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A welcome return by Jean-Michel Jarre, the true pioneer of Electronic Music
by Nick March :
nmarch@thenational.ae
Jean-Michel Jarre could easily lay claim to a host of titles: the father of EDM, the godfather of ambient – he might even be the original superstar DJ.
Without his synthesisers blazing a trail through the 1970s and 1980s, there might never have been dance music as we know it today. Without Jarre performing to more than three million people in Russia in the 1990s, there might never have been Armin van Buuren headlining at du Arena in Abu Dhabi. Without the French composer, there might only be a bunch of possibilities rather than certainties.
It’s been eight years since Jarre recorded new material. Now he’s back with 16 tracks gathered together under the banner of Electronica 1: The Time Machine. A sequel, Electronica 2, is expected early next year.
Electronica 1 is actually a series of 15 collaborations. A quick browse through the list of contributing artists leaves no doubts about Jarre’s enduring pulling power. You’ll find two works recorded with Erasure's Vince Clarke, plus tracks co-written with Pete Townshend, Moby, the aforementioned van Buuren, Laurie Anderson, 3D of Massive Attack, Air and more.
If ..!, written and recorded with Little Boots, provides one of the album’s standout moments. Its loopy synth track is overlaid with Victoria Hesketh’s infectious musings on modern life and empty communication.
Suns Have Gone, on which Moby shares the credit, is equally wonderful, pairing a typically epic Jarre soundscape with a vocal of real substance.
His collaboration with Anderson, the performance artist best known in the music world for her 1980s oddity O Superman, is more frustrating. This is in part because Rely on Me is not really a cooperative work – rather, it is a meeting of uncompromising minds. Jarre’s sequencing warbles away in the background like data struggling to find adequate bandwidth, while Anderson talks in that discombobulated style of hers that is often more disconcerting than dynamic. Travelator (Part 2), with Townshend, is equally unsettling, as the vocal just sounds too forced.
I am not sure how many people would admit to having missed Jarre during his fallow years, but time and again Electronica 1 proves how good it is that the Frenchman is back on the scene.
The album’s closer, a seven-minute arrangement called The Train & The River recorded with Chinese concert pianist Lang Lang, is a discursive and arresting hybrid of ambient and chill. It’s also a wonderful work that demands repeated play. It stands as absolute evidence that Jarre is still relevant after all these years.
Edgar Froese knew how to go out on a high note
