Zoolook

Working with synthesizers, Jarre said, is very lonely. You have to approach it like a painter shut away in a bunker. He was talking to the British magazine Electronics & Music Maker in February 1985, and he said that this time he had let people in. He brought in musicians, and he brought in a great many more voices than that. Afghan, Balinese, Tibetan, Quechua, Sioux: the inner sleeve names twenty-five languages. What the voices were actually saying was not part of how he picked them.

Where it sits in music history

How Jarre got here is told in Jean-Michel Jarre, where to start. The guide puts this record fourth: play it first and it will scare you off, skip it and you will think he was only a showman.

Three years earlier, on Les Chants Magnétiques, Jarre had used the Fairlight CMI, the machine that records a sound from the outside world and plays it back from a keyboard. On that record he was still finding out what a sampler was for. On this one he handed it the human voice. The equipment list on the sleeve starts with the Fairlight, and next to it is an Emulator. In March 1985 Jarre told Electronic Soundmaker & Computer Music why he used the first Emulator. The sound was not all that good, he said, but it had a lot of mistakes, and he liked using an instrument's weak points in odd ways.

The voices came from two places. Some Jarre recorded on his own travels. The rest came from the French ethnologist Xavier Bellanger, who had a large collection of tapes. They listened together and Jarre picked the words. He chose them for their phonetic and musical qualities; meaning did not come into it. In the same interview he said the fashion for setting ethnic instruments next to rock ones struck him as artificial. Taking words and parts of words from different languages and building music out of them seemed far more interesting. Some of the rhythm tracks are made from nothing but sampled words.

Tracklist

Two pieces fill side one, and five short ones share side two. Jarre wrote everything. The timings follow the original French LP as listed on Discogs.

Twenty-five languages on the sleeve

The original inner sleeve says that the human voices on the album were created from recordings of speech and song, and then lists the languages. In the sleeve's own order and spelling: Aboriginal, Afghan, Arabic, Balinese, Buhndi, Chad, Chinese, English, Eskimo, French, Gabonese, German, Hungarian, Indian, Japanese, Madagascan, Malayan, Pigmy, Quechua, Russian, Sioux, Spanish, Swedish, Tibetan, Turkish. Countries, peoples and languages are jumbled together on one line. A final sentence says the recordings were edited and transformed with various electronic devices.

Jarre also explained the title in the Electronic Soundmaker interview. He had taken voices off television in China, Africa, the United States and Germany and mixed them together into a sort of human zoo. Zoo, look: Zoolook.

The New York band

The basic tracks were made at his own studio in France. Then he went to Clinton Studio in New York to record the other musicians, and came back to France for the final overdubs. He explained how he chose them. He wanted players known less for session work than for working at the very edge of their field. Marcus Miller could play rock, jazz, breakdance, anything. Adrian Belew had probably forgotten some time ago what a normal guitar sounded like. Yogi Horton was a drummer who had worked with Talking Heads.

Laurie Anderson brought recordings of Japanese words back from her tour there, and Jarre mixed them in with other sounds. Then he asked her to sing something as if it had been written by aliens from another planet, so that she would not understand the meaning of what she sang, only the feeling under it. That singing is on "Diva".

Mixing began at Trident in London with David Lord, who had co-produced Peter Gabriel and knew how to handle Fairlight sounds. Jarre was not happy with the result, so he took Lord back to France and they finished it in his own studio. Only the title track was mixed by someone else, René Ameline.

"Zoolook", as it goes

The guide sends you to the title track first. It runs 3:50 and opens side two. What to listen for is the point where a voice stops being a voice and becomes an instrument. Jarre said he used the voices on this record as other instruments, and that some of the rhythm tracks were built from sampled words. There are no lyrics. If your body finds the beat while you cannot understand a single word, you are exactly where Jarre wanted you.

The rest of the record

"Ethnicolor" opens the album at 11:41, more than half of side one. The guide sends you there second. "Ethnicolor II", at the end of side two, comes back to it and closes the record.

"Diva" runs 7:33. It is the track with Laurie Anderson's alien song.

The three pieces in the middle of side two each run between 3 and a little over 4 minutes. "Zoolookologie" came out again as a remixed single in 1985. "Wooloomooloo" was the B-side of the "Zoolook" single in 1984.

How to listen

• Title track first. Then go back to side one and play "Ethnicolor" all the way through.
• On headphones, a little louder than usual.
• Do not try to understand the words. Jarre did not pick them that way.
• Play "Part 2" from Les Chants Magnétiques first. You will hear how much wider the sampler's job had become in three years.

What happened next

The album entered the UK chart at 57 on 18 November 1984 and reached 47 a week later, a long way below the number 6 of the 1981 record. Reviews were split. In NME on 1 December 1984, Rachel Wilde called it a union between David Bowie's Scary Monsters and Kraftwerk on speed. Years later AllMusic's John Bush wrote that the tracks with Jarre alone are often the best.

France saw it differently. In April 1985 it won the Victoires de la Musique award for instrumental album of the year. The video for the title track was directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who went on to make Delicatessen and Amélie. The open-air concert in Houston on 5 April 1986 opened with the first part of "Ethnicolor". In 2015 a thirtieth-anniversary edition came out, newly mastered from the original analogue tapes.

The one track to send a friend

Send "Zoolook". Say it runs under 4 minutes, then add one line. Every human voice you hear on it is a real recording of someone speaking or singing, and Jarre chose each word for how it sounded. Out of twenty-five languages, there is not one word you need to understand.

Where to get it

The 1984 French Dreyfus LP is the record as it first appeared, with the list of languages and the equipment list on the inner sleeve. On CD, the 2015 thirtieth-anniversary edition is newly mastered from the original analogue tapes. Turn the lights off and drop the needle at the start of side two. Words you do not understand turn, one by one, into a beat that circles the room.

Zoolook · AmazonNew CD and LP search results.Zoolook · DiscogsEvery pressing, new and used.