Docklander wrote:Analog-Umph wrote:.....
I have to wonder about that myself though. You are right that many sounds here can be had by fiddling with synths. Then again, I fiddled with synths for many years, but never produced anything like Oxy 3. However, that could just be my general ineptitude for wanting to be a Jarre, but something being missing in the DNA...that I readily grant you. It's been a very frustrating strand in my life.
I know that many people find this an adequate album, but that may be because they do not listen much varying kinds of electronic music, or play themselves. When you listen to a lot of variety, you start to see where the quality lives. And when you play synths (or any musical instrument) yourself, you definitely become a scrutinizer of quality. These things go hand in hand.
In my view the album is way too simple, almost like a demo, in need of another 1-2 months of composition, arrangement, and mixing. Quite a few others have come to the same conclusion as myself. It doesn't matter whether this would have been a more melodic album, or a more ambient album, or a mix of both. In both cases, it needed a lot of more work. I know in myself, that if I was making a major new album, I would not have been able to hand in Oxygene 3 to the studio, and call it an album in front of everyone. At most a demo - of where it might head.
Anyhow, if Jarre's happy with it, I am happy for him. We can't all the time produce masterpieces that are the greatest thing ever. I tell you, at times, even the masters do not know how they produced their great/est work/s. Which may have to do with man being a "channel" of something far greater than himself, when he dedicates himself to a greater purpose.
Docklander wrote:On the other hand, I'm not so easily convinced that incredible new landscapes of sound that have never been heard before still exist to be discovered, as they were back in the relative infancy of synthesizers when Jarre began. This claim is often made, but I don't see much evidence for it. The problem is that most "experimental space" is filled with really, really weird stuff, which certainly is different, but it lacks the aesthetic power to redefine a whole emotional world and draw a generation along in its wake. Most examples people end up giving are desiccated outposts in experimental space. Exactly the kind of thing I don't care for and never have. Jarre's work brought emotional warmth to the synthesizer realm. Of course others were going to discover that and follow in his path. They would have discovered it anyway, even if he had not. But he was the world leader in bringing it.
Zoolook is my least favorite Jarre album, for exactly these reasons. He tried to push an emotional warmth too far into eccentric space, and the two just don't go together well. The thing about synthesizers was that they created a genuine new CONTINENT of sounds. Whether that can ever happen again is moot...though I don't rule it out completely. Jean-Michel was in one sense lucky to be a kind of early "Columbus" heading out into that terrain for the first time. Both factors were necessary: his artistic talent and being in the right place at the right time in history. It's also possible, however, that present technology is already capable of producing just about any sound capable of being heard by the human ear. In that case, small, dotted, undiscovered islands of heterodox sound don't amount to the second discovery of a new continent.
IMO, of course.
Yeah, I agree with that.
I think, in some way we have hit a ceiling. We've come to an end, one which can only be surpassed via, not the actual transformation of the music, but the very self and the reality in which the self exists. Then new dimensions may open up.
As an analogy, we live in a 3 dimensional space-time continuum, which holds 3 dimensional objects in its reality, but we only ever see two dimensions. If at some point in time, humans were to be able to live in a higher dimensional space, and see/experience 3 or more dimensions, that would be analogous to broadening our experience of perception itself, and thus of the kind of music one would be able to make. There may come a time, when one is able to see the sound they are making and how it actually affects the emotions, the mind, the body, the very matter of the room in which one is. There may come a time where we can see which music is inherently beneficial to listen to and which is not. Things like that, things which are far beyond our current reality.
One could argue for all kind of technological innovations that would deliver the music directly to the brain, but I find all of those unnatural and creepy. You defeat the point of life, if you treat a human being and their body as a robot, that needs just the "right" kind of stimulation.
For sure changing the way we perceive reality would change our experience of it, I just think that if any fundamental change of perception is to occur, it would far surpass anything to do with any technology, whether it is modern or of the future.
On a separate note, I view JMJ as part of the big 5 of EM pioneers. Alongside TD, Schulze, Kraftwerk and Vangelis. You could also add Tomita, Kitarō... When listening to Oxygene for example, you can definitely hear that Jarre was influenced by Schulze's Timewind, which came out just a year before. He himself is very aware that it was the balancing act, of taking that experimental sound and combining it with a more harmonious and melodic (pop) aspect, that made Oxygene what it is.
Without faith nothing is possible. With it, nothing is impossible.
