Jean-Michel Jarre
Jean-Michel Jarre has always been about creating music for the future. Now, to coincide with the 40th anniversary of Equinoxe, he’s released the next phase, Equinoxe Infinity. Electronic music’s first superstar discusses his past and future with Prog…
The French synth maestro revamps Equinoxe for a new era.
“Iwasn’t intending to revisit Equinoxe, but I’ve always been very intrigued by the album artwork,” says Jean-Michel
Jarre, referring to the banks of mysterious ‘Watchmen’ that peer out from the sleeve of his 1978 opus. “I’ve always felt that Equinoxe has one of the most iconic covers of the vinyl era. And I thought it would be interesting to imagine what happened to these beings over the past 40 years and what might happen to them 40 years from now.”
The French maestro’s next step was to recruit Filip Hodas (“a brilliant young artist from Prague who specialises in 3D computer graphics”) to create some visuals that he had in mind. Jarre asked him to come up with two future settings for the Watchmen – one depicting mankind in harmony with nature and technology, the other a lurid nightmare in which machines have taken over the world.
With these opposite images in place, the next logical move was to create the accompanying music. The upshot is Equinoxe Infinity, a long-overdue sequel to the original Equinoxe. “I thought it would be interesting to have all the visuals before even going into the studio,” explains Jarre, whose best works tend to exist at the interface between sound and vision. “I did the album like a soundtrack to this graphic project, an imaginary kind of scenario where these watchers would symbolise the evolution of technology since I began making music.
“You have this kind of machine-learning process,” he continues, “where machines and computers are watching us, learning from us and then maybe one day taking over. It may happen with artificial intelligence. There’s also this kind of attitude we have these days with technology, in that we’re watching our tablets and smartphones all the time, so there’s this interesting connection that I thought could be fun to explore on Equinoxe Infinity. I really made the album as some kind of audio movie.”
The album arrives on the back of 2016’s Oxygene 3, which, as the title implies, completed the trilogy that Jarre had begun in 1976. If anything, Equinoxe Infinity is more melodic than any of the Oxygene projects. Comprising 10 movements designed as a continuous flow, moments of pastoral beauty like Flying Totems or Robots Don’t Cry find contrast with the steely techno of Machines
Are Learning or the pulsing beatronica of The Opening. It’s the tension between these two representations of the future, between bliss and belligerence, that gives the album its cinematic power.
“I think Equinoxe Infinity is like Equinoxe on steroids,” says Jarre, who was partly inspired by the soundtrack approach of Blade Runner 2049, another recent sequel. “It’s like keeping the feeling and the mood of the analogue world, but with contemporary techniques that makes the whole project have more impact, audio-wise. So I used a lot of not only analogue instruments, but digital sounds as well. The way we are listening to music today has really evolved since I made the first Equinoxe. It’s almost unconscious. We are listening to music louder and the range and audiogram of the human ear has changed in the last 20 or 30 years – so much bass and so little high frequencies. With Equinoxe Infinity I was very interested in creating this kind of very warm sound.”
Jarre had become electronic music’s first superstar by the time Equinoxe landed in November 1978. Its low-budget predecessor, Oxygene – powered by hit single Oxygene (Part IV) – had proved an international success after a difficult gestation period. Turned down by various record companies, all of whom failed to see the value of synth-based instrumental music, it was finally picked up by a small label, Les Disques Motors. They immediately understood its potential. It’s since sold in excess of 12 million copies and is the biggest-shifting French album in history.
“With Oxygene I just finished it and nobody was waiting for it,” Jarre recalls. “But with the massive success of that album, you suddenly have a lot of new friends and a lot of pressure with deadlines and so forth. So it was
“You’d hear something like Soft Machine and realise that it wasn’t that far away from what you were trying to do. That really gave me the desire to create a link
between those two worlds.”
a completely different challenge when it came time to do Equinoxe. I approached it as a kind of development of Oxygene, with more tracks and more equipment. It didn’t necessarily mean that it was going to be better, but in that case Equinoxe developed what I’d wanted to say with Oxygene – this kind of impressionist and epic approach of electronic music. Not just track after track, but actually a concept like a movie.”
Jarre’s intention with Equinoxe was to create music for the future. While studying under Pierre Schaeffer in the GRM (Group for Musical Research) in the late 60s, he’d begun devising a series of electronic pieces. Further studies, this time with Stockhausen in Cologne, deepened his interest in the possibilities of the synthesiser. Jarre became the first composer to bring electronica into Parisian opera society when he was commissioned for a ballet at The Palais Garnier in 1971. He swiftly found himself in demand to create scores for theatre, TV, soundtracks and festivals.
Equinoxe was his latest attempt to show that these different disciplines need not be mutually exclusive. “I’ve always been interested in, and excited by, creating this bridge between pop culture and the experimental world,” he says. “I was frustrated with the serious contemporary music world at that time, which was full of all these intellectual, dogmatic types of people who had a condescending attitude regarding pop culture. But people were finding things that actually existed in a very intuitive and
“I’ve always been interested in,
and excited by, creating this bridge between pop culture and
the experimental world.”
exciting way in rock or pop culture. I’m talking about progressive music or prog rock. I consider myself part of that tribe as well, because we were doing that, too. And we were able to do it in a very effective way. Looking back at the kind of experimentation that was going on when I studied electronic music, you’d hear something like Soft Machine and realise that it wasn’t that far away from what you were trying to do. That really gave me the desire to create a link between those two worlds. And then start pushing the boundaries. I always thought that melody was one of the most important parts of music, so I was interested in trying to mix a melodic approach with pure experimentation in sound. Even The Beatles had done that.”
Equinoxe was Jarre’s fourth album. Once again he called on artist Michel Granger, who had designed the memorable sleeve of Oxygene, to produce another striking image for the follow-up. Granger’s artwork, a sea of identical Watchmen staring directly into a theatre stage, alluded to Jarre’s unease with his own role as a performer. Not for nothing was the album originally going to be called ‘Stage Fright’.
“After I’d done Oxygene, with the image of the skull inside planet Earth, I was working on the next album and started talking to Michel Granger,” Jarre remembers. “He came up with this very strange painting and I loved it. He went with this idea for the cover and gave it the original title, but we suddenly realised that it could be much more than that. It could be more mysterious, with this situation of the audience watching us. These watchers might be looking at natural phenomenon, but they’re also linked with technology. So it was quite ahead of its time. It was also linked to this idea that I wanted to do a concert outdoors.”
Equinoxe didn’t sell quite as well as Oxygene, but it did big numbers nonetheless. Eight months after its release, Jarre finally put his plan into action and played his first ever show. The day and location – Bastille Day 1979 at the Place De La Concorde in Paris – were deliberately chosen to signify a major event. A million people turned up, earning him a berth in the Guinness Book Of Records. It was also broadcast live on French TV.
“It was prepared almost as an underground project, with very little promotion or PR,” explains Jarre. “Something I’d had in mind for a while was to experiment with giant projections onto buildings and to try to find a vocabulary for electronic music in performance, in the days when it was impossible to put computers or synthesisers on stage. Then it struck me that the visuals – all the lights, lasers, videos and techniques – should be part of the grammar of the show. I did that in Paris and had no idea that so many people would turn up. At sunset, I remember going on stage with my manager and one musician and seeing this dark shadow on the Champs-Élysées. I thought it was a sunset effect from the shadow of the buildings, but it was actually the audience. I couldn’t believe it. That was a real shock.”
Within two years, Jarre was playing to hundreds of thousands of people across five historic gigs in post-Mao China. In April 1986 he found himself back in the Guinness Book Of Records when his show in downtown Houston attracted what was then the biggest audience for an outdoor rock concert. The setlist, as with the Bastille Day event, was largely taken up with selections from Oxygene and Equinoxe.
Looking back on the height of his megastardom, Jarre says, “It was really like this 80s syndrome of crazy rock star life, this very extreme approach where everything was possible. I was doing big shows and big concerts and doing all this mad touring. It was quite fun that it should happen with electronic music, because it was the kind of thing you would normally only see in rock.”
Equinoxe Infinity was released on the 40th anniversary of Equinoxe. Back in 1978, technology was gaining pace, albeit at a rhythm that almost seems quaint in hindsight. Mainframe computers could hold up to 4GB of virtual memory (hundreds of times bigger than before), the ultra-basic WordStar became the first popular word processing system and President Jimmy Carter installed a computer in the White House for the first time.
“We had this appetite for the future in a kind of innocent way when we thought about the year
2000 and so on,” Jarre recalls of the late 70s. “That changed entirely at the beginning of this century, but now I think we’re regaining our appetite for creating a vision of the future, with Tesla, Elon Musk and SpaceX and movies like Interstellar, Gravity and Ghost In The Shell. There suddenly seems to be this greed for shaping the future with artificial intelligence. I think Equinoxe Infinity is linked to this phenomenon, to recreate an audiovisual link to the time I made the first Equinoxe. I’m convinced that we will only be able to survive in the 21st century if we can evolve in good faith with the environment, nature and new technology. That’s what I tried to evoke through this new album.”
Jarre also reveals that he’s already working on another new project for 2019, though he’s not in any position to divulge details. Given that Equinoxe Infinity, Oxygene 3 and his two star-studded projects under the Electronica banner (The Time Machine and The Heart Of Noise) have arrived within the space of just four years, the 70-year-old is currently in a prolific run of form.
“A few years ago I was going through quite a dark moment,” he explains of this late-career surge. “I lost both of my parents, then my publisher, and I was going through quite a painful divorce [he and French actress
Anne Parillaud separated in November 2010]. It was really very difficult for me to go into the studio to do anything. Then I did the first Electronica album by meeting up with people and having a new team around me. It became a massive project and by going into the studio every day it gave me a training where I was able to go straight into Oxygene 3 and Equinoxe Infinity, as well as touring at the same time. In life, you have to take advantage of this kind of prolific phase. I’m sure the public will soon be sick of me!”
Equinoxe Infinity is out now via Columbia. See www.jeanmicheljarre.com for more information.