Name: Jean-Michel Jarre

Nationality: French
Occupation: Producer, composer, sound artist, performer
Current Release: Jean-Michel Jarre's Oxymore, a tribute to the French pioneer of Musique concrète, is out via Sony.  

If you enjoyed this interview with Jean-Michel Jarre and would like to stay up to date with his work, visit his official website. He is also on Instagram, Facebook, and twitter.

This interview with Jean-Michel Jarre is part of a three-part series. Read the second part about his his past at the GRM. And the third one about synaesthesia and abstract painting. 

Over the course of his career, Jean-Michel Jarre has worked with and been remixed by a wide range of artists, including Air, Moby, Tangerine Dream, Lang Lang, The Orb, Jeff Mills, Tale Of Us, and Thylacine.

[Read our Air interview]
[Read our Moby interview]
[Read our Tangerine Dream interview]
[Read our Tangerine Dream interview about Improvisation]
[Read our Lang Lang interview]
[Read our Alex Patterson of The Orb interview]
[Read our Thomas Fehlmann of The Orb interview]
[Read our Thylacine interview]
[Read our Tale of Us interview]



I wanted to start this interview off with some impressions from the Oxymore listening sessions yesterday. What I noticed is that some of your albums before this one all seem to be in reference of something: The Electronica series contained references to your earlier works, Amazônia was a reference to concrete spaces in the Amazon jungle. But when I left the cinema yesterday, I thought that this one had no references to anything outside of the music itself. It really seemed a self contained world as it were. Is that a fair assessment?

I think this is one of the best comments and compliments about what I've done, that's exactly what I tried to achieve.

My goal was, on the one hand, to use and pay hommage to the technical elements, or the technical approach, of composition from the roots of French electro acoustic music. In my opinion, it is still absolutely contemporary and modern in its use of noise and sound design, which has by now become the grammar of modern music. But I also aimed at something absolutely contemporary by using the most recent software granular synthesis and Dolby Atmos in the creative process.

And, you know, what you say is interesting, because actually, when it comes Oxymore, I didn't think about my 1976 album Oxygene at all. But there is still a link. When I started to compose Oxygene, there was no pressure other than wanting to achieve something its own.

Not as an ambition, but just as a fact. Simply, I had no references for for Oxygene because nothing of this kind existed prior to it. And then I worked in a very intuitive way, allowing myself to be guided by what I was doing.

And it's exactly the same situation with Oxymore. By exploring this idea of 360 degrees sound I had no references, because it hasn't been done before in this way. So I had to find my own way to create this piece of music with the tools available …

... which weren't even made for musicians.

Right! They were meant more for movie theatres. So actually, I had no pressure other than trying to explore. And this the reason why your initial comment to this interview means a lot to me. Oxymoron really is a world on its own.

Flaubert said that you should put everything into a work of art: God, the earth, the planets, the universe – but never yourself as a composer. I thought this was a very interesting quote after having listened to Oxymore, because the album seems to exist without the composer in a way.

Yes, a very interesting comment. On one side I would agree totally. On the other side, I won't agree at all of course.

It reminds me about something that director Federico Fellini told me one day:  

“You know, Jean-Michel, I did a lot of movies and each time I thought it was a totally different movie. But looking back, I think I always made the same one. It's what we call style.”

I think artists often just have one thing to say and what they're doing is always just variations of themselves.

Also, there is no progress in terms of human emotions. What an ancient Egyptian artist wanted to create, what someone in the 18th century wanted to create or when it comes to the arts today, remains the same. It's always about our relationship with death and love and solitude. Basic human feelings and emotions are recurrent. It's just the tools which are changing from one generation to another which make your music specific.

We have 12 notes to work with in Western music but then we have millions of songs based on that principle. What this means when it comes to Flaubert's quote is that your self is, in fact, very important for creating something that is  specific.

I guess I'm ambiguous about the idea of human emotion being static. After the Oxymore session yesterday, for example, I wasn't sure what I felt. I thought it was really impressive in parts and almost threatening at times. I'm not sure if I liked it, but it was decidedly something new. Don't you think that tools and sounds that are new can open doors into new emotions, too?

Not necessarily. The first time people listened to The Rite of Spring, or the first time they heard Charlie Parker play, or the first time they were exposed to a heavy metal piece, a lot of people were a bit puzzled and a bit lost. They didn't know what to make of it. Because the style itself, the form was unexpected. But it doesn't mean that the feelings you experienced from this unexpected situation were new.

Perhaps, yes.

It's a very interesting question. And I love this kind of conversation.

For instance, we are recording this interview at the moment, and suddenly we have lots of noise. And you have one guy in this room with us, behind you with headphones [Dirk Fischer, who did the recording], panicking entirely. And then after 10 seconds, the noise stops again. This is exactly the unexpected we love also in the creative process.

It's always present when you are introducing music, or a movie, that puzzles people. As an audience member, you don't know exactly what to think, you're a bit lost about your feelings, or you may have mixed feelings. I think this is something positive.

David Lynch once said that “confusion is a very powerful sensation”.

Coming from the king of confusion, absolutely. [Laughter] By the way, it's interesting because David Lynch was my first choice for Electronica. He was the first person I contacted for a collaboration. And then we did something together and we both agreed that it was not really interesting.

It wasn't confusing enough?

It was the apology of confusion. [Laughter]

What I thought was so remarkable about Oxymore is that is felt so unlike a typical tribute where people talk in hushed voices and say nice things to each other. In parts, this music felt almost violent.

I tend to think of it more as raw rather than violent.

Yes, that may be a better word.

I personally don't think this music is dark. It's not noise music, but it's about processing noises in such a way that they become musical objects.

Actually, there is a very interesting book from Schaeffer called Solfege De L'objet Sonore (The Solfege of the Musical Object). For Oxymore I really had the feeling of placing sonic objects all around me. They were not so much part of an arrangement or orchestration, but almost literally like physical objects.

You could say they were audio objects that I would place somewhere in space.

But dynamic objects, of course.

Yes, exactly. Talking about all this, I was just thinking about how Goethe once compared music to liquid architecture. Which is quite true. Except in the case of Oxymore it's not liquid, but more earthy. More mineral.

In the way the beats are programmed, right? Although it's mostly percussion playing, it doesn't feel like a pure rhythm record. There's an almost thematic quality to the drums.

In electronic music, you'll often have a repeated pattern of percussion or bass which unconsciously puts you in a kind of trance. But at the same time, it also puts you in a situation of comfortable expectation. And I escaped that on this record, which is why I love what you said that you didn't know what to think or what to feel.

How do you break this mode of comfortable expectation?

It was almost as if I was working in reverse order of what I've usually been doing for some of my projects. There was a system or a dogma that every few bars, the beat had to change. Like in nature, when you look at the clouds or at waves. You can look at the waves at the beach for hours, and you won't get bored. It's almost always the same, but not exactly the same. It's like a heartbeat: For our human bodies to work properly, each heartbeat has to be slightly different. If we had identical heartbeats, we would die.

The same goes for what I tried to achieve on Oxymore. Each time you return to it, you will discover something else.

You mentioned that there is a system in place. What is it?

It has two aspects.

Firstly, the textures are not changing in a logical way. They are not based on patterns, they're based on non rhythmic repetition or evolution.

And the other thing is the fact that, as I said in the interview at the cinema yesterday, if you are too minimalist in your compositions in a 360 degree environment, your sounds will feel naked, because they are isolated from each other.

What changes did you make to your creative approach in the threedimensional space?

It is of utmost importance in music to achieve fusion. What makes an orchestra stand out is when you create this fusion between the high parts and the low parts and also between the right side and the left side, how the textures are slipping from the strings to the winds. In 2D, it's quite easy to create a sense of fusion. But as you start to to leave this kind of abstract canvas, sounds are naked until you understand that more is more instead of less is more.

So you have to create multiplying textures of the same sound instead of having just one sound. Or you need to divide the texture - or the evolution of the sound - into four or five parts at different places. If you manage that, you're no longer just inside the music, but inside the structure or the texture of the sounds. This is what makes Oxymore quite unusual in my opinion.

I think that's what I also appreciated about Oxygene when I first heard it. I instantly thought that the first part of the record was incredible. But I had to wrap my brain around what was happening, it was so far removed from anything I was listening to at the time, things like Queen. [Laughs]

It's a good group, I'm in good company.

There's a logic to Oxygene, but even today, after 30 years of listening to it, I couldn't pinpoint that logic exactly. And I think maybe Oxymore has a bit of that quality as well: You sense that there is a logic, but it escapes what can be expressed with words.

I totally understand what you're saying. And, of course, as the musician concerned by it, it's something I really appreciate.

It's very strange … When I listen to my music once it's done, there is a kind of mixed feeling – it's something very familiar and a sense of mystery at the same time.

That doesn't happen necessarily all the time, however. For me, the first part of Oxygene, the A-side of the vinyl, still carries a kind of mystery. I don't know exactly how I did it. And it's the same thing for Oxymore when I listened back to it. Of course, I do know the sounds I used and the structure I applied. But the way that it's built ... there is still even for me, a kind of mystery.

Why do you think that is?

Two reasons. The first one is I did both Oxygene and Oxymore in more or less six to seven weeks. So quite quickly. But then it took me a long time for both to finish them, mixing and producing and getting the spatialisation right.

The other thing is that I had absolutely no pressure, neither for Oxygene nor for this one, because as we were discussing, neither had any references. So it was quite innocent. It was all about exploring something that I knew was different, something without any preconceived idea.

Which is very rare these days.

It's quite difficult today! Everything has been done more or less with technology in the past 40 or 50 years. But with this new playground I built for Oxymore, I was dealing with space in a totally different way.

So, now it's done, it's something that unfortunately is not going to happen anymore, because I now do have a reference.  It's a precious moment.