After a long absence for some unknown reason I decided to listen to Jarre's Les Chants Magnétiques on my ipod in the car as I drove up the Pacific Coast Highway today.
What an amazing little album. I'm no expert on electronic music (visuals being my forte) but it seems impressive to me considering that for the time, and for Jarre it was a big leap from Oxygene and Equinoxe. It is like a fusion of experimental soundscapes mixed with very simple, yet melodic movements. Just listen to Part 3 with the industrial/train sounds with some almost asian wooden sounds then how it flows into the hypnotically rhythmic and quiet thumping of Part 4.
Plus I found this interesting fact that I had completely forgotten (from wiki):
For this album Jarre was partly inspired by the works of Andy Warhol and a fascination with the reproducibility of digital sound, being heavily laden with sample work, foreshadowing the sound of Jarre's 1984 album Zoolook.
The album has official titles in both French and English. The French title, Les Chants Magnétiques is a play on words. Literally translated into English this means "Magnetic Songs" or "Magnetic Singing". Spoken aloud however, it sounds very similar to "Les Champs Magnétiques" (literally, "Magnetic Fields"), due to the French words chants (songs or singing) and champs (fields) being homophones (a word that is pronounced the same as another word but differs in meaning). As this is not the case in English, such word play could not have survived translation, and the more straightforward title "Magnetic Fields" was chosen instead.
