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. To keep reading, we recommend our first Jean-Michel Jarre interview, which deals mainly with the concepts behind his Oxymore album. And our second 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]



We spoke about the rawness of Oxymore in an earlier part of our interview. Is that a reference to the rawness of the music of the originators – of Pierre Henry and Pierre Schaeffer?

Yes, I think it's the rawness of the kind of big bang of electronic music for me, the kind of maelstrom of noise and sounds from which people such as Pierre Henry built a new system of composition. In my opinion, it is a major contribution to the way we are making music these days. I mean, we are all integrating sound effects in our music, whether you're from the hip hop scene, from rock and pop or from electro and techno. We're all influenced by this idea of creating oxymorons - mixing the sound of white noise with the sound of a locomotive with with a bass drum …

Stockhausen's influence was equally important. His approach was to work with oscillators, with electronic waveforms - more than  musique concrète. This is why I think that if you want to talk about the origin of electronic music, you have to acknowledge that it is really from continental Europe, from Germany and France.

Maybe we shouldn't forget Britain, because, at least for me,  that influence was also very strong. Think of psychedelic groups like the early Pink Floyd. Some of their experimental passages could easily have come from one of the  leading sound labs we are talking about.  

Absolutely and I wouldn't want to remove it. But it was 20 or 30 years later. If you look at continental Europe, you can go back to Luigi Russolo in 1910 and his “The art of noises”. I truly, truly believe that electronic music is coming from our heritage of classical music. It is not originally a pop format. You can draw a line from these long instrumental tracks to classical music.

I have a lot of respect for England, and for their arts. But we cannot compare the number of classical composers in the UK to that in Germany, or in France. It's not the same story.

You've spoken admiringly of this tradition and the exciting potentials that  musique concrète offered. And for a while, you, too, worked with tape machines alongside Henry and Schaeffer. So why did you ultimately move from the tape machine to Stockhausen's side – the world of the synthesiser? Why did that other technology seem more appropriate for what you wanted to express?

Actually, I don't think that I left the world of  musique concrète. I think what you're describing with Pierre Henry is one side: The roots of sampling and recording sounds with a microphone. And on the other side you have the electronic approach of dealing with oscillators and filters. So that was the world of synthesisers. I always thought that electronic music, the way I see it, was resting on both these pillars, not just one.

And there was something else. You mentioned Pink Floyd and early prog rock. I was a bit frustrated about the Groupe de Recherche Musicales (GRM) in the sense that these guys had a very intellectual approach towards music. Ultimately, they were making the same mistakes as some people from the establishment of classical music - judging what was coming from pop culture ... not even rejecting it, but just outright ignoring it.

While, if you were truly listening to the first Pink Floyd albums or Soft Machine, they were dealing with the same kind of principles and textures, creating a journey from sounds. I wanted to create a link between experimentation and pop.

I always thought that melodies were at the heart of music. And I still remember how, in those days, Iannis Xenakis came to a masterclass at the GRM and said something quite unexpected: That all emotions in music are suspect. When you are at that stage of the debate, it becomes a kind of hysterical intellectual statement. This purely experimental, almost scientific approach seemed to me quite, quite far away from what I wanted to express as a musician.

You did, however, eventually record something at the GRM: A 7inch single called “La Cage / Erosmachine”. On the one hand, these pieces have something of the experimental avant garde of that time about them. But then you put this freaked out drumming on top of it, which completely pulls it into a different direction. It almost feels like a statement of defiance.

It was exactly that! Alhough it was released later, I'd made the music when I was studying at the GRM. All the synth sequences came from the studio. But the thing is that we hardly had any time there. Students did not have the right to go there, the studio was handled by the headquarters of the Groupe de Recherche. So we made a copy of the key to still be able to go inside at night, and to use the first sequencers and electronic sounds.

I still remember that we were spending entire nights there to record as many sounds as we could on tapes, to get tapes full of sequences. “La Cage” was done entirely like this. And yes, it was a statement of defiance, as you said, to add some drums in a kind of akward way.

I did all of this with a roto tom, you know, a small percussion and by moving the pitch. I was totally not a drummer, so it was quite imperfect. And this was quite in sync with this rawness of the moment we spoke about.

So the GRM eventually ended up with its own set of rules, just as Schaeffer had always wanted.  The opening bars of Oxymore start with  a recording of Pierre Henry explaining his rules. But then you gradually manipulate the recording. And just when he is about to reveal the secret, he disappears.  

Thank you for mentioning that, very few people got that moment. I became quite good friends with Pierre Henry's widow and she said:

“You know, Pierre, wherever he is, should be very happy for the respect brought to his work. But  he should also be happy for betraying him enough.”

That's the idea behind that opening: There he is, talking in a rather pompous way about the rules while he spent his entire lifetime breaking the rules. For Oxymore I thought it was important to return to that rule-breaking spirit. I do believe that would have made him very happy indeed.