Electronic Sound Issue 96 2022-PDF

English | 100 pages | True PDF | 21MB
We’re tickled pink to have Jean-Michel Jarre on the cover of Electronic Sound. Come to think of it, we’re tickled any colour you care to mention. Like most music magazines, we probably use the word “legend” a bit more than we should. It’s completely justified with Jarre, though. He learned his trade from some of the best – Pierre Schaeffer, Pierre Henry, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Iannis Xenakis – and maintained close personal connections with these giants of early electronic sound over the decades that followed.

His ‘Oxygène’ album put synth music into the upper reaches of the world’s pop charts in 1976, trumping everything that even his most famous German cousins had managed up to that point. His grand-scale live extravaganzas, perhaps most famously in Paris in 1979 and Moscow in 1997, hit heights so high they ended up in the record books. But however illustrious his history, Jarre has always been a man of the future, his focus fixed on the idea of moving forwards. Witness his spectacular live show at a virtual Notre-Dame on New Year’s Eve in 2020.

And if you didn’t witness it, get yourself over to YouTube. With his new album, ‘Oxymore’, Jarre has once again set out to create something fresh, something different, even if he’s taken a trip back to his roots for his initial impetus. The result is a musique concrète record crafted with 21st century technology, offering the listener a thrilling and immersive sound experience. As Jeremy Allen says in his interview with Jarre, “It’s quite unlike anything else you’ll have heard before”.

Talking of Jean-Michel Jarre’s roots, we’re also tickled pink to be reissuing his debut single, featuring ‘La Cage’ and ‘Erosmachine’, to accompany this month’s magazine. It’s incredible to think that he recorded these two fascinating tracks at the end of the 1960s. And in the dark. By which we mean, quite literally, without any light. Check out page 7 for the full story on that.