The short version
- Oxygène → Équinoxe → Les Chants Magnétiques → Zoolook → Rendez-Vous. Kitchen, studio, sampler, voices, city.
- Play them loud. Unlike everything else on this site, this music was mixed for it.
- Save the concert films for later. They are spectacular, but they are not the music.
- Writing singles did not make him a lightweight. He chose to write them.
While Berlin was building cathedrals, Paris was making music for the radio. Then it filled city squares. A million people at the Place de la Concorde in July 1979, a million and a half in Houston in 1986, three and a half million in Moscow in 1997. Those numbers make him easy to file away as a showman, and the Germans did exactly that. But all of it started in the kitchen of an apartment at 12 Rue de la Trémoille, in the 8th arrondissement, in 1976. The man in that kitchen had joined the research group of Pierre Schaeffer, the inventor of musique concrète, in 1969. By 2004 his albums and singles had sold eighty million copies. Five records, in order.
A few things first. Jarre writes tunes. His pieces are short, and they get numbers instead of titles: "Oxygène Part IV", "Équinoxe 5". His instruments were cheaper and stranger than Berlin's: an Eminent organ, an EMS VCS 3 and a Synthi AKS, an ARP 2600, a Korg Mini-Pops 7 rhythm box, and later the Fairlight. He mixes like a pop producer. The bass is loud, the top is bright, and the whole thing is built to come out of a car radio. That is the difference. Berlin made music to stand inside. Jarre made music to drive to.
The Fairlight comes up a lot in Jarre's story, so here is what it was. The Fairlight CMI came out of Sydney in 1979, a digital synthesizer and sampler. Until then a synthesizer built its sounds from circuits. The Fairlight let you record a sound from the outside world and play it from a keyboard at any pitch. A train, a voice, a piece of metal being struck: all of it could become an instrument. That is sampling. Jarre was among the first artists to use it, and from Les Chants Magnétiques in 1981 its sound runs through his music.
- The French Oxygène came out on Disques Motors; the other four are Disques Dreyfus. Polydor handled the international pressings.
- Play the first three straight through. The numbered parts only make sense in sequence.
- Play them loud. Cut the bass and half of what he built disappears.
The five, in order
Oxygène
The kitchen record. Made between August and November 1976 in a makeshift studio in an apartment kitchen, on a pair of Revox tape machines. Six parts, with a Michel Granger watercolour on the sleeve: a skull surfacing through a peeling Earth. Several labels turned it down as unsellable, Island among them. It has since sold about eighteen million copies. "Part IV" is the single and it reached number four in Britain, but the heart of the record is "Part II". Start here. Everyone starts here, and they are right.
Équinoxe
The same idea with money behind it. Eight parts, a sixteen-track tape machine, and the Matrisequencer 250 that Michel Geiss built for him. Two rows of fifty notes, and the central instrument on the record. It runs faster and does more than anything on Oxygène. Where the first record drifts, this one marches. "Part 5" is almost disco and "Part 7" is a storm. The sleeve is Granger's Le trac, which means stage fright. Number 11 in Britain, a million and a half copies in France alone. It goes second so you can hear what he did once he could afford to.
Les Chants Magnétiques
The Fairlight arrives, and sampling arrives with it. This is among the earliest records made on that machine, and Jarre spends the whole of it working out what a sampler is for. "Part 1" runs 17:50 and refuses to sit still. "Part 2" is the single and the reason the record sold. Number 6 in Britain, number 98 on the Billboard 200. It goes third because it is the turning point. After it he is a pop musician who uses synthesizers; before it he is a synthesizer musician who writes pop.
Zoolook
The strange one, the critics' one, and the one that did not sell. Singing and speech in twenty-five languages, sampled into a Fairlight CMI and cut into rhythm. Adrian Belew plays guitar, Marcus Miller plays bass, and Laurie Anderson speaks on "Diva". It stalled at number 47 in Britain. It is the most inventive thing he ever made and the least like Oxygène, and it shows that being popular was something he chose. Play it fourth. Put it first and it will scare you off. Skip it and you will think he was only a showman.
Rendez-Vous
The stadium record. It was made with a crowd of a million and a half in Houston four days away, and it sounds like it. Synthesizer fanfares as thick as brass, choral pads that need distance to open out. The saxophone on the last track was meant to be recorded in orbit. The astronaut Ron McNair was to play it aboard the shuttle Challenger. On 28 January 1986, seventy-three seconds after lift-off, Challenger broke apart and all seven crew were killed. The French jazz player Pierre Gossez played the part instead, and the piece was dedicated to McNair and the others. Play it last, because this is where the kitchen ends and the world begins.
What you have just heard
A man who took the Berlin sequence and asked, on every record, how many people it could reach. A kitchen, a studio, a sampler, a set of voices, a city. The answer turned out to be all of them. He is the only artist on this site whose records your parents own, and the only one who ever turned this music into an event. Berlin never forgave him. You can.
Paris, analogue
Oxygène, Équinoxe, Les Chants Magnétiques, and the concerts in China. The records in this guide, and the reason he is on this site.
The sampler and the stadium
Zoolook, Rendez-Vous, Houston, London Docklands. The concerts become the product.
The long middle
Chronologie is good, and Oxygène 7–13 is the sequel it says it is.
Electronica
Collaborations with everyone from Tangerine Dream to Pet Shop Boys, and a return to the modular. Better than it needed to be.
Save these for later
- Oxygène → Équinoxe → Les Chants Magnétiques → Zoolook → Rendez-Vous. Kitchen, studio, sampler, voices, city.
- Send a friend "Rendez-Vous II", and send the story about the saxophone with it.
- He and Tangerine Dream finally recorded together in 2015, on "Zero Gravity" from Electronica 1: The Time Machine. It took forty years.