Jean Michel Jarre is one of the first superstars of electronic music. His 1976 album Oxygene—a multi-part masterpiece of fluttering synth melodies and spacious drones tinged with a dark foreboding—enraptured an international audience, selling over 10 million copies and landing him on the Billboard Top 100. Since that breakthrough, Jarre’s career has been a series of sustained highs: Bringing one million people to his 1978 concert in Paris to celebrate Bastille Day; being the first Western artist to perform in China following the death of Mao Zedong and releasing album after album that embraced both the stillness of New Age and the body jacking joys of dance music. 

Jarre is garnering even more attention this year with the release of Electronica 1: The Time Machine, an album that finds the 67-year-old Frenchman collaborating with an array of artists that include The Who guitarist Pete Townshend, EDM stars Boys Noize and Moby, electropop singer Little Boots and film director/composer John Carpenter. And what they created provides a great overview of Jarre’s body of work, from his earliest experiments with tape to his more recent ambient and electro compositions.

With the scope of his most recent album in mind, we spoke with Jarre from his home in France to gain some insight into the creation of Electronica, and five other milestone albums from his four decades of pioneering musical efforts.

Electronica 1: The Time Machine (2015)

This project was very special to me because I wanted to gather around me people who are a source of inspiration to me and to the electronic music scene. I started in this genre when nobody was doing it. Now it is everywhere. There are no boundaries anymore. I thought it would be cool to create, through an artistic project, a link between Tangerine Dream and Gesaffelstein and Fuck Buttons and M83, showing that there’s a timelessness to their work and there is timelessness in electronic music. I was really moved by the fact that everybody said, “Yes,” and then I ended up with almost two and a half hours of music. And in these days when “featuring” albums are so trendy, I was working with a different mindset where I wanted to travel and meet physically with people. It’s not easy to go into a home studio and be with someone and share your secrets, share your maniac approach to things, and your weak points as well. You are quite vulnerable. I would compose a piece of music but leave enough space for the other person to collaborate. The results then are going to be different because you’re actually merging your musical DNAs. Through that, what we created at the end of the day contributed to the unity of the project.

“La Cage”/”Erosmachine” (1971)

I actually did this in 1967 or ‘68 and it was released later on. I was discovering a whole new world at the time, discovering you can approach music not only in terms of sounds and bass tone but you could go out and record the sound of the wind and the rain and an engine and a dog barking and make music with this. That was an absolute revolution and this did change the way we are doing music these days. I was coming from the rock scene, playing in obscure bands. I had an old tape machine that my grandfather gave me and I used to record some guitar solos or sounds, then reverse the tape or slow it down or speed it up. When I started at Groupe de Recherches Musicales [the French electronic music collective started by Pierre Schaeffer], it was made up of very serious avant garde types, and very dogmatic. But from even those early days, I was obsessed with creating a link between experimental music and pop music.

Oxygene (1976)

It’s always difficult to understand why something you do will be embraced by an audience. In the documentary we made on Electronica, Moby said that when he got this album, it was so different from his cultural environment, these kind of European aesthetics linked with science fiction and visions of the future. It captured the imagination of the people. In those days, most people didn’t know what synthesizers were. In the days when you had punk and disco, suddenly you have this UFO arriving with long tracks with no drummers, no vocals, and no three minute songs for the radio. In those days, my technology and my finance were limited. This was before MIDI and before sequencers were really available, so I had to create all of it by hand. I would have to play them all in half-time and then playing them back at normal speed, and then double speed to create the really fast sequences. It took me a long time!

The Concerts In China (1982)

The then-British ambassador gave my music to Chinese radio in Beijing because it was just after Mao’s time and when they wanted to show the West that they were opening their doors. After 25 years where you just had songs dedicated to the grandeur of Mao Zedong, it was a shock. On top of it, it was not just a pop song, it was electronic music. It created such an impact in China that they invited me for a master class and then a few months later, the idea of the concerts happened. I must say that playing in China in those days was like playing on the moon, for both me and them. The funny thing is that I actually never knew who invited me officially. You could feel such a pressure that, if anything would have gone wrong, the people responsible would be in trouble. But it was never clear from the outside who made the decision. It was also in the days where you had artist dissidents in jail. After every show, I was asking about them. Not in a provocative way, but I insisted. I think it was positive because three months later, they freed them. I can’t say for sure but I think that I contributed to that.

Revolutions (1988)

We went from the Industrial Revolution to the ‘60s to the digital revolution. Electronica is also based on these same ideas. Not just gathering people linked to electronic music but also to the relationship we have with technology. We obviously have the positive side but there’s a dark side as well. This was obviously more political, responding to what was going in South Africa and the Middle East at the time. When one of the singles from the album, which featured Arabic singing, was played on French radio for two weeks, they had letters of protest with people saying they didn’t want Arabic songs on the radio. They had to stop playing it. I couldn’t believe it.

Geometry of Love (2003)

This was part of a project linked to a club in Paris. They asked me to do a kind of lounge music for them. I had a lot of fun doing this. I used the software Reason to produce it, and it’s interesting because since the beginning of this conversation, probably 100 pieces of software or plugins have been created or are on the market. And by tomorrow morning, they will be history. So if I can give advice to a young artist: don’t be trapped by technology. It can help express your ideas but it cannot create your ideas. Today you can do everything using analog instruments or using plugins or your iPad, but the main thing is limitations. You have endless possibilities so you must create your own limits, which can sometimes be difficult.