way, and it’s only quite recently — I would say in the last five years — that with 96kHz, 192kHz, and 24-bit, we’ve entered what we can call the high-definition era. And only since then I decided to take the opportunity of the 30th anniversary to do a better recording.”

Jean Michel’s plan was to follow as closely as possible the original recording process, using the same synths and effects wherever possible, but replacing the Scully eight-track with a Mac-based Pro Tools HD3 system, recording at 24-bit, 96KHz via a Summit Audio TPA 200B Dual Tube preamp and Neve and API processors.

“I put almost everything through the Summit,” he says, “and I got this good, fat, analogue sound. I also used an old Neve preamp and an API, just to put it on Pro Tools, basically. When I mixed, I used only digital processing because I realised that having analogue sources is what really counts. When you have all analogue synthesizers and you put that in Pro Tools at 96KHz, 24-bit, it is almost transparent. The main difference is when you are using virtual instruments — when everything in the chain is digital — that’s definitely totally different.”

The original was also recorded

Tom Flint

Photos: Richard Ecclestone

interview jean michel jarre

30 YEARS OF OXYGENE

“With sequencers you are working with patterns and blocks, so it was very interesting revisiting songs and realising that the process of not working with patterns is a totally different journey — a totally different trip, without the aid of a sync track or timecode, and pre-dated MIDI sequencing, so Jean Michel elected not to use these tools for the remake either. “I played and triggered all the sequences by hand,” he continues.

really. I remembered that when I started to do electronic music I was obsessed — I more or less forgot that obsession along the way — about not having anything being repeated in exactly the same way. For me it

The massive live area‑cum‑store‑room in Jarre’s Paris studio, with synths set up as they were for the performance of Oxygene on the LiveInYourLivingRoom DVD.

was exactly the opposite attitude to that of Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream and all those electronic bands who were doing something more robotic. I considered electronic music in a much more sensual, organic way, where

nothing should be repeated.

“So, on Oxygene nothing is repeated the same way. Each sound, even if appears to be the same, has a slightly different attack and release, and, as the sequences are being

made by hand, by definition they are not exactly the same. Even the sounds of the drum machines were filtered in a very subtle way to give life inside the patterns.

“I used a lot of pedals like the

Inside The Studio

Jean Michel Jarre’s studio, on the outskirts of Paris, is pretty much under construction at the moment, but is all the more interesting for that, as it reveals so much about where he has come from and where he is going. The control room is the one completed area so far, and is suitably soundproofed, decorated and furnished. Here there is a Mackie Control 24 desk acting as the front end for the Pro Tools HD3 rig, running on a Mac G5, a large screen for monitoring DVD images and viewing the Pro Tools interface, plus a few racks of processors housing, amongst other things, his prized Revox B77 tape machines.

Elsewhere in the building is a larger performance/store room which can only be described as extremely rustic, with patched-up walls and a vaulted brick ceiling shored up by steel girders. Although some plasterboard has been thrown up here and there, the room is still very much the store area it no doubt was 150 years ago, and, as such, is packed to the vaults with flightcases, boxes and shelves containing miscellaneous gear gathered throughout Jean Michel’s career. Squeezed in the middle of all this, however, wired into a makeshift PA system and ready to play, is one of the most impressive vintage synthesizer collections anyone is likely to see. These are no museum pieces, however: they are fully functional, complete with custom modifications and surrounded by soldering irons and torches so that quick repairs can be undertaken.

The setup, as seen in our photographs, is exactly what Jean Michel used for his Live In Your Living Room DVD, and, by the time you read this, it will have already been used for a series of live shows, performed without synchronisation of any kind. “We are doing the first live performances in a very chic theatre in Paris and I’m going to put all these instruments on stage. I’ve been fighting to just use a PA rather than specific monitoring, but everybody is telling me ‘Don’t push too hard, because with the feedback on stage it’s a bit difficult.’ So we’ll probably have either wedges or ear monitors just to be sure to arrive in sync, otherwise it might not be precise enough. But for the DVD filming we had a big PA in the warehouse and everybody, including the sound engineer, was listening to the same thing. I very much like this kind of thing.”

Electro-Harmonix Small Stone phase shifter to create the modulations and delays, and for the remake I had a pair of Revox B77s for tape delays. Actually, I would say that 40 or 50 percent of the music is coming from the Revox machines, because I was quite extreme, by having a signal direct on one side and delay on the other, almost at the same percentage.”

Making It Live

Through the process of making the new Oxygene recording, which involved dusting down many of his old vintage synthesizers,

Jean Michel began to consider the idea of actually performing the whole album live from start to finish, something he had never done before for logistical reasons. The idea led eventually to the production of the Live In Your Living Room DVD, which is actually a studio recording, but performed live in front of cameras instead of an audience. The performance will be of great interest to all synth enthusiasts, not only Jarre fans, for it acts as a fabulous demonstration of the world’s most sought-after analogue synthesizers being played in a genuine live situation.

Jean Michel explains how the idea evolved. “I have often played excerpts from Oxygene, but never the entire piece. These days, as we know, so many concerts are pre-recorded or pre-produced to diminish the risk of mistakes and optimise the result, but I decided to perform the whole piece in a real, live situation with no computers. So we put everything in a big warehouse and filmed the performance without any stops. The DVD is not made up of a few takes — it’s like a concert film, except the idea is the audience is the people watching on their plasma-screen TV or whatever.”

One thing Jean Michel really wanted to do was make sure that the same instruments were used as on the original album, even though there was the possibility of using more reliable modern equivalents. To complicate matters, Oxygene was an

eight-track recording, featuring as many independent synth lines playing together. Having just two hands and no multitimbrality or sequencers meant that a live performance required three other musicians and extra banks of vintage synthesizers. Drafted in to provide the other six hands were Jarre’s long-time collaborators Dominique Perrier, Claude Samard and Francis Rimbert.

“Sometimes there are two or three layers of the same sound, each with different phasing and processing,” explains Jean Michel. “For example, there are several Eminent String Machines that make up one of the main Oxygene string sounds. Having four of us meant I had to multiply the number of instruments, and finding the equipment was quite a headache, especially as I tried, as much as I could, to avoid using instruments produced after Oxygene. There are one or two exceptions but 95 percent of the instruments are of that time. For me it was really important for the radicalism of the process.”

Most abundant in the setup are the EMS Synthi AKS and VCS3 synthesizers, each one set up with a certain variety of patch, as Jean Michel explains. “During the piece you have the VCS3 or AKS being used for lots of different sounds, but because they have no presets it takes too long to change between numbers, so we have four or five on stage and each synth is used for one family, style or range of sounds.”

Having so recently re-recorded the album, Jean Michel was well aware of what he’d used for each part, but he still needed to plan the

EMS VCS3 and Synthi AKS pin‑matrix modular synths were central to the recreation of Oxygene; no fewer than five are visible in the pictures of Jarre’s studio.

Two Revox B77 tape machines used for delays were, says Jarre, responsible for “40 to 50 percent” of the sound of the re‑recorded Oxygene

One of the most unusual synths in Jarre’s collection is the RMI Harmonic Synthesizer, an early additive synth. On top of it is an even rarer device: the Digisequencer matrix sequencer custom‑built by Michel Geiss to Jarre’s specification.

setup in a way that would enable four people to perform the piece together. “At first I had to see who was doing what per song,” he explains. “It was more or less like a band situation where someone says ‘OK, I have

Big Influences

Jean Michel is quick to name Pierre Schaeffer, inventor of the idea of musique concrète and founder of Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM), as his mentor. He explains why Schaeffer was such an important influence on his musical career.

“I started being involved in electronic music when I was a student aged about 16 in the 1960s, and started studying under Pierre Schaeffer in Paris. In my opinion, this guy is the father of all of us. He created absolutely everything. He was the first saying that music is not made of notes, but of sounds and noise, and back in the ’40s he invented everything. He was making loops with records even before tape recorders, and he was the first to use delays and reverse sounds. When I was a student of his we were doing all these kind of looping things, re-injecting one tape recorder into another and creating huge delays.

“At that time I remember going in studios where you had maybe 20 speakers around and above, like multiple mono channels. That was something I experienced a lot, but when I left art school and went into these sophisticated pop-music studios I was in front of just two speakers and always felt frustrated with that situation. But because of the cinema industry, we can get a decent sound system at home and I’m really happy to exploit that again.”

a good feeling for that part, I’ll take care of it.’ That’s also a reason why we have some repetition in terms of gear. Then I could say ‘OK, for this number this person will need this, this and this, for the second, this, this and this.’ I planned it by drawing it on paper and then everything went together like Lego!”

Remarkably, Jean Michel reckons that rehearsing the album to a point where it was ready to perform in one take only took about two weeks, although he was under a little bit of pressure to meet the important anniversary deadline. “Everything went so fast because I changed record companies this year, partly for this type of project. After that everything has had to be done with a kind of emergency feeling, but that seems to fit the project so I love that.”

Camera Action

For the filming, the four musician were arranged in a ‘T’ shape (Perrier far left, Rimbert on the right, Jarre out in front and Samard in the middle) within the warehouse, so that each person was surrounded on four sides by his bank of instruments. On stands facing the four, and fed by the Mackie FOH desk, were two large Genelec PA monitors, ensuring everyone was listening to the same thing. Two microphones were placed pointing outwards from the front of the setup to capture the ambience of the warehouse. The synthesizer outputs were recorded into Pro Tools on separate tracks.

Finally, a large corridor of space was left around the perimeter of the setup for the camera operators, enabling them to capture

the action from all angles. Antwerp-based Alfacam, specialists in high-definition TV filming, were hired to shoot the DVD, having previously worked on Jean Michel’s Beijing concert in 2004. “They are really nice people who are technically very precise,” comments Jarre. “We rehearsed the performance choreographically, to avoid a situation where one camera man would get in the way of the lens of the other.

“On top of that, I decided to produce a 3D Stereoscopic version. I thought the idea was quite interesting because 3D is retro-futuristic stuff; it reminds us of the 1950s when you have these guys wearing white glasses and all that. I’m quite familiar with the idea because about 10 years ago I worked with Apple filming a concert in 3D. It’s going to be the next step in the entertainment world. James Cameron has developed a new Stereoscopic movie camera and 3D projectors have been installed in 1000 theatres in the US. Actually, the 3D version is going to be released in 50 theatres in Germany and the US.

“For filming you have two lenses for each camera, so you produce separate HD masters for each eye. The lenses are spaced the width of the eyes, and you have to do some pretty precise, boring stuff to get the right angles depending on where you want the focus, but the result is spectacular. With standard home DVD players and screens, the only way to get 3D at the moment is by using the old red and blue glasses, but Phillips is developing a new screen you can use without glasses. Our film is ready for that but it’s still a prototype. I think it’s very interesting, because until now music was the only mode of expression invading the space around us.”

Of course, the Stereoscopic visuals go hand in hand with surround sound, and JMJ is no stranger to the format. “I’ve worked a lot on 5.1 since Aero,” he adds. “That was really the first album, I think, conceived and produced especially for 5.1. It’s got the THX label and George Lucas is using it for THX demonstrations.

“I’m not looking for realism; I’m looking for musical results, and I think what’s great about electronic music is that you don’t care if you are in the middle of this orchestra. You don’t know which instrument is doing what, so having them in front of you and the audience behind seems, to me, a bit irrelevant in that case. It’s much more fun and exciting to be in the middle of all these sounds going around. In that aspect, electronic music is made for 5.1 more than anything else.”

The Performance

Although Live In Your Living Room runs through the Oxygene tracks chronologically, it also offers listeners three extra tracks not found on either the original or remake. As the

performance is a continuous piece of music, the new sections form links between the main movements. Jean Michel explains how the transition parts came about. “I suddenly realised that to get from one part to another in a more live situation it would be nice for the other musicians to be in a freer, improvised thinking pattern. So we’ve either improvised variations between different songs, or lengthened the existing parts. When I started feeling that it was the right time to change, I began introducing the next part and everybody followed. It happened in a rather natural way but we also used eye contact to communicate.”

In contrast to the free-form transitional parts, a notated orchestral score was used by all the musicians to help them with the rest of the material. “It’s one thing when you are all by yourself, overdubbing one bit at a time because you know what you’ve just played,” explains Jean Michel, “but when you’re playing all the parts at the same time,

Some of the desirable modular and semi‑modular synths used on both the original and the recreated Oxygene. From top left, clockwise: Korg PS3200, ARP 2500, ARP 2600 (two were used) and Moog modular.

particularly when you don’t have a drum machine, you need to have a method of counting the measures to be able to play together. So, it was strange, but fun, using this kind of retro-futuristic system that mixed a quite serious orchestral score with a performance on analogue electronic instruments!”

Although the performance was undertaken without any click, MIDI or time reference, there were still some electronic drum parts, emanating from two Keio Mini Pops drum machines, which occasionally had to be started so that they fell in time with the pre-established tempo.

Claude Samard, positioned in the middle of the other three

musicians, was the official musical director of the project, given the task of operating the Mini Pops and other critical rhythmical parts. To help him start the drum machine in the right place, Jean Michel, or one of the other musicians, would introduce a sound that acted as a signal for everyone. “For ‘Oxygene IV’ he was getting this kind of crescendo of noise,” explains Jean Michel, “and was just counting one, two, three, four, hitting Play and we were all right in time, hopefully… well, almost! The Mini Pops has no in or output sync, so you have to play everything around it, even the song’s bass sequence. It’s a bit of a problem playing like

Two Keio Mini Pops drum machines provided an authentically retro rhythm track.

a human sequencer.”

Although separate feeds were taken into the Pro Tools system from all the synthesizers, so that they could be mixed at a later date, it was always the intention not to change much afterwards. “We all know that for a lot of live releases you end up redoing everything in the studio,” says Jarre, “but for this particular experience that would have been silly, so the idea was to keep all the accidents — even if you have the wrong note being played, or something not really in tune — to keep the whole thing and therefore the truth and authenticity of the performance.

“The only thing I changed is the delays, and that was only because I didn’t want to carry my Revox machines to the warehouse. I was just in the middle of finishing the mix of the studio version; I didn’t want to change anything, and when you are travelling with those kinds of things, you never know if something will happen. So, just to be sure, I used some regular delays for the performance and later exchanged them for the Revox machines. But what has been played has been kept.

“For both the album and live recording I didn’t work with stereo sources at all apart from mono-to-stereo reverb, just to give it a sense of space. Otherwise, all delays and sources are mono. Obviously, when you work in 5.1, stereo is a headache, so you have to

Taurus

be in mono.”

In terms of processing, the Summit Audio preamps favoured for the album recording were not used live, only the direct feeds routed via the front of house desk. However, Jean Michel is insistent that the raw synthesizer outputs were perfectly good enough. “I was totally amazed, as were the sound engineers, by the warmth and depth of the sound when you have all this analogue stuff on stage playing together. Nothing is harsh, so you can push up the volume and you have no aggressiveness; it’s amazing how very round, warm, solid and fat the sound can be. And all these sounds mix, so you never get those kind of digital phase problems or foggy type of effect. With all those instruments playing on stage it’s like a symphonic orchestra, where you have violins mixing with trumpets and they all really work together. I’ve never experienced

that before, so it was really amazing to mix a Mellotron with a modular Moog, analogue drum machines, Eminent strings, AKSs and all that.”

Happy Accidents

One of Jean Michel’s main reasons for using the old analogue gear, despite its quirks and issues of reliability, was to engineer a situation in which the band were forced to react in a musical way to any random mistakes or accidents that occurred. One issue thrown up by the relative tuning of the Eminent String Ensembles proved to be particularly beneficial.

“The Eminents were not tuned to exactly the same pitch, and we had an instrument where the pitch was blocked so we couldn’t change it. It made us realise that nowadays everything is automatically at 440, 442. We detune, but we do big important detuning as an effect. The sort of subtle detunes that you have in acoustic instruments are found less and less with electronic instruments, where the tuning is done somewhere in a digital patch. The stuck pitch was around 443 or something like that, so it gave us something strange. It was one of those scary, silent movie soundtrack-type sounds that reinforced the atmosphere.

“Also, in the keyboard of the ARP 2600 there are two notes that make the synth go berserk each time you play them. That created some interesting things when we did a chorus or improvised. We had a few accidents with that so we built everything around the accidents, making other instruments respond with strange sounds.

“Obviously it’s a risky situation to go on stage with those instruments because they are not reliable like a Mac, but at the same time it is also that kind of risk when suddenly you have an accident that can give you something else. In electronic music these days, where everything is so pre-produced and clean to optimise the result, we are killing the effect of surprise. We have rock bands with just guitar, drums and bass coming back instead of keyboards and synthesizers, because of this reason. People are bored of

Multiple Eminent 310 string machines were central to the Oxygene string sound. Here, a Moog Liberation monosynth is also ready to go.

A Moog

bass synth, stand‑mounted for playing by hand rather than foot!

being behind their computer and want to express themselves with a rawer attitude, and with those analogue instruments you are in exactly the situation of a rock band, where you just plug and play.”

The Future Now

Now that Jean Michel has revived his love of old synths, he is adamant that he will continue using them on future projects, and he has some strong views on the pros and cons of today’s music technology. “By playing with real analogue stuff, you realise how unique these instruments are. All the musicians and engineers working with me said the same thing. Those instruments are incredibly rich — no one can beat that. We have fantastic virtual synthesizers and emulations of vintage instruments, and you can do lots of interesting music with the technology, but they are so different you cannot compare them — just forget it! You can’t compare a 400-kilo Mellotron with a virtual synth that’s imitating the look of it.

It has almost nothing in common. Oxygene could only have been done with the old analogue instruments; that was part of the experience, and now I want to experiment more with them.

“New bands today want Fender Stratocasters or Les Paul Gibsons from the early ’60s because they have a different sound, but it’s not a retro attitude, because if you take, for instance, a symphony orchestra violin player, his dream is to play a Stradivarius, made in the 17th century. It shows that with all the technology we have, no one has been able to make an instrument of that quality. It proves that building great instruments it is not just based on how technologically advanced or sophisticated you are.

“What’s really interesting is that we haven’t invented many new instruments. We have much more sophisticated ways of processing sounds or emulating frequencies, but the irony is that virtual instruments are all about recreating the past, right down to the look

of the interface. But then you find yourself playing in a rather awkward way with your mouse or remote control! This is instead of getting back to the real instruments, which is a totally different approach, where you have a large facade with knobs that you can instantly grab and alter and you can be constantly processing the sounds and getting instant feedback from the machine.

“In principle you can do all that with a computer — but you don’t, because you memorise everything. But with these instruments, aside from the Memorymoog, you have no presets. These ephemeral situations, in which you are all the time, put you in a totally different frame of mind. It’s like when you are in front of a guitar — you don’t preset your chords or sounds, it’s a dialogue with your instrument. That physical response is something we have forgotten, and yet it’s the foundation of rock & roll. It is based on intuition and doing music with your instinct, not only with your brain.

“Looking back, the 1980s was a really dark time for me. The ’90s were better and this decade is definitely far better, but back in the ’80s we were at the beginning of the digital age. Even if it was a revolution, it broke an old poetic attitude towards electronic music. Suddenly everything worked in terms of patterns and presets, and we all became archivists for quite a while, instead of having this kind of artisan, craftsperson attitude and an intuitive relationship with our instruments. I think we all fall into that trap. It’s not better or worse, it’s just something different.

“And the designers even stopped producing those instruments. Tom Oberheim, Bob Moog — they all more or less stopped. And crazy guys like Mike Matthews, doing all the Electro-Harmonix Electric Mistress flanger and Small Stone phaser pedals. They are absolutely amazing; you can’t get those sounds with virtual effects. Those instruments are part of the mythology of electronic music at the same level as the Stradivarius, Steinway, Gibson Les Paul or Fender Telecaster. A lot of people have only seen these synthesizers in photos so it’s a good opportunity to show everybody in the world of music — and the audience in general — that they should be considered at the same level as Stradivarius. You have this mythology in rock & roll, obviously you have it in classical music and jazz, but, apart from Moog who more or less everybody has heard about, the other synthesizers are relatively unknown.

“This whole thing is a tribute to all those guys who created these instruments, without whom I wouldn’t be there, you wouldn’t be there and most of the people wouldn’t be there!”

Classic polysynths such as the Memorymoog (top) and Yamaha CS80 were also used in the performance of Oxygene.

PRODUCING ELECTRONICA

New album Electronica sees Jean-Michel Jarre making connections with a galaxy of other legendary figures from the world of electronic music.

Wandering room by room through his studio on the outskirts of Paris,

Jean-Michel Jarre is giving Sound On Sound a guided tour of his creative HQ. Passing through a corridor, he invites us to glimpse into a storage cupboard where shelves heave with synthesizers from various eras. In a live-playing area, where Jarre rehearses for his concerts, the lights of an ARP 2500 twinkle in a corner, while the 67-year-old musician proudly leads us towards his Coupigny, the first synthesizer he ever used when studying under the guidance of modernist composer Pierre Schaeffer in 1969. “Very warm frequencies,” Jarre nods.

TOM DOYLE

The last time SOS visited the studio, in 2008, the facility was still under construction, with only the control room completed at the time. “I suppose a studio like this is always moving,” he says. “It’s what I like actually. I always approached studio environments like a place where not everything has to be there forever. Just changing things. It’s something which is great also when you start a new project, to change your habits.”

Who’s Who

Electronica will be released as two albums, the first in October, with a second instalment due in April 2016. A typically ambitious undertaking, it involves Jarre collaborating with a pantheon of other artists connected to electronic music down the years. The first album, Electronica 1: The Time Machine, features tracks created with Tangerine Dream, Pete Townshend (an early adopter of the ARP 2500

In the control room today sits a circle of instruments pulled out of storage for Jean-Michel Jarre’s latest project, Electronica, including a Moog 55, a Memorymoog, a Big Briar Theremin, a Fairlight CMI, an EMS VCS3 and Synthi AKS and an ARP Pro/DGX. “I like to say ‘OK, this is going to be my range, my palette of colours,’ and then try to limit myself as much as I can on this,” he explains. “I think limitations are the key. The difficulty these days is actually there is no limit. And there is nothing worse than having no limit.”

Photo: Herve Lassince

Going Live

Aside from the synths selected for Electronica, Jean-Michel Jarre took delivery of an SSL AWS 948 for the making of the album. “I wanted to have a desk which could actually provide the best of both sides: the possibility of having lots of synths plugged in and being able to record in the analogue way, but also being able to control DAWs. I’m working these days with Ableton Live and with this SSL, it’s quite compact, but you still have 48 inputs. You can have two monos or one stereo output for every track.”

Monitor-wise, Jarre still favours Genelec 1031s. “I’m very faithful to Genelecs,” he says. “I love the 1031s with two subwoofers because I believe that all that is said about bass being not directional is not true. I like having two subwoofers more or less in the axis of each speaker. Before, I was very keen on big speakers on the wall, but actually you’re depending too much on the acoustic of the room. Even in a very sophisticated studio, you can really destroy a mix very easily because the room is affecting too much what you hear. I love the idea of having like a big home studio monitor. So the 1031s are good because they’re medium-sized, and with big subwoofers you have actually the sound of the big room, but closer to your ears.”

Meanwhile, the creation of Electronica found Jarre changing his preferred DAW, moving from Pro Tools to Ableton Live. “I started with Pro Tools,” he points out, “and step by step, because I was travelling a lot and working with so many people, I suddenly used Live more and more because I could use it on the road. I really fell in love with this DAW. Even in terms of quality, I found it in some aspects better than Pro Tools.

on 1971’s Who’s Next), John Carpenter, Vince Clarke, Moby, Air, Massive Attack, Fuck Buttons and Little Boots.

“I started this project more than three years ago,” says Jarre. “It has been

For instance, bouncing a mix from Pro Tools, I heard a difference between the bounce and the result of the session being played. With Ableton Live, it’s absolutely transparent — even visually on the spectrogram and when you listen to it. And it’s so easy to work with, so friendly. I’ve found for the first time a DAW where I have as much pleasure as I used to have dealing with an analogue desk.”

When travelling to work with others, Jarre ran Ableton Live on his MacBook Pro, using an Apogee Duet interface. Most of the

a massive project in my life. I’ve wanted to do this for quite a while: collaborating with people, but not at all the kind of ‘featuring’ album which is so trendy these days, where you’re just sending a file

collaborations were done side by side with the artists, but some file-sharing was involved in the later stages as the tracks were being completed, forcing Jarre to make a decision to work at 48kHz. “So many files were exchanged through Dropbox,” he says. “After a while I couldn’t even put them on my one terabyte Mac [drive], so I said, ‘OK, having made lots of tests between 48 and 96, frankly, there is no problem.’ The main thing is the content of the music, and the sound, if you record carefully, the difference between 48 and 96 is not that crucial.”

somewhere to somebody, and you’ve never met. It was absolutely not that. I was really wanting to work with people who have been a source of inspiration to me or are a source of inspiration, directly or indirectly linked to the electronic scene.”

Some of the artists travelled here to Paris to work with Jarre, but mostly it involved him going to them, whether they were in London, New York or Los Angeles. “I really wanted to have this almost initiation journey, where I go and visit people,” he says, “in days that we think we are connected with the world, but we’re not talking to our neighbour any more. I mean electronic musicians, you know, we are quite isolated. Starting a track from scratch with someone is something that is not that usual. I’ve been really moved by the fact that everybody

Jean-Michel Jarre’s idea of a ‘limited’ setup probably seems like a wild dream to most SOS readers! One instrument much used in the making of Electronica was his Moog modular synth.

To help develop the working approach he had in mind for Electronica, Jean-Michel Jarre installed an SSL AWS 948 hybrid console in his Paris studio.

Photos: Tom Sheehan

The Future Is All Around Us

Forever looking to frontier technology, Jean-Michel Jarre has mixed four bonus tracks on Electronica 1: The Time Machine using the Audio-3D process developed by the French company of the same name. “This is not playing on phase and stereo enhancer,” he points out. “It’s actually a series of algorithms that this company is using. I mixed with them through their system and it’s really amazing. The beauty of it is you don’t need any kind of equipment, you will be able to download it from the Internet. It’s a file that is processed, so you don’t need an app, you don’t need hardware. Hans Zimmer is quite involved with the DTS process, and making comparisons, this process is quite amazing.

“I’m actually convinced the future is surround audio 3D for headphones. Because you know, stereo is just a fake. I mean, the world is mono. When you talk to me you are in mono. A violin is mono, a clarinet is mono, an electric guitar is mono. And what makes

said yes. I thought it was really important to try to connect.”

Starting Points

Before connecting with his collaborators on Electronica, Jean-Michel Jarre tended to generate the initial idea for each track himself. “What I’ve done, almost as a dogma, is I’ve prepared quite advanced demos for every collaborator, thinking about what could it be,” he says. “What could it be working with Vince Clarke, or what could it be working with Massive Attack? Then trying to go musically to establish a kind of bridge. Writing something in their direction.”

Conversely, as a result, some of the parts which seem to exemplify Jean-Michel Jarre’s trademark style were not actually created by him. “In lots of tracks,” he grins, “I’m sure that lots of people will think that the other collaborator has done some of the tracks I’ve done, actually. And the reverse was true in some cases because some people supposedly respecting me — used some of my sounds. So it’s not me, it’s them. It’s quite funny.”

High on Jarre’s initial list of potential collaborators was Vince Clarke, who now works out of a studio called The Cabin, in Brooklyn. “He’s definitely one of the sounds of the ’80s,” says Jarre, “being a founder of Depeche Mode and with this kind of pure British electro-pop approach of synths. He kind of has a pointillist approach, with lots of precise sounds and things very rhythmic. I really

the space is the space around us, the air, and also the fact that we have two ears and not one. Stereo is the feeling of space, and it became the normal way of listening to music, which is actually something which is not natural. The natural thing is actually to recreate the environment around us, behind and above the head and all this. Stereo will be regarded like a gramophone by the end of the 21st century. We have so many things to explore ahead of us in terms of sound.”

At 67, it seems, there is no dimming of Jean-Michel Jarre’s passion for advances in the sonic world. “I mean, I think it’s timeless, you know,” he smiles. “It’s something that you have or not. And if you’re curious about things… It’s funny because I went through the vinyl and then the CD… we were all thinking that the CD was the grail and it was worse than the vinyl. And the MP3 came along and it was worse than the CD. So it’s time to wake up, guys. Now we should be a bit more ambitious.”

love Vince, I think he’s a great musician and a great human being.”

The results of Jarre’s sessions with Clarke produced two tracks on Electronica, ‘Automatic Part 1’ and ‘Part 2’. “I went to Brooklyn to his studio, and I had two quite different demos in mind,” Jarre says. “We worked on both tracks, and then we decided to have this work with two parts. The first one is more abstract I would say, and the other one has a more dynamic kind of club feel, which is part of Vince’s world, and also quite melodic, which is part of my world. We both think that melody and sounds are very important in music, so we were very close. We worked in Brooklyn and then I came back here to finish the tracks. Then we discussed again the tracks another time in Brooklyn. It was really back and forth, like everybody else.”

Elsewhere, for the six-and-a-half-minute atmospheric journey that is ‘Close Your Eyes’, Jarre and Air had a very grand scheme in mind: attempting to tell the story of electronic music, in sound, as the track progresses. “We thought it would be cool to have something that would be in one track going through all the equipment of the story of electronic music,” he says. “Starting with the Coupigny and doing a loop with tape and scissors. I did the first beats with this kind of technique by looping with magnetic tape [on a Revox B77]. When you are 120bpm, it’s two seconds for

a bar and then at 15 inches per second, you just calculate what means an eighth note or a quarter note.

“I recorded various sounds on a microphone that I processed, speeding up and down, reversing, all that. And then editing it. When you hear it, you instantly understand what it is. It’s sounds that I recorded in the street, some sounds that I recorded in the studio like percussion sounds or whatever. Sounds that I made with strange objects or whatever and then processed. Then by doing this, you create the beat.

“So as a process we are starting the track with this technique. And then I matched it in a sneaky way into the first drum machine which was a Korg MiniPops, and then going through the first modular Moog to the analogue polyphonic Memorymoog. Then the Fairlight and the first samplers, then the digital [Roland] D50 and [Korg] M1 and [Yamaha] DX7 from the ’80s, then to plug-ins. And the last sound of the track I did on an iPad, using Animoog.”

If I Were A Carpenter

One of the more unusual collaborations on Electronica is with film director (Dark

Star, The Thing) and electronic composer John Carpenter on the brooding and intense ‘A Question Of Blood’. “For me, John Carpenter was a must in this project,” says Jarre, “because some people don’t know that apart from being a genius as a film-maker, he used to do all his soundtracks with analogue synthesizers. He was really the first one to use analogue synthesizers in Hollywood, in days where it was not the case at all. And also with a very specific, recognisable sound. I mean all the collaborators I wanted to work with, they all have in common something very precise — an instantly recognisable sound. You hear John Carpenter for 50 seconds, you know it’s John and nobody else. You hear Moby or Air or Vince Clarke or Massive Attack, you know that it’s them and nobody else.

“So I went to see John, and he was quite ill at that moment. He said, ‘I’m in, but give me some time to do it.’ I played him what I had in mind and he really liked it and then we met again in Los Angeles and went into his studio. Then we went back and forth because of his situation. It was more kind of Skyping and sending the work we had done on each side, and then joining forces in Los Angeles. And then I mixed the final thing here. But I had in mind this epic type of track, starting in the very minimalist-like John Carpenter opening credits, and with a progression to this kind of crazy massive ending.”

One of the other tracks which took a long time to complete was ‘Watching You’ with Robert Del Naja, aka 3D of the famously painstaking and slow-working Massive Attack. “We started working on

Working on Electronica gave Jarre a chance to return to the first synth he ever used: the integrated modular synth designed by Francois Coupigny in the late ’60s.

For his collaboration with Air, ‘Close Your Eyes’, Jarre attempted to tell the entire story of electronic music — beginning with musiqueconcrète, courtesy of loops created on his Revox tape machine.

a totally different track,” Jarre explains. “We wanted to get some female singer on it, and then we didn’t find the right combination. We were going nowhere particularly and then I suddenly changed my mind and said, ‘OK, we should go somewhere else.’ I did a whole new demo in one night and Robert really loved it.”

One of the key features of ‘Watching You’ is its ultra-processed and warped vocoder topline, created using a Novation MiniNova. “It’s not like a classic vocoder, it’s a vocoder using bender and sliders,” says Jarre. “I love the MiniNova, which I think is even better for vocoder than the bigger Novation. It’s a great piece and I must say that for the few vocoders I used in the project, I used mainly the MiniNova and also the Roland VP550. Y’know, not a big success commercially, the VP550, but one of the best sound processors I know on the market. Basically I love commercial failures in synthesizers because most of the time they have something very interesting. Then you find something different which is definitely your own sound.”

Final Statement

For Jarre, the most poignant collaboration on Electronica was with Edgar Froese and Tangerine Dream on the expansive soundscape of the near-seven-minute ‘Zero Gravity’. Froese died in January 2015, shortly after its completion. “I mean obviously Tangerine Dream was also very high on my list for this project, this story of electronic music,” says Jarre. “As we know, lots of people in America think that electronic music started with Avicii and it’s not exactly the truth [laughs]. Tangerine Dream are part of the foundation of electronic music and actually, funnily enough, we started at the same time and we didn’t know each other.

“Electronic music really started in those two countries, France and Germany, with Stockhausen, Pierre Schaeffer, Pierre Henri, and also in Italy, with people like Russolo and the Art Of Noises. So it’s really a continental European saga, the beginning of electronic music. And it’s probably due to the fact electronic music is coming from the tradition of classical music — long pieces, instrumental — which was not at all in the American way of thinking, with jazz and blues.”

Jarre has in the past talked about how he feels that he and the German electronic music pioneers of the 1970s

Soft Machines

Perhaps surprisingly, given the range of vintage synthesizers at his disposal, Jean-Michel Jarre also uses soft synths — unlike many other electronic musicians, who can be sniffy about them. “Oh yes, I use a lot,” he enthuses. “I love to use Native Instruments, especially the recent ones like the Kontour and Rounds and FM8. Monark is a very good one. Actually the Monark is closer to the old Minimoog than the Voyager for me. I really love this plug-in. Also, a lot of the Hollow Sun plug-ins, and Omnisphere… I love Eric Persing’s work, I think he’s brilliant.

“This project is actually quite balanced between very modern digital plug-ins and old analogue synthesizers, going from the Theremin to the Animoog or Omnisphere or whatever. I think Omnisphere is really one of the best synths these days. I’m not making differences now between using Omnisphere or the ARP 2600. It’s different instruments depending on what you want. It took a long

time for plug-ins to have the same kind of warmth, but now we are getting there. When you have instruments such as the Monark or the Rounds or Kontour, you have things which you can’t do with analogue instruments. The Animoog is the most interesting and creative synth that Moog have done for decades. Because it’s something totally different from analogues. It’s not a Minimoog, it’s something else.”

While the revival in the use of vintage analogue synthesizers is of course widespread, Jarre accepts that he’s perhaps unusual in still wanting to use the Fairlight CMI in a time when sampling is so much more sophisticated. “This 8-bit [sound] and limitations creates something which these days is very poetic, very unique,” he states. “Suddenly you play with a Fairlight or an old [Emu] Emulator II and it has a kind of instant style. It’s like using a Clavinet or something that has a unique flavour.”

had very different approaches, Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk being much more about precise repetition, while he was more influenced by Ravel and Debussy and exploring constantly evolving sequences. He wanted ‘Zero Gravity’ to be a melding of the two different styles.

“I was really interested by the pure electronic sound of Tangerine Dream, not the kind of prog-rock type of things they did later on with guitars and saxophone and drums. I really wanted the pure electronic sounds like Phaedra and Rubycon and Ricochet. I had in my mind the idea that most of the time, Tangerine Dream pieces used to be more or less on the same chord or two chords. I wanted to have something that could be exactly the kind of things we like — hypnotic,

haunting sequences — but with subtle constant changes all along the piece, in terms of modulation but also in terms of moods.

“I really worked a lot before meeting with Edgar. I took the train to Vienna, then I took a car to his place. We spent a whole day in his studio and it was the first time that we really met. He was using a lot of analogue gear and also some polyphonic emulations of analogue synthesizers. They were quite Moog people, but I was more of an ARP guy when I started.

“We worked together and then they worked on their own because the whole band was involved, and then when they sent the final result to me, I didn’t change anything. I thought it was really perfect and then I just mixed it and that was it.

The Fairlight CMI, says Jarre, still has “instant style”.

It’s funny because I called this track ‘Zero Gravity’ and he sent me something very nice saying that it’s a perfect title for this project, because he was feeling actually kind of weightlessness and all that. It was really a few weeks before he passed away. And I must say that for me obviously this track is very symbolic, very important because it’s going to be the last track that Tangerine Dream ever did with the soul of it, with Edgar.”

Punk Attitude

While the majority of the collaborations involved creating entire tracks, some of the guests, such as Little Boots and Pete Townshend, appear only as singers

though the latter adds his trademark windmilling power chords to ‘Travelator Part 2’, where he also provides a very punky vocal. “He listened to the music I’d done,” Jarre recalls, “and he said, ‘Wow, I really like it, I’m going to sing on it and add guitar riffs.’ Pete gave me so much on this project. I mean, the anger, the kind of punk approach he has, is actually intact. When we were in the studio, it was like an 18-year-old kid, giving so much to the vocals. Pete amongst the collaborators is probably the one who’s the most aware of analogue vintage gear but also plug-ins. I never saw so many iLoks as I did in his studio. I was really impressed.

“Little Boots is somebody I really love.

I discovered that this young English girl was using the laser harp. I said, ‘Wow’, and then I discovered that she was a great electronic musician, and that we had a lot in common. We met in London and I had an idea of having this mad rockabilly type of electronic approach. And then she sang on it and I love what she did, but I didn’t like what I did. And then I decided to change entirely the structure of the song, and it went into more crazy pure electronic and more downtempo. And I must say I love this track, it’s the most electro pop.”

Crazy Mastering

Mixing for the first instalment of Electronica was done in Paris and at Paramount Recording in Los Angeles. Even after all these years, Jarre says that mixing is still a tricky part of his creative process. “I was mixing for the past two days and then I realised that it was totally wrong,” he laughs. “So, you never know. I was quite confident and it doesn’t work.” Jarre actually spent six weeks mastering the album at his studio to gain more control over carving out frequencies. “I think it’s crazy actually to do a mastering from a stereo stem these days,” he reasons. “If you think there is too much bass, suddenly you are going to change the low frequency on the whole mix, when probably it’s just one track that needs that adjustment. I wanted to get the mastering directly from the session. And then I could change whatever we needed to change on the track, if we were having a problem.”

Come April, the second part of Electronica will appear, featuring a completely different cast of collaborators including David Lynch, Cyndi Lauper, Gary Numan, Yello, Hans Zimmer, Julia Holter, Jeff Mills, Sebastien Tellier and the Orb. “It’s a very exciting project, going through the whole landscape of electronic music,” Jarre says. “It’s basically covering four generations of artists linked to the electronic scene.”

Two quirky analogue synths separated by 40 years: Jarre’s EMS VCS3 (left) and Dewanatron Swarmatron (right).

Jean-Michel Jarre says that he was more of an ARP than a Moog devotee in his early days, and with instruments such as this ARP 2500 modular synth available, who can blame him?

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Immersive audio is helping Jean-Michel Jarre implement a distinctly French musical vision, inspired by his own mentors.

SAM INGLIS

“Ifeel very privileged to have witnessed three moments of disruption,” says Jean-Michel Jarre. “One was the emergence of electronic instruments. The second was the emergence of computers and the digital age. And the third, which is maybe the most important one for me, is the technology of immersive worlds.

“For a human being, the feeling of immersion is first of all audio, before being visual. The visual field is 140 degrees. The audio field is 360 degrees. So for the development of the metaverse, the development of XR and VR, sound is absolutely crucial. And I think musicians have a lot to say and to do in virtual worlds.”

For Jarre, immersive audio is not merely an extension of stereo, or a superior way of repackaging content originally created for stereo. It’s a much more radical medium, with endless possibilities that musicians are only beginning to get to grips with. “Stereo is

an illusion. [Film director] Christopher Nolan used to say that he loves 2D, rather than 3D with glasses, because he loves to control the illusion of perspective. It’s what great painters have done in the history of painting. And in music, it is the same. With stereo and with a frontal approach, with a flat 2D approach, we have been trained as musicians to create perspectives, to create layers. Suddenly, with immersive audio, you take this and you put them all around your ears.

“So it’s actually, in a way, going back to the natural way of listening to sound. Because in nature, stereo doesn’t exist. The world around us is mono, and it’s only our environment and our ears which are creating the perspective in audio. I think the music of the future is going to be absolutely different because of that. In a few years from now, and especially also because of the development of the metaverse and immersive worlds, our children or grandchildren will regard stereo as we regard the gramophones of our ancestors.”

Centralisation

The technology that powers Jarre’s immersive project, Oxymore, is new,

but the philosophy behind it is not. From 1969, Jarre trained under French composers Pierre Henry and Pierre Schaeffer. Both were pioneers of musique concrète, and both sought to break down conventional perspectives in music performance. “These pioneers defined a new vocabulary. They were breaking the tradition, not only by considering music in terms of sounds, and saying every noise can become music, depending on the intention of the musician, but also in terms of space, saying, ‘OK, the sounds should be 360 degrees.’ They were not interested by stereo at all.

“They were really obsessed by this idea of 360-degree composition: at that time, by just creating sounds for each speaker, and not so much in terms of movement, because the technology was not there, but with the idea of creating a kind of immersive platform from which they could explore textures. They were really thinking of multi-mono, placing speakers in circles and then using a console to place a sound here and there. It was very basic, but the idea was to break with this idea of the frontal relationship with the sounds. And they

Jean-Michel Jarre in the immersive studio at the Paris headquarters of Radio France.

The Radio France immersive studio features 29 Genelec monitors arranged in three layers, with Steinberg’s Nuendo controlled from a Yamaha Nuage fader surface.

also created, later on, what they called the Acousmonium, which is an orchestra of speakers on stage.”

In his own experiments with 3D composition and mixing, however, Jarre formed the view that today’s most popular spatial audio formats aren’t yet truly ‘immersive’, in the sense of giving equal status to sound arriving from all directions. “I realised at quite an early stage, even before this project, that Dolby Atmos is an excellent system, but originally created for movies and not for music. And then we had to, as musicians, adapt ourselves to a technology that has not been devised and created for us. In the history of music, we are quite used to this. But it creates a lot of issues, mainly for binaural because of the different filters.

“Dolby developed their system with a kind of ‘heliocentric’ approach that was basically made for movie theatres. Wherever you are, you are in the right position to have the dialogue in front of you and the rest of it on each side and the effects behind. And that is not at all what we need as musicians. We are more ‘egocentric’ as musicians, and we need to have an equivalence all around us from the centre point. It’s quite a different approach.”

For this reason, Oxymore was mixed not on a conventional Atmos system, but in an experimental studio at the Paris headquarters of Radio France, using Steinberg’s Nuendo and L-Acoustics’ L-Isa to feed a monitoring system with 29 loudspeakers. It was a fitting choice of location: Jarre’s studies with Henry and Schaeffer took place in this same building, and he used to sneak into unused studios at night to practise his craft.

The Concrete Jungle

In tribute to his mentors, Jean-Michel Jarre used the techniques of musique concrète extensively in the creation of Oxymore. In fact, the seed of the project was a cache of sounds created by Pierre Henry himself, which were passed to Jarre by Henry’s widow after the composer’s death in 2017.

“In the middle of the 20th Century, these guys were really obsessed by the textures of sounds. I studied this with them. Schaeffer classified almost all sounds of nature by types of textures. I think in electronic music, texture is fundamental — and these days we are forgetting it, because we have so many plug-ins and so many ready-made sounds

that we are not really working on the textures any more. And for Oxymore, I really tried to work on acoustic sounds or electronic sounds to merge them so after a while, you don’t know if it’s a digital sound or a sampled sound any more. That was the link with Pierre Henry, because it has been really useful for me to use — not so many of his sounds, but some of them — but more as a source of inspiration.”

Discussions of musique concrète often focus on the use of tape loops, but Jarre does not think the specific medium is very important. “For me, tape is secondary in the idea of musique concrète. What is important is the word ‘concrete’, which could be the opposite of abstract: the texture, the content of sounds. To use noises and transform them into musical elements. When Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry started to work on musique concrète, it was actually before tapes. They were using 78s, and the first concert they did was exactly like what a DJ used to do 20 years ago. They had actually a bunch of 60 or 80 78s — not vinyls, it was like metallic plates — and they were playing them, slowing them down, playing them in reverse, exactly like scratching. They are really the first DJs of music history!”

The development of sampling, likewise, made it easier to implement the ideas behind musique concrète, but did

not fundamentally change them. “I was very lucky enough to have one of the first Fairlights in Europe. It was like a grail for me because suddenly, what I was doing before with tapes and taking lots of time to do, suddenly you could record the sound of your dog, as we know, and play your dog on the keyboard. So it was a total revolution. But it’s the same approach, in terms of taking sounds and transforming them into musical elements.

“What I wanted to do with Oxymore was not only this, but to go back to what musique concrète is all about, what electro-acoustic music is all about. Not in a cerebral, intellectual way, but also to have fun. I got some sounds from Pierre Henry, but at the end of the day, I didn’t use them so much. Maybe in the whole album you have five percent of these sounds. But they are very important because for me, they were the source of inspiration for the whole project.

“Beyond a tribute and an homage to Pierre Henry, I love also the idea that musique concrète is quite close to another French movement called surrealism. The Marcel Duchamp approach influenced a lot of musicians such as John Cage: a kind of irony in terms of assembling sounds which have nothing to do with each other. And it’s something that I really enjoyed by doing

Many of the sounds on Oxymore began life as recordings of acoustic instruments such as the waterphone (front) and thunder drum (rear), often miked with contact microphones.

it. It was like going back to the roots, but with the tools of tomorrow!”

Old & New

Jean-Michel Jarre has an enormous inventory of instruments at his studio, including practically every synth ever made. He typically selects a smaller palette from within this armoury to provide the core sounds for each project. The palette from which the Oxymore textures were generated was light on classic analogue synths, focusing instead on acoustic instruments as sources for sound design, along with modern digital synths and controllers.

“I used a palette of instruments, from old Mellotrons to recent keyboards, and also sound effects that I recorded with contact mics, such as the Zeppelin Labs Cortado — for me, one of the best contact mics available. I’m not sponsored, but they’re really cool for what we need as musicians. I use lots of elements that people use when they’re doing sound effects for movies, and old instruments such as the Cristal Baschet [see box].

“Two very recent instruments are the Expressive E Osmose and the Nonlinear Labs C15. The Osmose is an amazing instrument, because you can really have so many ways of processing the colour and the pitch and all that. You can move

horizontally, vertically, the speed and everything, so it was an ideal instrument for what I needed, to work constantly on the speed of a pitch or the evolution of sounds. I really used it a lot for having evolving textures and sounds. And it’s interesting because these instruments are very, very new.

“I use also, for performance, the Erae Touch [MPE controller], from Embodme. And also some plug-ins, of course, from Arturia and Sample Logic. You have so many. And Spitfire also. I use a bit of Omnisphere also. A mixture of different digital elements, and I use a lot of granular processing, which you can do with lots of gear these days. Granular synthesis was also part of this work on making a sound evolve, even sounds that I recorded.

“I have a few different waterphones, from a fantastic craftsman from Poland, Janus Slawek. The waterphone is an instrument you play with a bow. You can put some water in it, and then by moving it while you play with the bow, you can create some very interesting Doppler effects. So I use that a lot. I have a few. And also, the thunder drum is a quite interesting drum with a long metallic tail, and by moving it, you create really the sound of thunder — but it’s not thunder. As Fellini, the Italian director, has always

said, ‘I’m not interested by the sound of the sea. I’m interested by the image of the sea. I like to recreate my sea in the studio with some cloth and paintings and fans, and doing something which would be my image of the sea.’ It’s a little bit the same with these thunder drums. You create your own thunder, which is of course not the same one as the real one.

“And also, there is another percussion element called the ocean drum. It’s a flat drum with two skins, and then you have a few hundred little lead balls between them. This is also a very nice instrument that I used, not necessarily to recreate the sound of the ocean at all, but to create this evolving noisy effect that you can only have with the microphone and contact mic, which is different from white noise or pink noise.”

In The Round

The process of creating musique concrète textures went hand in hand with that of juxtaposing them in space and time. Jarre composed immersively from the very start, using a 7.1 Genelec surround rig in his own studio. “I forced myself not to be too much in the front, to have a different approach. Otherwise, I realised that I could fall very easily into the trap of: OK, we are so used to working with two speakers in front of you. Then after a while, the basic part of

Few analogue synths were used in the creation of Oxymore, but Jarre’s Mellotron does feature. It is an unusual early model with two manuals side by side, designed originally for film dubbing.

the track is in front of you, and then you put some effects around — and then you go back to what I’ll call the Dolby trap — with lots of respect with Dolby, because they give us at least a tool we can use to place these objects in space.

“And also, because I was not always working in 5.1 or 7.1 here in my own studio, I kept some extreme movement in stereo by saying, ‘That’s going to be interesting in the final spatialisation, not only to deal only with mono sources, but also a mixture between mono sources and pre-spatialisation in stereo I could put somewhere, to create this kind of fusion in space.’ And I think that worked quite well.

“I didn’t start with melodies,” says Jarre of the composition process. “The melodic parts for me were not crucial and happened later on, almost like a cherry on the cake. But basically, I wanted to create the sonic environment, and the elements in space. That was really the biggest challenge: how to create this fusion between the high frequencies and the low mids, in space. So I really started by trying to create a kind of palette or range of sounds that could work together in space, but keeping dynamics.

“I also didn’t start, like in lots of electronic pieces or songs, with the beats. I started with other parts, and then I tried to inject the drums and the bass afterwards to see how I could deal with this. And most of the time I tried to put them in a cross shape [within the 3D soundstage], or sometimes just keeping them in stereo because it was better. But I tried to mix all the drums and bass in at an early stage to see how it worked with space.

“I had lots of fun changing tempos completely, experimenting with the speed and the bpm, and I used lots of tempo changes within the textures and sounds themselves. Lots of bending the sounds, and if it was not coming from a synth, I used the transposition variations a lot [ie. changing pitch without correcting the tempo].

“Western music is based on harmony, whatever we do. If we’re doing hip-hop or rap, it’s still there. So it’s always been there, all along the project. I forced myself not to start with the harmonic approach, but at the end of the day, I was using sounds and these sounds were fixing the harmony or the pitch somehow. I liked not starting with simple melodies and doing the arrangement, thinking I was doing the reverse, but probably the harmony was present even at the beginning.”

Immersive Mixing

Once the material had been assembled, the pieces that make up Oxymore were mixed in the immersive studio at Radio

France. This involved transferring the audio from Ableton Live to Steinberg Nuendo, and using L-Acoustics’ L-Isa system to develop initial panning and motion that had been carried out at the composition stage. “On Max For Live, you have some very interesting tools that I use. But otherwise, by far, Nuendo is the best at the moment, the most advanced DAW for multi-channel, even more than Pro Tools. Nuendo has really developed that, and I really hope that Ableton Live is going to develop more multi-channel technology in the future.

“We kept a lot of my early pannings, but then we put them in L-Isa and then fine-tuned them or recreated new ones.

Modern instruments that featured heavily included the Nonlinear Labs C15 and the Expressive E Osmose (below, lower right in front of modular).

But one of the secrets or the secret of multi-channel is that you need much more audio material than you do for stereo. I always thought that ‘less is more’ should be a motto for all of us, but in the case of multi-channel, more is more. We need to have lots of textures and elements to play with, constantly.

“In the case of Oxymore, what I tried to do is think in terms of placing objects in the weightlessness of space, where you could put objects all around you. And from the beginning, to try to find a fusion between these elements. Because the big difficulty in a multi-channel format compared to stereo is that once you start to separate the elements in space, you lose the fusion which is essentially music, especially in the bass and the low mid. It’s like a symphony orchestra. You write for a symphony orchestra. If suddenly you separate the violins from the percussion,

from the winds, from the brass, you lose the magic of the music.

“And what is fantastic for the musician is actually, most of the time when you have to deal with a stereo mix, you have to fight against the side-chains and things to give space to everyone. In 360 degrees, in multi-channel, you don’t have that because everything can be heard on its own. So that’s the luxury. It can be a trap. It is also something that is very, very interesting for a musician, because you can put many more elements at the same time. And I think, I hope, that people will feel that in Oxymore, you have a kind of richness in terms of variety of elements, because 360 allows you to do it.”

One of the things that Jarre and Radio France engineer Hervé Déjardin like about the L-Isa system is that panning is angular rather than coordinate-based, as it is in many DAW surround panners.

“We put everything in the L-Isa system, which allows you to pan objects through 360 degrees, degree by degree. But then you have to deal with the Apple renderer and the 7.1.4, the existing format for the audience. You have to simplify it through Dolby Atmos to have a format able to be heard by the audience.”

Binaural Trouble

This, says Jarre, works well enough on a typical 7.1.4 loudspeaker system. But the binaural render is another matter. Many streaming services create the binaural version as an automated fold-down from the surround mix, with little or no control available to the artist and engineer — and he feels that the results are often less good than the orthodox stereo mix. “The Apple renderer is not exactly the same as the pure Dolby Atmos renderer. So it means

Jarre’s studio just outside Paris has two main spaces. This is the more conventional studio room, equipped with an SSL console and a 7.1 Genelec speaker system.

that if you want to really be effective for Apple, you have actually to produce a special file for Dolby. And then you have the Fraunhofer European system, which is absolutely, in my opinion, the best, but they still have also the same kind of issues with the filters of transfer [head-related transfer functions] for Sony 360, which is again different. So we are in a stage at the moment where if you want to be efficient and to be good in each of these different profiles, we have almost to produce a master and a mix for each of those profiles.

“At the moment, we don’t have mastering rooms for multi-channels or binaural, but as soon as you want to have a proper result for binaural, you need to go through a mastering stage. And this is also something which, in comparison to stereo, is still a problem, because suddenly when you go from a stereo mix

The Cristal Baschet

“I sampled a lot of this instrument for Oxymore,” says Jean-Michel Jarre of the extraordinary Cristal Baschet, an instrument created by brothers Bernard and François Baschet in the early ’50s. “They were calling their instruments structures sonore. That means sound or sonic structures. They were quite influenced by [Alexander] Calder, the sculptor, and their instruments were absolutely stunning in terms of aesthetics. They were sculptures in themselves.”

The instrument is related to the glass harmonica, and is played by rubbing rods of different lengths with wet fingers. The resulting vibrations are amplified by shaped metal resonators. “It creates a very, very strong sound, almost like low trombones, and it can be very, very brutal, very violent, as well as very subtle. They developed also lots of percussion instruments with springs and also lots of metallic parts. But always, the aesthetic was very important. They had this idea that beauty and the shape of an instrument is very important in the musical result. And actually, it’s true.

“The shape of a violin, the shape of a guitar: you develop almost a sensual relationship with an instrument, which is of course desperately lacking in the electronic gear where you still have this box. Very few people have been focused on

to a binaural mix, you have a difference of level. And just this difference of level, as we know, is enough to change the perception, making the stereo version more exciting. So with Apple, what they’re doing is for spatial audio, they are readjusting by reinforcing the bass and adding a bit of reverb. So when you move to spatial audio from a stereo file, you say, ‘Wow, it’s quite good.’ But it’s not binaural.

“What we’ve done with Oxymore is actually to develop some mastering tools in-house to optimise the level and also to try to adjust what, in my opinion, is missing in lots of binaural mixes: the lack of bass and lack of dynamics in the low mid. We really put a lot of attention on that because at the moment it’s difficult, with the same file, to have an ideal low-mid and bass for speakers, and with the same file, width for headphones. You have to choose. And then I took

the real aesthetic of electronic instruments. This is lacking. And the Baschet brothers were really obsessed by that. It’s really like a sculpture. And you can scream or sing into it and it creates a... I don’t know, dinosaur-like voice. It’s quite interesting. It’s a physical synthesizer, because you can really create sounds and make them evolve, like if you are moving some oscillators. It’s exactly the same thing.”

the option to do separate files for headphones and speakers.

“Having said that, I’ve been quite impressed recently by the fact that with Dolby Atmos on Apple, if you have good mastering, like we tried to do, the same file is quite OK in binaural and 5.1. You lose a little bit of space. So we still have a work in progress, but I really try to improve with the tools we have today for this project. And hopefully, I think this project and the energy we put in this project will help also, or contribute to help some developers and some brands such as Dolby to also help the musicians and the music community. We are still in the dark age of multi-channel, binaural and immersive sounds, which is quite exciting in a sense, because we can work with companies to progress together and to define a proper grammar for music and not only for movies.”

The Cristal Baschet: part instrument, part sculpture.

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