Oxygène

The Korg Mini-Pops 7 is a Japanese rhythm machine from 1966. Press one of its key-shaped buttons and you get a rhumba; press another and you get a bossa nova. The buttons were meant to be pressed one at a time. In the autumn of 1976, in a kitchen in Paris, a twenty-eight-year-old composer held two of them down at once and taped them there. That is the beat of "Oxygène (Part IV)": "rock" and "slow rock" laid over each other. "Part VI" does the same with "rhumba" and "bossa nova."

By 2016 that record had sold about eighteen million copies. Somewhere inside it is a strip of sticky tape.

Where it sits in the history of music

How Jarre got here is told in Jean-Michel Jarre, where to start. In 1969 he joined Pierre Schaeffer's Groupe de Recherches Musicales and learned musique concrète. Production work for rock acts paid for a small studio in the kitchen of his apartment at 12 Rue de la Trémoille, in the 8th arrondissement, and the royalties from writing for singers such as Françoise Hardy bought him an ARP 2600. This is his third studio album.

The line back to Berlin is drawn in one sentence of the Phaedra piece: two years later, Oxygène used the same blueprint. In 1977 the British press heard it too. Its ears were full of punk, and it was largely hostile. Angus MacKinnon wrote in the NME: "The German spacers ([Tangerine] Dream, Schulze et al) mapped this part of the electronic galaxy aeons ago ... Explore its prime influences instead." Those prime influences are what this site is about. What MacKinnon missed is that Berlin tended to fill a whole side with one piece, and Jarre got a tune into four minutes and fourteen seconds. That difference is what put this record on the radio.

Tracklist

Numbers instead of titles. Parts I to III on side one, IV to VI on side two. 39:39 in all.

Three parts, up close

"Part II" (7:49). The first thing he wrote for the record. He got his old Mellotron back from the Ferber studio and wrote this on it, though only a few of its keys still worked. The beat is a single Mini-Pops preset, "swing." This is the part the guide picked. Listen for the waves. They come from the Synthi AKS and wrap around the piece, and the small beeps come from the same machine. The phased strings are the Eminent organ and the VCS 3.

"Part IV" (4:14). The one everybody knows. It opens on a wind, a flat noise from the VCS 3, the first synthesizer Jarre ever owned. Into the middle of it come the taped-down "rock" and "slow rock." Listen for whether the two patterns roll along as one, and where they snag on each other. The lead sound on top was programmed on the ARP 2600 by Michel Geiss. The piece is in the Dorian mode. The idea came from Gershon Kingsley's "Popcorn," which Jarre had covered under a pseudonym in 1972, without success.

"Part VI" (6:20). The closer. The beat is "rhumba" and "bossa nova" together. Listen, again, for waves. Unlike those in "Part II," these are the "breathing" waves Geiss built on the ARP 2600. The record has waves twice, from two different machines. At the end, listen to that breathing and wait for the record to stop.

The rest of the record

"Part I" (7:39) opens the record and "Part III" (3:16) closes side one. In 1977 Robin Smith of Record Mirror wrote that side one "ends on ghost-like notes" and that side two "has a rushing opening like the breaking of a barrier." That opening is "Part IV." "Part V" (10:23) is the longest thing here, and its main sequence comes from an RMI Keyboard Computer. It sits at the centre of side two and stays longest, which makes it the place where someone who only knew "Part IV" starts hearing the album as an album. Throughout the sessions Jarre used a Revox tape machine to delay the sound coming out of a speaker and get a "huge sense of space."

How to listen

• Loud, on good speakers. The first 50,000 copies were handed to hi-fi shops to demonstrate stereo. It went out into the world to be heard that way.
• A side at a time, whole. Side one runs about nineteen minutes, side two about twenty-one. The numbers only mean something in sequence.
• Don't start with "Part IV." Go in order from side one and IV becomes just one piece of the record.
• Once in the car. As the guide says, Jarre made music to drive to.

What happened next

Polydor took the record around the world in 1977. By April it had sold 70,000 copies in France, and in August "Part IV" came out as a UK single and climbed to number four. Europe 1 in France used it as the theme for two programmes, and BBC Radio 1 played the whole album. Karl Dallas of Melody Maker owned up: "the first time I heard this album I hated it ... I've got to admit it repays further listening."

Équinoxe followed in 1978, and after the Place de la Concorde concert in 1979 the two records sold together. By 1981 this one had sold about fifteen million. Michel Granger, who painted the cover, said: "That picture is the best known of all my work. It's my Mona Lisa. But I don't feel like it belongs to me any more." Sequels came in 1997 and 2016.

And the people who turned it down had to live with that. Chris Blackwell, who founded Island Records, later named two professional mistakes of his life. One was turning down Elton John's first album, Empty Sky. The other was turning down Oxygène.

The one track to send a friend

Send "Oxygène (Part IV)". Tell them first that it runs four minutes and fourteen seconds. Then add one line. The beat is two buttons on a 1966 rhythm machine, held down together with sticky tape. The buttons were meant to be pressed one at a time.

Where to get it

The French Disques Motors original, 2933 207, is the face of this record. The 1977 Polydor international release exists in many national pressings. For a first listen there is the 2014 remaster. The 2007 New Master Recording is a re-recording on the same instruments, so it is not the original.

AmazonJean-Michel Jarre Oxygène on CD and vinyl.DiscogsEvery pressing of Oxygène, from Disques Motors 2933 207 in 1976.

In a kitchen, a rhythm machine plays a rhumba and a bossa nova at the same time. There is tape over two of its buttons.