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. The most recent release connected to that album is Brian Eno's “extension” of the track “Epica”.

[Read our Brian Eno interview]

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 one about the originators of electronic music and his time at the GRM.

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]


Oxymore, probably deals with sound more openly than any of your previous albums. And I wanted to start with a questions that is somewhat influenced by my German philosophical nature … apologies for that in advance.

I love German philosophy, so do go on.

Music is vibration in the air, captured by our ear drums. From your perspective as a creator and listener, do you have an explanation how it able to transmit such diverse and potentially deep messages?

I think it's more linked to physics than philosophy, actually.

As we know, we can reduce all emotions to a complex equation. So what is hitting your eyes or hitting your ears and which is then relayed to your brain is creating not only a physical reaction, but emotions as well. Which is quite a mystery.

To me, what's interesting about this is that what you are saying implies that art is made of illusion. It is about how to cheat with your brain. This is exactly what any artist is doing. In painting, it's an optical illusion. In music, it's an acoustic illusion. In literature, a traditional book, for me, is the first example of a Virtual Reality object.

How so?

Because you are teleporting yourself into the story, imagining some characters. It's all a matter of trying to create a sense of confusion, a bundle of emotions that will affect you one way or another.

True. And then there's this phenomenon that the music exists only in the brain of the spectator. So everyone present at the performance or the event yesterday went away from it with a completely different response - even though we're sharing the exact same time and space for listening to it.

What you're saying is the best justification to listen to this piece of music in a movie theatre and asking people to close their eyes. Because then Oxymore can become the instant soundtrack of the movie or the story that everybody has in mind. And it is going to be a specific story or specific scenario for each individual listener.

Do you have any kind of visual sensations when you listen to sound yourself?

It's strange. I don't have these with my own music. But with music by other artists, I do have graphic connections sometimes - abstract images.

Why do you think this is?

First of all, I started out both with painting and music and I wasn't sure which of the two to choose.

I was really involved in abstract painting. In musique concrete, you're dealing with textures and sounds just like abstract painting is dealing with textures - with “material” as we say in French. Actually, abstract painting should really be called concrete painting, because it's actually not abstract. It's really organic. I mean, Jackson Pollock is very concrete, he is not abstract at all for me.

So to answer to your question then, my visual connection with music is most of the time linked to this sense of painting, to Soulages, or Pollock, or even Picasso.

Why don't you see Pollock as abstract? That's interesting.

For me, musique concrete is very organic, very sensual. And we can say the same about the paintings of Dubufe or Pollock. Or Soulages, who is actually dealing with really concrete elements.

In my opinion, contrary, the reproduction of a landscape by Renoir, is very abstract. It's just an illusion, a fake vision of reality. Nothing concrete about that. Whereas, with a Jackson Pollock painting or something by Hartung, where you're putting hands into the painting, just dealing with textures and paint directly with your hands, that's something very organic, almost sexual.

It's not two dimensional.

Exactly, exactly. And in the case of Pollock, it is also a kind of art that's close to synaesthesia. Which is close to electro acoustic music, which was surely influenced by surrealism, by Marcel Duchamps and the art of this period. It's kind of an apology of Oxymoron.

Do you personally feel as though writing a piece of music is similar to something like making a great cup of coffee?

Yes, I totally agree with this. I was born in Lyon, one of the capitals of food. And I always thought that electro acoustic music, electronic music, is exactly like cooking: cooking frequencies, cooking waveforms, in a very tactile way.

In Italy you'll find a ceremonial approach towards preparing espresso, or take the ceremony of tea in Japan. I see a similarity to a musician's routine of going back to your instrument day after day. It will never be perfect, just like the tea ceremony will never be perfect. You repeat the same movements all your life, trying to get as close as possible to a state of perfection that will you will never achieve.

And I am absolutely convinced that for an artist, it is the same. You have one thing to say in your life, and you're just doing variations of yourself. It's what Fellini meant when he said that he always made the same movie. It's the same with the Beatles, Tarantino or Kubrick, with Pink Floyd. The reason why you keep doing these variations of yourself for as long as your body is carrying you, is is because you are obsessed by this kind of mirage of perfection. It's your own obsession with trying to create perfection in your work.

Why do you call it a mirage?

Because maybe this perfection is actually imperfect in itself. I feel it's like happiness in life. Happiness doesn't exist, you just have brief moments of happiness. And the best you can achieve as an artist, likewise, are very short moments of perfection. And if you succeed, even occasionally, then it's worthwhile to live this addiction.