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Jean Michel Jarre – Equinoxe IV (1981) [video]

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Re: Jean Michel Jarre – Equinoxe IV (1981) [video]

#51

Post by T-A »

secure wrote: post #22

Fans of Jean-Michel Jarre often also like: Tangerine Dream (DE): My favorite recordings are Logos and Poland (both live recordings), but there’s many other great ones, e.g. Force Majeure, Phaedra, Quinoa, … Redshift (UK): Love almost every single album they made. My all-time favorites are Redshift Wild 3, Redshift Wild 2, and Wild (all live recordings). Peter Baumann (DE): I particularly like the first few tracks of…

From roughly the same era as Jean-Michel Jarre's heyday, there is the little known Dutch group Peru (aka Nova):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_(Dutch_band)

https://www.discogs.com/artist/98910-Peru

I particularly liked their album "Constellations".

Different in style but hot on the heels of Oxygene, there was the French group Droids, which scored a Star Wars-inspired hit in Europe with "The Force", built on it with the album "Star Peace" and then left the planet:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dro%C3%AFds

https://www.discogs.com/Droids-Star-Peace/master/36264

A modern contender is Stellardrone, from Lithuania:

https://stellardrone.bandcamp.com/

Re: Jean Michel Jarre – Equinoxe IV (1981) [video]

#52

Post by eternalban »

I used to listen non-stop to this album in college, late 80s. Listening to it after all these years, it is still exciting but I don't think JMJ is going to age well. This album with its Chinese street sounds and all the mythology around the trip was heady and amplified the psychological impact. But it also sounds a bit plastic, too much mascara, if you will. I couldn't loop listen this again. Once in a while, sure.

In contrast, I think Kraftwerk is timeless. Imagine this with the same staging as the China concert: https://youtu.be/NL3NqfFTec8?t=25m5s

Re: Jean Michel Jarre – Equinoxe IV (1981) [video]

#53

Post by ivanzhao »

secure wrote: post #22

Fans of Jean-Michel Jarre often also like: Tangerine Dream (DE): My favorite recordings are Logos and Poland (both live recordings), but there’s many other great ones, e.g. Force Majeure, Phaedra, Quinoa, … Redshift (UK): Love almost every single album they made. My all-time favorites are Redshift Wild 3, Redshift Wild 2, and Wild (all live recordings). Peter Baumann (DE): I particularly like the first few tracks of…

Klaus Schulze, Ashra, Cluster, Harmonia...

On the more pop side, there's the whole genre of "minimal wave" of the early 80s. I am building a playlist: https://open.spotify.com/user/ivzhao/playlist/1ti0pgDyCrf1FT... Many of them reissued on vinyl by http://minimalwave.com/

Or trace who Brian Eno have worked with always help too.

Re: Jean Michel Jarre – Equinoxe IV (1981) [video]

#54

Post by teh_klev »

coldtea wrote: post #15
droithomme wrote: post #9

This was the first western pop music concert in China. Wham claims their 1985 concert was the first, that is not correct as this predated it by 4 years. Also, Jarre was invited by the Chinese government to play, unlike Wham he did not have his publicists petitioning for it. He had gone over to a university there to meet students and show them synthesizer technology. He even left some schematics so they could build th…

> This was the first western pop music concert in China. Wham claims their 1985 concert was the first, that is not correct as this predated it by 4 years. Well, Jarre is not exactly pop music though. Not compared to Wham!

Well, Oxygene reached number two in the UK album charts and Oxygene IV was a hit single reaching number 4 in the UK singles charts. Those were popular music charts, and back then there was a much wider variety of genres of music occupying the top 40's, especially in the UK. I was ~11 years old and for a while you couldn't avoid Jarre on the radio and Top of The Pops.

Re: Jean Michel Jarre – Equinoxe IV (1981) [video]

#55

Post by Lasher »

metricodus wrote: post #29

Jean Michel Jarre - Rendez-Vous Houston (VHS), 1986 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iVQ2o-PI9M Fantastic collection of TV sound bites begins at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iVQ2o-PI9M&t=57 This love of some french artist in Houston felt odd when I last rewatched this, about ten years ago. Loved the enthusiasm and openness shown in this video.

This is fantastic, thanks for posting it. I'd forgotten about the Rendezvous Houston concert. The studio version of Rendezvous was also my first ever CD.

Re: Jean Michel Jarre – Equinoxe IV (1981) [video]

#56

Post by rusanu »

deng wrote: post #49
wazoox wrote: post #6

For the electronic music geeks, JMJ presents the gear he used to make this album: https://youtu.be/ctOhwRGdVvo About the "matrisequencer" and "digisequencer": the matrisequencer was conceived and built by Michel Geiss, an engineer who worked with Jarre for more than 20 years, from discreet components. It was horribly complex and expensive. In the early 90s, Geiss rebuilt it anew as the "digisequencer", with a tactile…

Wow. What I never really understood is: how did those people finance the gear? OK, in '81 JMJ was already famous, and for the original Oxygene in '76 he probably only had a fraction of the stuff you see in this video, but still: those machines were crazy expensive. Even one of them would have put most musicians in debt.

He is the son of Maurice Jarre [1], and I heard before how this helped him financially quite a bit.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Jarre

Re: Jean Michel Jarre – Equinoxe IV (1981) [video]

#57

Post by crispyambulance »

Much of the equipment consists of analog modular synths.

If that intrigues you, definitely check out the recent documentary on the topic "I Dream of Wires" (http://www.idreamofwires.org/). It is on Netflix streaming, but there's also an extended version that is a bit more geeky. The documentary does a great job of covering synthesizers from the Moog days to the present revival of analog synths. Interesting stuff.

Re: Jean Michel Jarre – Equinoxe IV (1981) [video]

#58

Post by celias »

metricodus wrote: post #29

Jean Michel Jarre - Rendez-Vous Houston (VHS), 1986 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iVQ2o-PI9M Fantastic collection of TV sound bites begins at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iVQ2o-PI9M&t=57 This love of some french artist in Houston felt odd when I last rewatched this, about ten years ago. Loved the enthusiasm and openness shown in this video.

The last song on the Rendez-Vous album, Dernier Rendez-vous (Ron's Piece), has an interesting backstory -

"The last track on the album was originally scheduled to include a saxophone part recorded by astronaut Ron McNair on the Space Shuttle Challenger, making it the first piece of music to be recorded in space, but on 28 January 1986, 73 seconds after lift-off, the shuttle disintegrated and the entire Challenger crew were killed. The track was dedicated to McNair and the other astronauts on board Challenger.[3] On the album the saxophone part is played by saxophonist Pierre Gossez." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendez-Vous_(Jean-Michel_Jarre...

Re: Jean Michel Jarre – Equinoxe IV (1981) [video]

#59

Post by ultrasandwich »

secure wrote: post #22

Fans of Jean-Michel Jarre often also like: Tangerine Dream (DE): My favorite recordings are Logos and Poland (both live recordings), but there’s many other great ones, e.g. Force Majeure, Phaedra, Quinoa, … Redshift (UK): Love almost every single album they made. My all-time favorites are Redshift Wild 3, Redshift Wild 2, and Wild (all live recordings). Peter Baumann (DE): I particularly like the first few tracks of…

Check out Laurie Spiegel too, who worked at Bell Labs in the '70s and '80s I think. She's absolutely brilliant. And fun fact, she composed music that also ended up on the Voyager spacecraft in 1977. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NChqEEz31eE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzOJtZYsGSA

Re: Jean Michel Jarre – Equinoxe IV (1981) [video]

#60

Post by raverbashing »

pmoriarty wrote: post #39
raverbashing wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And today all of this fits inside a computer. Amazing

Similar music can be made purely by using computers, but what's inside computers today is digital, while all this gear was analog. Also, the physical interface of all those synths can not yet be reproduced inside a computer, that's still dependent on outboard gear or simulations such as graphical buttons/sliders, etc. There's been a huge resurgence of modular synthesizers and analog gear in the last decade or so, as…

You can simulate the analog circuits with good precision on a computer.

However, how you interface with them might not be comparable to turning knobs on an actual circuit

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