Les Chants Magnétiques

In French, chants (songs) and champs (fields) sound the same. Say the title out loud and it means "magnetic songs" and "magnetic fields" at once. The English release had to pick one, and it picked Magnetic Fields. The word on the cover was songs; the English title went for the fields, which appear nowhere on it. Only half the pun survived the crossing. There is a third layer too: Les Champs magnétiques is the title of a surrealist book published in 1920.

The sound has two layers as well. One is the EMS synthesizers Jarre had been using all along. The other is the outside world, caught by a new machine. His collaborator Michel Geiss went out and recorded trains.

Where it sits in the history of music

The road that led Jarre here is in Jean-Michel Jarre, where to start, and the record before this one is covered in the Équinoxe piece. Oxygène and Équinoxe were given over to nature. This one takes as its subject what human beings do to their surroundings. So trains come in, and cogwheels, and metal and machinery, each a little changed on the way.

The machine that captured those sounds was the Fairlight CMI. It came out of Sydney in 1979, a digital synthesizer and sampler that let you record a sound and play it from a keyboard. The first model held sixteen kilobytes of samples. This record is among the earliest made with it, and Jarre was among the first musicians to get his hands on one. The French Wikipedia says he was drawn to Andy Warhol, and to the idea that a digital sound can be copied again and again without changing.

The room changed too. The record was made in Jarre's own studio at Croissy-sur-Seine, in the Yvelines. Jean-Pierre Janiaud recorded and mixed it.

Tracklist

Timings from the 1983 Polydor CD, 800 024-2. The lengths printed on LP sleeves vary from pressing to pressing. "Part 1" is all of side one, and the other four are side two.

Three parts, up close

"Part 1" (17:50). A whole side, in three movements. The French CD marks them at roughly seven and a half, four and six minutes. The first movement is built on a fast sequence, and from 1982 to 1983 it was the theme of the American television drama Bare Essence. The second is slow, and it is where the Fairlight shows most of what it can do. This is the guide's pick from the record, and the guide says to count the ideas. Here, listen for the two places where one movement turns into the next. The second movement is a preview of Zoolook, three years away.

"Part 2" (3:59). It opens side two, and it was the single, with a music video. As the guide says, this is the track that sold the record. Listen for where the outside sounds slip in around the tune.

"Part 3" (4:15). Short and spare. Its sounds came out of a toy box, and the toys are what to listen for. Tucked in between the trains and the cogwheels is a box of toys.

The rest of the record

"Part 4" (6:18) was also a single in 1981. The last track, "Part 5," carried a subtitle on the LP: "La Dernière Rumba" in France, "The Last Rumba" in English, the last rumba. The CD above drops it. Five years earlier, "Part VI" of Oxygène ran on a rhythm box with its rhumba button taped down. Here, at the end of this record, the rumba becomes a title.

How to listen

• Side one in one go. Seventeen minutes fifty, three movements that only make sense together.
• Find the trains. Geiss's recordings keep coming back in different shapes. Try to tell where it is still a train and where it has become an instrument.
• Loud. As the guide says, cut the bass on Jarre and half of it disappears.
• Say the title once, out loud. Songs or fields. The record lives in between.

What happened next

By the beginning of July it had sold 200,000 copies in France alone. Most of the reviews were kind. Cashbox called it "Jarre's most subtle work yet, being a bit busier than Oxygène and more textural than Equinoxe." Simon Tebbutt of Record Mirror did not agree, and found it "nullifying, stultifying and ultimately BORING," the capitals his own.

Then the music turned up somewhere nobody expected. The same year, the British Embassy gave Radio Beijing copies of Jarre's albums, and they became the first foreign music played on Chinese national radio in decades. China invited him over. He was the first Western musician to play there since the death of Mao Zedong. Those concerts became The Concerts in China, in the guide's "Save these for later" list. Three years later, on Zoolook, the Fairlight moved to the centre of the record.

The one track to send a friend

Send "Les Chants Magnétiques Part 2". Tell them it is four minutes. Then add one line. In 1981 the British Embassy gave Radio Beijing copies of Jarre's records, and they became the first foreign music on Chinese national radio in decades. Then China invited him to play.

Where to get it

The French Disques Dreyfus LP, FDM 18108, is the face of this record. The English-language pressings are titled Magnetic Fields, so search under that name too. On CD it goes back to 1983.

AmazonJean-Michel Jarre Les Chants Magnétiques (Magnetic Fields) on CD and vinyl.DiscogsEvery pressing of Les Chants Magnétiques, from the 1981 Disques Dreyfus FDM 18108.

The train Geiss recorded ends up inside a computer, folded down to a single key. Press it, and a train goes by.