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

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

#31

Post by dfox »

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.

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 found this out very fast and scrapped the whole project.

For synthesizer control, people probably aren't that dependent on using it without looking, but the part of quickly finding what you want to tweak still stands.

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

#32

Post by lobster_johnson »

lazyjones wrote: post #5

Not sure what this is doing here, presumably because of the electronic devices on his stage? Sure, he was an early adopter of sampling technology, but he probably also invented the "turning knobs on the DJ equipment just for show" malpractice and most certainly built up huge fake device installations on stage.

What he's turning knobs on are modular synths. The knob is how you make sound. [1] A lot of the background loops are of course already sequenced, but Jarre and his team definitely played the music live.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBEZF2pAbMg

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

#33

Post by reitanqild »

hk__2 wrote: post #19
reitanqild wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure either but greatly appreciated. So please don't flag.

HN Guidelines: > What to Submit > On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Exactly my point, - I find it interesting.

Can't point out exactly why though.

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

#34

Post by lomnakkus »

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

... and almost all of it is done and/or coordinated in a CPU which is smaller than a stamp and consumes about the same power as a light bulb. It's a bit dated now, but I still find the video "Indistinguishable from Magic"[1] to be quite amazing.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGFhc8R_uO4

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

#35

Post by henrik_w »

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…

I listened a lot to Tangerine Dream in the 1980s. Poland is my favorite (they've made tons of records). I guess you already now about Klaus Schultze and Edgar Froese...

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

#36

Post by a3n »

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.

Total guess, I've never seen one of these things in person, but: guessing that the knobs have some logical relationship to each other, like knobs in one row share a subject, and moving to a knob left or right changes the same thing, but more in one way than another way.

Also, one reason I still like physical books is that when I'm looking for something that I've read before, I know it's on a left or right page, and whether it's top, middle or bottom. There's probably a mind theory that explains that, and knob location is probably related. Guess.

Maybe this also has something to do with it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprioception

But to me it's all just knobs.

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

#37

Post by mturmon »

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…

Ulrich Schnauss has several works much in the style of TD - moody, romantic, storytelling. Try "A strangely isolated place."

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

#38

Post by nicoboo »

By the way, Jean Michel Jarre just played a concert in Israël at the Dead Sea against difficult weather conditions.

It was done to promote an ecological message as effect of global warming can be seen in this specific area, see more info about his show on the official website.

https://www.jmj-israel.co.il/en/index.html

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

#39

Post by pmoriarty »

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

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 people appreciate their advantages over trying to do everything on a computer.

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

#40

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]
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