Showing posts with label Jean-Michel Jarre. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jean-Michel Jarre. Show all posts

Thursday, March 17, 2016

February/March Roundup: Spring Cleaning

Where did February go? It seemed like just yesterday that I was pledging to get caught up on my blog and maintain it consistently. Now look where we are. A month and a half has gone by and despite best intentions, I haven’t posted a word. It’s not because nothing has happened – in fact, quite the contrary! Life has been astoundingly complex since that last post in January, and many episodes have attached themselves to music both new and old:

I took my band to Pre-UIL concert and sightreading contest with less than desirable results. I went on leave and became the father of two. My MS band subsequently went to UIL in my absence and got greatly improved marks. I’ve wrestled with lack of sleep and keeping my eldest entertained. I played a great gig with Ethnos. Keith Emerson died. Previously mentioned eldest daughter broke her collarbone in a freak chair-spinning accident. Plus, there’s that Star Wars soundtrack project I have been mapping out since last Fall.

It’s no wonder that I have felt overwhelmed with documenting all that. Seriously, any free time I have had has been spent fighting to stay awake while I watch samurai movies and John Oliver clips. I am going to try to make a push in the coming days, however, to try to get caught up. For the time being, however, here’s a roundup of the post-birthday stuff that has passed through the player in the past month and a half:



ToeHear You: Hear You is significantly more mellow and jazzy than I have heard previously from Toe. It retains the band’s signature mathy undercurrents, though.

John Williams – The Force Awakens OST: The recording quality and performances on The Force Awakens breathes new life into familiar themes. There is also some standout new material, as well.

RiversideLove, Fear, and the Time Machine: Despite identifying as a prog rock fan and liking a broad range of music within the genre, I also have a myopic aspect that is pretty critical of contemporary prog. Riverside has evolved into a band that balances all of the variables in just the right way for my tastes.

Jean-Michel JarreEquinoxe:  Jarre was around a lot when I was growing up, and I could have sworn that somewhere along the line I got acquainted with Equinoxe. When I recently got ahold of a used copy, however, it seemed gloriously unfamiliar and quite captivating.

Esperanza SpaldingEmily’s D+Evolution: It’s comforting to know that albums like this are still being made. Spalding’s experimental side recalls the heyday of 70s jazz, rock, and prog crossovers and brings it into startling relevancy.

MuteMathVitals: I have come to accept that none of MuteMath’s releases will ever touch me like their self-titled debut did. Vitals, however, is a bit of a departure and as such, it favorably resists comparison to that excellent album.

Field Music Commontime: With several album titles that harbor musical double meanings, it’s clear that Field Music wears their musicianship on their sleeve. The potential for pretentiousness is high if they were unable to back it up, but their incredible musical skills always stand in service to their amazing songs and compositions.

Pink FloydSaucerful of Secrets: The final Pink Floyd studio album that has been missing in my collection finally finds its way in. It’s a necessary document of the group at its most unstable as they headed away from Barrett’s psychedelic pop towards the cerebral soundscapes Pink Floyd would later perfect.

Sunday, October 20, 2013

S U R V I V E: Staring Down an Invasion in Tuscon

My friend The Best Man and I have been promising each other that we would eventually crack the underground Austin synth scene. He recently discovered a band called S U R V I V E but alas, their album was only available in sold- out limited edition vinyl and downloadable MP3. As much as I value the suggestions of friends, this limitation would have probably kept them out of rotation permanently.

Last weekend, however, in a direct attempt to stare down my remaining apprehensions about heavy lifting, I attended a CrossFit Olympic Lifting Instructors Course in Tuscon, Arizona. This was to be a quick solo trip, so any music I planned to bring for the plane ride and layovers would have to be in soft format. It seemed like an opportunity to give S U R V I V E a shot.



This ended up being a smart move. While I still admit that I would like to see the album cover professionally printed and mounted in a jewel case, the content of the album is shady and immersive in a way that can best be delivered through earphones. I played S U R V I V E through my phone when I was walking around Tuscon, which ended up being quite a bit more than I had initially planned. Once I got a feel for the area between my hotel and CrossFit Works, I found that I preferred a 30 minute walk surrounded by distant mountains and an epic alien invasion soundtrack to an 8 minute (and $10) drive with an awkward Russian cabbie.



S U R V I V E takes more than one page from Jean Micheal Jarre’s early playbook, particularly the ethereal and dynamic Equinoxe, Oxygene, and Les Chantes Magetiques trilogy. Jarre was playful and exploratory on these synth masterpieces. In contrast, S U R V I V E conjures a dark, ominous, and almost gothic tone using the gloomy synth sounds of late 80s Depeche Mode. While other electronic projects like the F*ck Buttons might use more contemporary technology to produce a broader variety of sounds, S U R V I V E does a whole lot more musically with much less.



S U R V I V E is one of several local synth bands that orbit around the Austin vintage synth shop Switched On, and they are so underground that they almost don’t exist. There are a few reviews of their sporadic live shows that indicate that their performances are epic. Aside from these, some links that lead to album download, and an intermittently updated Facebook page, there is very little about S U R V I V E online. I can barely figure out if or when they are playing next, but I would be interested in seeing them live.

From what I have seen, however, they seem to have some sort of following in Germany. While that’s not too surprising, considering the history of synth music in what is Kraftwerk’s homeland, I have never had to do a Euros conversion to purchase an album from a local band before.

Not too long ago, I became a bit snobby about listening only to local music, because I was convinced that it held the potential to stand outside of the agenda of the record industry. “Independent music” is, paradoxically, more mainstream now, and has its own political agenda that musicians have to navigate. S U R V I V E is one of those bands that purposefully fly under the radar, doing something not for fortune or fame, but because they have a genuine love for what they do. They are clearly passionate about the untapped potentials of traditional analog synthesizers and their current relevance, and their adoration of these instruments infuses their music with conviction.

Thursday, May 31, 2012

"Before the Dawn Heals Us:" A Rift Amid Real and Imagined

I was blown away by the songs I knew at M83’s recent concert, but there was also a lot of unfamiliar material that caught my attention. I walked away with a new appreciation for Saturdays=Youth and Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming, as well as an intense and perhaps financially dangerous curiosity about M83’s back catalog. The next day, I took a stack of unwanted CDs to Waterloo and traded them in for Before the Dawn Heals Us. This has turned out to be a good move, because it sows seeds that come to fruition in M83’s current work.

I'd like to elaborate on some of my previous observations about the ways that disparate influences uniquely converge in M83's music.  Especially after getting to know Before the Dawn Heals Us, I think that Jean-Michel Jarre's ubiquitous influence on French synthesizer music is a factor. Despite his sometimes melodramatic stage presence, he did have a unique gift for thematic, ethereal composition that harnessed the limits of 70s synthesizer technology. He had his moments of intensity, but Jarre’s style was mostly ambient, which, at the time, defied categorization.

When you turn the volume up on ethereal, however, it evolves into the cosmic, which aptly describes the splendor of Before the Dawn Heals Us.  I think that My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless, an album that just recently clicked for me, is the inspiration for this radiating intensity.  Before the Dawn Heals Us is a similarly beautiful work of sonic sculpture, but, in addition to its predecessor’s use of detuned and distorted guitars, it’s also carved from massive walls of organ and synths.



Before the Dawn Heals Us isn't really music to dance to, and it’s not music to sing along with, but it is music to take refuge in. This “synth-gaze” approach heads straight for that liminal space between the real and the imagined, where the listener can be empowered by a romanticized notion of the world, and also be justifiably disappointed and perhaps angry when the world doesn’t fit that ideal. This dissonance makes Before the Dawn Heals Us seem intensely personal, allowing it to translate particularly well to the inherently sullen isolation of IPod culture.



In retrospect, I’m sure fans of Before the Dawn Heals Us had difficulty accepting Saturdays=Youth. It is overall less concerned with songwriting and 80s nostalgia than its immediate successor. Its immense grandeur, however, lays the groundwork for Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming, and in some ways it might even be more successful as a unified listening experience. It certainly provides perspective on a larger arc in M83’s creative path. Coupled with the concert, Before the Dawn Heals Us has clinched the deal on one issue - M83’s creativity and vision has moved them up in ranks amongst my all-time favorite groups, which, at this stage in the game, is a difficult echelon to break into.

Saturday, May 26, 2012

Kraftwerk, Robots, and Conformity

Although I have known about Kraftwerk for decades, I finally began to really check them out earlier this year. After recently watching a BBC documentary on British synth-pop, I was beset by a craving for more of their stuff. My budget for CD purchases, however, was pretty tight at the time. Very rarely do I trade in CDs, but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.

The next disc on my list was Trans-Europe Express, but after I had already done the deed I went to the racks to find that the single copy that Waterloo had in stock had sold, so I picked up Man-Machine instead. As I was checking out, a gentleman in the line behind me, who had  a stack of vinyl under his right arm, commented on the influence of Kraftwerk and of Man-Machine in particular.  Encouraging!

Kraftwerk’s exploration of new music technologies made them innovators within the emerging electronic music scene in Europe, but they were not working in a vacuum. Kraftwerk had several contemporaries, not the least of which was French synthesist Jean-Michel Jarre, whose fantastic sci-fi tinged soundscapes have been relatively marginalized by history. Kraftwerk, conversely, were inspired by the very real surroundings of post World War II Europe, and because they were grounded in the real, they became one of Germany's leading cultural exports, laying the foundation for a whole genre of music to come.

I immediately liked Man Machine, but the video for The Robots profoundly affected my perception of the album as a whole. As they pantomime the mechanized nature of their own music, their descriptively impressionistic approach spills beyond music into performance art. The song is not really for dancing, and I don’t think that the listener expected to sing along with the thick German accents buried in its vocoder-altered and reversed lyrics. Instead, like the entirety of Man-Machine, The Robots is a futuristic commentary on the present that explores some of the possible street- level outcomes of technology.



A counterculture of working class post-punks armed with Moog synthesizers found a kindred spirit with Kraftwerk when they began to appear on British soul in the mid 70s. Like Kraftwerk, they weren't interested so much as the synth as the replacement for the symphony, but were instead exploring the potentials of emerging synthesizer technology on its own terms to describe their condition. The difference was that they successfully shaped it into a commercially accessible form.

Cars by Gary Numan on Grooveshark

At least in comparison to Autobahn, Man-Machine is a movement toward a more commercially viable Kraftwerk. It’s difficult to discern if songs like The Model are an intentional effort to capitalize on the commercial success of synth pop or an ironic extension of the statement that Man-Machine is making about conformity. In either case, this song made a lasting impression on the synth-pop scene.



Although Man Machine is still relevant today, I’m not sure that I, as a 21st century American, can ever really understand the complex sociocultural environment in which it was situated. As post-war Germans, Kraftwerk was part of a generation that was struggling to make amends for the transgressions of generations past while doggedly pursuing a unique and globally acceptable cultural identity. From this perspective,Man-Machine takes on a much more complex and, I think, satisfying meaning about the cultural tone in Europe during the late 70s.

Sunday, February 27, 2011

Recording Ambience: Jarre's "Oxygene" Thirty Years Later

I am not the most devout fan of Jean-Michael Jarre, but I know his work.  I used to hitch a ride to school with a guy who would listen to “Magnetic Fields” and “Oxygene” regularly and my dad was also a fan.  When the CD player showed up in our house in the mid-80s, “Rendez-vous” was one of the first things that hit the tray.  In general, though, Jarre’s work was too soothing for my teenage ears, and by the 80s his image had turned a little cheesy.  He mostly went in one ear and out the other at the time.  There were, of course, exceptions:



Recently, though, as I listen to Ratatat or the “TRON: Legacy” soundtrack, Jarre keeps coming to mind.  I think that his contribution to electronica is under-recognized, so this week, I decided to take the bull by the horns and listen to his breakout album “Oxygene” critically, perhaps for the first time ever. 

A caveat - Jarre wasn’t that great of a keyboardist, but I don’t think that piano technique was his priority.  He was a synthesist, and as a craftsman of recorded ambience, he was quite the innovator in his day.  When “Oxygene” was released in 1976, there was no ProTools or Ableton, and computers ran on little paper cards.  Jarre was working with 8-track recorders and ARP synthesizers, and considering these tools, it’s a testament to his exploratory vision that the ambient depth of “Oxygene” is so impressive.  Its spooky sci-fi vibe is organic and immersive in a way that subverts the technological conditions under which it was constructed.  It’s actually a pretty innovative ambient achievement.

Unfortunately, the “ambient” label would not come to exist for another twenty years when bands like Enigma started to have some success in the late 90s.  As a result, Jarre ended up in the 80s “New Age” bin more often than not.  In 2007, however, he re-recorded a “live” version of “Oxygene” using vintage keyboards, complete with attendant video clips:


Considering that your phone could probably automate what all four of those guys are doing while downloading an app in the background, this performance may seem a little archaic.  If, however, you can imagine a much younger Jarre in an early 70s apartment studio multitracking this whole mess by himself, I think it deserves quite a bit of credit.  

Back to the original question: why does so much of my current listening remind me of Jarre?  I think that my early exposure to Jarre laid the foundation for my understanding of electronica’s ambient potential.  Contemporary synthesists construct ambience as a matter of course, but I seem to be particularly attracted to artists that use actual keyboard sounds like the ones that Jarre used.  His brand of “imaginary space opera” from this era provides the perspective from which I currently listen to electronic music.