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

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

#71

Post by jacquesm »

rusanu wrote: post #56
deng wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That says that Maurice moved to America leaving Jean-Michel with his mom when he was five years old.

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

#72

Post by jacquesm »

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…

Kraftwerk

Vangelis

Kitaro

Klaus Doldinger (esp. Constellation)

If you can't find something let me know.

Enjoy!

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

#73

Post by jacquesm »

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, thank you for posting that video, incredible to see all that old gear still in perfect working condition, wired up and ready to go.

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

#74

Post by jacquesm »

zerothlaw wrote: post #48
lucio wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My order was Vangelis, then JMC, then The Alan Parsons P. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Q00HQwO2Sg

Same progression for me with a smattering of Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream, then branching to Jean Luc Ponty - I heard Pulstar on Albedo 0.39 and was hooked.

If you like Jean-Luc Ponty check out Alan Holdsworth (also played with Ponty on a number of tracks), Pat Metheny, Paul Winter, Leomoon, Return to Forever, John Abercrombie.

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

#75

Post by jacquesm »

chris_st wrote: post #23
a3n wrote: post #4

That's a lot of knobs. Knobs are the ultimate general purpose machine. They can make music, or macaroni. Knobs can also make knobs, which accelerates our ability to make knobs. Artificial dexterity running on cheap knobs will one day force us to deal with a world without work. Sounds great too.

Your comment is hilarious, but as I deal with UIs a lot, the sheer complexity of all those knobs kind of astounds me that he can deal with it all, and in real time to make music. Wow. I've loved his music since the late 70's, it's great to hear it again.

I far prefer this setup compared to memorizing some 5 level deep menu structure accessible through a scroll wheel and two or three selector buttons. Humans are pretty good at remembering spatial arrangements.

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

#77

Post by jwdunne »

jacquesm wrote: post #74
zerothlaw wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same progression for me with a smattering of Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream, then branching to Jean Luc Ponty - I heard Pulstar on Albedo 0.39 and was hooked.

If you like Jean-Luc Ponty check out Alan Holdsworth (also played with Ponty on a number of tracks), Pat Metheny, Paul Winter, Leomoon, Return to Forever, John Abercrombie.

Thank you and the parent. GP's suggestions were pretty much the road I was on but clearly lost my way. Think there's more than enough here for a nice work commute playlist :)

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

#78

Post by emersonrsantos »

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 was backed by French government after the launch of its first album.

France, Italy, UK are places that values and market local culture very agressively since...who knows, centuries?

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

#79

Post by chris_st »

dfox wrote: post #31
chris_st wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment is hilarious, but as I deal with UIs a lot, the sheer complexity of all those knobs kind of astounds me that he can deal with it all, and in real time to make music. Wow. I've loved his music since the late 70's, it's great to hear it again.

Loads of physical knobs is the most intuitive UI for this kind of thing. You can find the control you want to tweak by combination of it's position and touch very fast and in many cases without purposefully looking at the thing. When we tried to build touch based mixing/lighting console (large capacitive touch panels were significantly cheaper than loads of physical knobs and motorized faders even ~5 years ago) we fo…

> You can find the control you want to tweak by combination of it's position and touch very fast and in many cases without purposefully looking at the thing.

I really wish car makers would rediscover this fact.

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

#80

Post by bborud »

raverbashing wrote: post #16
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…

And today all of this fits inside a computer. Amazing

Kind of. As others have mentioned, the way you play an instrument is pretty important. It isn't hard to see the difference between playing a real harp and playing its software analog (no pun intended) on a keyboard. It may be a bit harder to understand how an actual modular synth is different if you have never spent any time playing one.

Of course, the software based synths are more practical and easy to deal with since you can automate everything easily, things are reliable, never go out of tune and you can fit an obscene amount of sound-generation into a small device. Not to mention that your DAW will give you a lot more flexibility than those old monster mixing desks gave you.

I also think the limitations are important. While Jarre's setup from way back when may have looked impressive, it is still extremely limited compared to what even amateurs have available to them today. So he had to make everything count.

(If you want an interesting counterpoint: Deadmau5 mostly makes music by editing MIDI on a computer -- still, he has 2-3 huge modular analog synths. Hans Zimmer actually plays keyboards and mostly composes orchestral works, but he still uses modulars from time to time)

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