Jean-Michel Jarre
Everything we have written about Jean-Michel Jarre: the listening guide, then each record in release order.
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Jean-Michel Jarre: where to start
A first album made on a second-hand organ in a Paris kitchen, and the concerts that filled city squares. Five records, in order.
Oxygène
An album that sold eighteen million copies got some of its beat from two rhythm-box buttons held down with sticky tape. Jarre's kitchen record from Paris.
Équinoxe
Jarre wanted to throw out a cassette sketch. Michel Geiss talked him out of it, and it became Part 7. A 1978 record that follows one day from waking to sleep.
Les Chants Magnétiques
A French pun that loses half of itself in English. The 1981 record where a Fairlight sampled trains and cogwheels, and the door it opened into China.
Zoolook
In 1984 Jean-Michel Jarre loaded speech and song in 25 languages into his samplers and played them as instruments. Words picked for their sound, Laurie Anderson asked to sing like an alien, and a band gathered in New York.
Rendez-Vous: the saxophone Jarre meant to send into orbit
Ron McNair was to play its last track on saxophone aboard Challenger. After 28 January 1986 the album was dedicated to him and his crew.
Revolutions: Jarre's 1988, and two nights on a London dock
Jean-Michel Jarre's 1988 album Revolutions and the Destination Docklands concerts at London's Royal Victoria Dock that October. Hank Marvin's guitar, a lawsuit over a Turkish flute, and two nights of wind and rain.