JEAN-MICHEL JARRE
Synth pioneer makes waves with inspired follow-up to a classic.
In 1978, the 30-year-old Jarre released his fourth album. Like his breakthrough Oxygène two years before, Équinoxe had an enormous impact worldwide, selling in excess of 10 million copies. Its themes permeated the public consciousness and its iconic artwork left a retinal imprint.
It’s the staring figures from Michel Granger’s concept art that triggered the composer to revisit Équinoxe and create a new work 40 years on.
Equinoxe Infinity isn’t so much a sequel as a meditation on what Granger’s faceless watchers might be fixated on over the horizon. At Jarre’s request there are two different covers – the watchers petrified to stone on an unspoiled landscape or in a technological dystopia. Which one arrives through your letterbox is left to chance.
Duality is le mot juste for every aspect of Equinoxe Infinity, from art to subject matter to the music itself. Ten movements fuse the traditional free-flowing style of his most celebrated works with the EDM he favoured on recent releases.
The elemental musique concrète of bubbling gurgling liquid permeates the album, as it did in 1978. First movement The Watchers will instantly put admirers of the original in familiar territory, with the sound of massive objects crashing into water. A meteor shower hitting the ocean or gigantic breaching whales? Choose your own adventure.
Analogue and digital vie for supremacy. Robots Don’t Cry seeks to revisit Oxygène Part IV’s insistent bass sequence, while soloing Mellotron is aggressively flanked by swirling futuristic effects. Headphones are a must. As the album progresses it assumes a darker tone. A portentous tolling bell dominates the fourth movement, All That You Leave Behind, perhaps sounding humanity’s death knell as we enter the age of the automaton. Voices are manipulated to become more synthetic and during the magnificent Machines Are Learning, robotic articulations begin to mimic speech. A terrifying glimpse of an inorganic future or an exciting evolution of our species? This too is left as an exercise for the listener.
Infinity and The Opening are classic Jarre given a techno makeover. In the hands of a lesser craftsman they would be faux-anthemic Europop pastiche, rather than these engaging multi-layered fusions of past and present.
Aside from the last movement’s conspicuous debt to the pulsating brain of The Orb’s Alex Paterson, Equinoxe Infinity is an unalloyed success. No rehash, it stands apart from its source material, looking Janus-like to the past while contemplating the future. Try your luck or order two copies. It’s worth it.
ENGAGING MULTILAYERED FUSIONS OF PAST AND PRESENT.