Lost And Sound

Jean-Michel Jarre

• Paul Hanford • Episode 108

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Engage your senses and prepare to be transported with godfather of electronic music, Jean-Michel Jarre. Producer, composer, 3 times Guinness World record holder and cultural ambassador, Jean is also one of the youngest 75 year olds you’ll ever hear, as Paul found out when the two spoke about his 50-year musical journey, his drive to continually look forward, and his latest creations – Oxymore and Oxymoreworks. 

Dive into the nuances of Jarre's unique creative process and how he reflects on his lineage, how Jarre's own iconic work, Oxygene, once faced rejection from record labels and how he drew inspiration From Pierre Henry on his latest work.


Oxymoreworks is available Friday Nov 3rd here.

Lost and Sound is proudly sponsored by Audio-Technica

Paul’s debut book, Coming To Berlin: Global Journeys Into An Electronic Music And Club Culture Capital is out now on Velocity Press. Click here to find out more.

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Lost and Sound title music by Thomas Giddins

Speaker 1:

In a minute you're going to hear a conversation with a true Sonic pioneer and all things. Sonic is at the heart of what this show's sponsors are all about. Lost and Sound is sponsored by Audio Technica. Audio Technica are a global but still family run company that make headphones, turntables, cartridges, microphones. They make studio quality yet affordable products because they believe that high quality audio should be accessible to all. So head on over to AudioTechnicacom to check out all of their range of stuff.

Speaker 1:

Sinovac, Hello and welcome to Lost in Sound. I'm Paul Hampford, I'm your host, I'm a writer, an author, a university lecturer and a former DJ based in Berlin, where I'm speaking to you now from. And this is the show where, each episode, I have conversations with the musical innovators, the outsiders, the mavericks, the artists that do their own unique thing, and we talk about music, creativity, life, the things that inspire us to make, the things that we make. Previous guests have included Peaches, Suzanne Cianni, Jim O'Rourke, Julie Gonzalez, Hania Rani, Ghost Poet Cosy, Funny Tuti, Graham Coxson, Mickey Blanco and first and more. And today on the show, composer, performer, electronic innovator, cultural ambassador, Jean-Michel Jarre. And my book Coming to Berlin is available in all good bookshops or via the publisher's website, the publisher is Velocity Press and yeah, so yeah, this is. I'm majorly excited about this one. I'm excited about all episodes I've put out, but this one, Jean-Michel Jarre.

Speaker 1:

He's been held as the godfather of electronic music. He's one of the first artists to take electronic music back in the 70s into the realms of popular culture, alongside other visionaries like Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream, Wendy Carlos, Suzanne Cianni and Giorgio Morroda. Beforehand, before this, I feel and please do correct me if I'm wrong in terms of how I feel and interpret things that electronic music before these pioneers of the 70s was really more the preserve of academia, of the avant-garde of composition. I mean, obviously electronic elements were in pop music and there were some electronic novelty hits, but the idea of making purely synthesized or largely synthesized synthetic electronic music was just like radically new. And Jean-Michel Jarre first came to prominence with the 1976 album Oxygen, which went on to sell 18 million copies worldwide, a truly cultural pop culture moment. He's gone on to sell 80 million records worldwide Since then at least.

Speaker 1:

He's known for his huge spectacular audio visual live events. He's a three times Guinness World Record holder for the largest outdoor performances. These include a Y2K Millennium Performance at the Pyramids in Cairo, being the first Western live act in post-Mao China, playing to 3.5 million people in Moscow in 1997. He's been honored with the Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication. He's collaborated with Edward Snowden the list goes on.

Speaker 1:

We only had a really short window of time to chat for this interview, the reason being he was on a press junket that day doing one interview after another. He's promoting two new albums Oxymor, which is out now. It's an 11 track album. It's a tribute to one of his major influences, Pierre Henri, one of the foundational 20th century giants of electronic music. And a kind of companion album, a kind of remix, rework club album, if you like, called Oxymor Works, which is out on November the 3rd, which is a collection of collaborations, of tracks from Oxymor, where he's collaborated with people like Brian Eno, Martin Gore, Armin Van Boer and really really, really good stuff. So yes, we had a very, very short window of time to chat and this is what happened. Thank you so much for chatting with me today. Are you having a good day?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm quite a busy one, but pleasure talking to you, paul, you too as well.

Speaker 1:

So over a 50 year career, you've always placed a sense of the future essentially in your work, whether that's in innovative concepts or just being at the heart of what you do. And I wanted to ask you why for you, has it been so important in central in your work to always look to the future, to place this high in your work?

Speaker 2:

I could answer with one word. The word would be curiosity. I'm not necessarily obsessed by the future, but more interested by. I'm not into nostalgia that much. I'm more I'm not interested by what I've done, because what I've done I've done it and I've no control with it, as someone was a cliché to say it. And then I think it's a privilege to have this kind of fresh curiosity in front of everything. I think that I have that from thank you to my mom, probably, and also my grandfather was an engineer, a musician and an inventor, always trying to think about new ideas, and probably it's worked on a level of chromosomes in my family. Maybe I don't know.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and so when you say it's always about you know, like this thing of not looking back and not nostalgia, when do you finish an album? Do you feel like? As soon as it's out, is it like Do you reflect on it or are you moving forward at that point?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I think that I'm restarting an album when I have an idea of the overall concept. I'm not kind of an artist starting an album with one song and then another song and then after a while I say, ok, I have the right amount of songs to do an album. I always thought in terms of an album like a book, like a novel or like a movie, where there is an overall concept around it. And for instance, for Oxymor the album from which Oxymor works has been done as an extension it was really this idea of paying tribute, for instance, to the roots of the history of the French electronic music and also the idea also of conceiving, after COVID, where I've been really involved in the VR and immersive mode of expressions, trying to conceive an album structured from scratch and from scratch, in 360 and not.

Speaker 2:

It's interesting to see actually that for decades we had a frontal relationship with music. When you compose for a symphonic orchestra, you have the orchestra in front of you. When you're in studio, you have the speakers in front of you. When you're in a concert hall, you have the PS systems in front of you. So you have this kind of frontal relationship for the musician and for the audience. And it's ironic. The irony is actually in our day-to-day life. Sounds are all around your head and in a sense, because of technology, and musicians have been limited into a painter in front of us. We did masterpieces with that, of course, but actually, suddenly, technology is allowing us to be inside the music, for the composer as well as for the audience, for instance. And then that was really the beginning, the starting point of Oxymor, the album I released a month ago.

Speaker 1:

That's really interesting what you're saying, actually, because I think in non-Western music and things like folk music as well, there's always been more this idea that you're always around the music, that music is part of life, and I think some of the aspects of Pierre Henry's work which you took from was more about like this, about the immersion of this, taking sounds from everyday life and what was so significant to you in your life about Pierre Henry as well when did you first discover his work and what did it mean to you?

Speaker 2:

You know, when I was a kid my grandfather was very important to me. He was playing a Diogo. He was an engineer and inventor. He created one of the first mixing desk in France and also the ancestor of the iPod, the turntable built in batteries where you could go to for picnic, listen to the Oedipia for Chad Baker. And then for my 10th birthday he offered me a second-hand German tape recorder and I became totally obsessed by this machine recording everything all the time. And one day I played the tape backwards and I thought that aliens were talking to me and I suddenly become really involved in the idea of processing sounds. I was playing in small rock bands and processing the sound of my guitar organs and things.

Speaker 2:

And then the drummer, his father, was working in the French BBC Radio France. He said you know, there is a laboratory, a center where people are doing the same kind of things, and that was the laboratory where PHFFA, pia Henry, were involved, the group of the Ocherche Musique Research Center, where actually started this idea of creating noises and sounds into orchestral sounds and music. And this Oximo project was actually a tribute to this fundamental moment in the history of music. Who I mean? These guys really invented the way we are doing music these days by saying, okay, we can in a rather surrealistic way, by saying okay, we can mix the sound of a bird with a clarinet or the sound of a washing machine with the percussion, and that was totally, totally surrealistic in those days. But now they actually back in the 1940s they defined the grammar of the way we are doing music these days by everybody. In hip-hop, electro-pop or whatever, we are all injecting and integrating some noises, sounds, white noises or whatever in our music, and so this album was kind of a tribute to that, was it?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it was a tribute and also on a personal level I was for one of my previous album called Electronica. We had a project to work in collaboration with, together with Pia Henry, and then he got here, he passed away and it never happened. And then I got the surprise to get his family and his wife, his widow. I mean they say that he left some sounds for me to use. Maybe one day and I said that for Oximo it could be interesting to use some of his sounds. Actually, by the end of the day, I didn't use so many sounds of him Maybe it's maybe four or five percent of his sounds in the album, but the album has been heavily involved by this period. By this approach of, I mean getting raw sounds. I mean, what was the beginning of sampling really? You know?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that's amazing. And then with the ReWorks album as well, with the collaborations on that, how did you approach that creatively? Because I kind of get the sense this wasn't just giving people remixes to do, you were working with the artists. How did you pick the artists and how did that come about?

Speaker 2:

So it was a fairly different process than for Electronica, where I wanted to collaborate physically in the same studio with people. In the case of Oximo ReWorks, that was for me to contact some people I respect and I love to ask them to create a kind of extension of this idea, of this kind of tribute to this early days of electronic music and French electronic music. You see the reason why I really asked so lots of total different artists from the different electronic music field, from Martin Gortz or Burani no to Armin Van Buren, who also Young French Act also because also the link with France was also part of the project and to try to ask them to actually pick one track and doing whatever they want. And so it's not like a remix for a specific need or marketing need or whatever.

Speaker 1:

It was more to say OK, I mean create an extension of the original idea more and that must have been quite exciting because you've been making electronic music for so long but to kind of see the results of people that have kind of come up among the timeline since as well. Is there anyone on the album that you were really, really excited to work with?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I mean it's interesting because electronic music, the work of electronic musicians, is like a writer of a painter in his or her own atelier, and to open the window, sometime, the door, and to try to connect with pals and colleagues is always refreshing.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, definitely. I love that description of it, and it is kind of like architecture as well, isn't it? You're taking pieces away and putting pieces in.

Speaker 2:

Absolutely. I mean, actually, if I were not been a musician, I would have been an architect. I think there is lots of connection, as we know, between music and architecture.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and do you feel, do you experience sound in a visual way? Then as well.

Speaker 2:

Yes, I always approach my music like a kind of soundtrack of the story of the movie that the audience could create by listening to my sounds. And in that sense I think I've, and also I involved at the very early stage some visuals for my performances, because I think it was part of the DNA of the music I'm doing, probably.

Speaker 1:

I mean, and if you don't mind me asking that, going back along your timeline as well, you were really one of the first artists that I'd say, along with Kraftwerk, maybe Tanjireen Jereem and Wendy Carlos as well that took these kind of avant-garde electronic techniques into the realm of popular culture. But at that time, you know, like the time of like oxygen being such a success, did you feel like you were understood by people or did you? Did you face resistance from people going like, what are you doing with? You know, where are the guitars, where's the kind of conventional motifs?

Speaker 2:

Oh yeah, of course, because you know it's very interesting to see that every emerging styles have been rejected by the previous establishment. It was the case for the being of jazz by classical musicians, it was the case for the early days of rock with jazz men, and the same, ironically, with the early days of electronic music, even with the rock, the establishment of rock, saying, well, what are these guys playing? I mean, music is playing guitars and bass and drums, and what are these black box with knobs? I mean these people are just making a. They should work into a broadcast radio stations, but not being on stage. So you know. So an oxygen, even oxygen, has been rejected by almost all record companies and only a small label to keep as a. And I remember that the first copies, some copies, were going back to the record company because they thought that the vinyl had a problem because the oxygen was starting with this thing of wind, the white noise starting, and they thought that some technical issues were on their, were existing on their own copies.

Speaker 1:

That's so funny. And it's also kind of funny because oxygen came out in 1976 and this was exactly when punk was going on. But punk was so conventional in a lot of ways, like in some ways, I feel like what you were doing and what, like craft work were doing was truly rebellious. Did you feel like a rebel at the time?

Speaker 2:

It's a very interesting question because, paul, because you know, when I was a, when I was a teenager, I was going to the Olympia, a whole venue in Paris quite famous, where you had until three, four o'clock in the morning, at that time, lots of progressive British rock bands going, such as Soft Machine and the early days of prog rock, and I said I was telling to myself that I mean, this is the revolution of my generation and the generation to come. But in the sense it's not my generation, my revolution, because it's an Anglo-Saxon revolution and, as a French rebel, it was during the student revolution when suddenly I discovered electronic music. This is what I want to do, because this is my own rebellion field and I was quite happy that some rock artists, and even because I was playing in rock bands, were not understanding, rejecting what I was doing. In a sense I was almost reassured by the fact that I was following the right way for me.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that's quite brave as well, isn't it? Because I feel like you know to be able to kind of know that some people that don't like your work is a barometer that you're doing the right thing.

Speaker 2:

You know, it's what Jean Cocteau, the French writer, said what people don't like in you do it because it's yourself.

Speaker 1:

And do you still feel like the rebel now?

Speaker 2:

Rebel? I don't know, but actually I still feel for sure as a beginner. I always start every project as with the same feeling as a beginner, probably because I try to explore different fields and not into nostalgia, and I'm not, even if I think an artist is more than he thinks, repeating himself. I love to experiment new ways, new directions, like it is, for instance, at the moment with immersive sounds, with VR, with AI. I mean, all these new technological tools are, I think, opportunities to create in a different way and to keep the excitement fresh.

Speaker 1:

And do you feel like be making electronic music for the rest of your life? Or do you feel like that there's going to be a point where you think, OK, that I've said what I'm going to say. Or do you feel like there's always going to be some sense of inspiration?

Speaker 2:

I think that young artists. Maybe they don't realize it, but they are very lucky to live in these days because so many doors are opening with so many possibilities with the emergence of immersive worlds, metaverse, For instance. In metaverse, everybody is talking about visual and, obsessed by visual environments, we forget that the visual field is only 140 degrees, where the audio field is 360 degrees. So sound and music are going to be more than ever at the center of our creative process in the future, for instance. So no, I think that as artists, some artists are not feeling the same way, but when your body is able to carry you and you have the curiosity being fresh, I'm not even asking myself if I would stop or not. I stopped sometimes in my life because suddenly I felt dry, I felt no inspiration. It's not linked to an age or two time, it's just a matter of a period in your life probably.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah, and that's a really nice philosophy for anyone to take on, I think, in any kind of fork of life as well, isn't it?

Speaker 2:

I think the other principle is actually to, as early as possible, to realize that success as failures are accidents, because your life is in the middle and the synazurid I mean the top or the bottom of the synazurid are accidents. And then you have to deal with this and life as an artist is to. And also, you know, artists are very selfish. I mean, you do music, or you do what you do, or you do writing or movie, first of all for yourself, and then, if it's and of course it's great when the audience is following what you're doing but otherwise, if you start to think about pleasing the audience, I think you are, in a sense, you're dead as a. I mean you're killing your creative process.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so I think a lot about this, and this second guessing of a people's reactions can be really, really harmful, and have there ever been times in your life where you felt that you've started to sort of do that yourself?

Speaker 2:

No, but I give you an example from Oxymorri Works. You have a really extreme noisy tracks. So, of course, for fans who are hoping that I'm going to repeat oxygen there are not only destabilized, but I think they are shocked, they become angry, you know. But you know, frankly, I don't care because actually you know it's. I think that this Oxymorri Works is an extension of my work and I like the fact that people are twisting and hijacking what I'm doing in an unexpected way and people understand. The fact that people understand it or not is not the issue. I mean, the issue is actually to continue to explore and to be excited by projects, what I do, and I think the audience is following or not, and sometimes less, sometimes more, and this is the life of an artist, not only these days but, I think, through time.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, definitely. Um, Sean Michelle, thank you so much for chatting with me today. I know you got a Super busy schedule, so I really appreciate you making time to talk to me.

Speaker 2:

Absolutely. Thank you very much, paul, and talk to you another time with pleasure.

Speaker 1:

Bye, bye, thank you so much, bye, bye. Okay. So that was me, paul Hamford chatting with Jean-Michel Ja for Lost in Sound podcast. Thank you so much, jean-michel Ja, for those words, thank you so much, and I would like to say as well that he is 75 years old and I have to say he is the youngest 75 year old I've ever, ever, ever, met. A few years back interviewed Michael Rota for the show, and I think he's like in his early 70s and he's really, really, really young as well. Suzanne Cianni is also incredibly young flage. So I started wondering is there something about electronic music that just keeps people really, really, really young? Maybe that is. You know, maybe you can scrap all your kind of well-being stuff and just make electronic music and that's what keeps you young. I don't know, I'm not a doctor. Oxymor Jean-Michel Ja's 22nd studio album is out now and Oxymor works. The collab album is out this Friday, november.

Speaker 1:

The 3rd, lost in Sound, is proudly sponsored by Audio Technica. Audio Technica are a global but still family-run company that make headphones, turntables, cartridges, microphones, studio quality yeah, affordable products, because they believe the high quality audio should be accessible to all. So head on over to AudioTechnicacom to check out all of their range of stuff. I use their products. I love them genuinely. I did the interview you heard using an AT2020 USB mic. Just plugs right into your laptop. Even someone who's completely rubbish with technical stuff like me can use it. It's great. The music that you hear at the beginning of the end of every episode of Lost in Sound oh, there's a bit of a car beepy sound there. The music you hear at the beginning of the end of every episode of Lost in Sound is by Thomas Giddens, link to his work in the podcast description, and thank you so much for listening. I hope, whatever you're doing today tonight, you are having a lovely one. Uh, chat to you soon.