It's been a busy année for JEAN-MICHEL JARRE. winning Olympic laurels and ending with an anniversary reboot for his pioneering Zoolook LP. But, as usual, electronica's Oxygène auteur is looking not back, but forward to music innovation driven by VR and Al. "That's what I'llke about this moment," he tells MARK BLAKE, "because we don't know what's coming next."

Portrait by ROBERTO FRANKENBERG

Roberto Frankenberg/Camera Press/Modds

“Technology dictates styles”: Jean-Michel Jarre reflects on tomorrow’s soundworld.

THE AUTHOR ARTHUR C CLARKE, OF 2001: A Space Odyssey fame, once told Jean-Michel Jarre that he would one day play a gig on the moon.

It was the kind of talk that Jarre’s 1976 album, Oxygène, tended to encourage. Here was music that seemed to reach across space, embodying the infinite promise of technology. Yet Clarke understood well enough the extreme unlikelihood of Jarre’s lunar concert. As Alien, the sci-fi blockbuster from a few years later, warned: “In space no one can hear you scream.”

“For a musician it would be a total non-event,” says Jarre today. Instead, the electronic music trailblazer is embracing the virtual world. Jarre’s Christmas Day 2023 concert at the Palace of Versailles found him performing to a live audience while his avatar did the same to a gathering of “digital twins” watching online, and has lately been released as the live album and film, Versailles 400.

Greeting MOJO in his studio near Paris, the IRL Jarre, now 76, is disarmingly fresh-faced. Sat in front of a striking piece of mirrored wall art, he favours those tinted spectacles worn only by rock stars (see: Bono, Daltrey, Elton) as a potential barrier between him and his interrogator, but throughout the conversation he’s both engaged and engaging.

To date, Jarre has sold some 80 million albums, and broken world records for playing to some of the biggest audiences on the planet (the most recent milestone: 3.5 million at the Eiffel Tower in 1997). A pre-eminent figure in the transfer of electronic music into the pop mainstream and one of France’s biggest all-time music exports (not to mention a Commander of Napoleon’s Légion d’Honneur), he was a shoo-in to headline the Paris Olympics’ closing ceremony in August but insists he kept the distinction in perspective. “It was a sports event and we were just the cherry on the cake,” he cautions. “We wanted to make the best cherry, but it was still a cherry.”

The show began with a daredevil Tom Cruise abseiling from the roof of the Stade De France, and ended with Jarre dashing, like a musical action hero, between a bank of keyboards and his signature laser harp, while performing the hits on his just-released Paris Stadium EP.

“But I hate it when you’re in a stadium or even in the middle of a 360-degree situation and you have to turn your back to the audience,” he says.

This, then, is Jarre’s raison d’être in 2024 and beyond: using technology so he never has to turn his back on the people again.

NERSAILLES 400 WASN’T JARRE’S first virtual reality rodeo. On New Year’s Eve 2020, he performed in a Parisian studio, while his avatar did the same in a virtual Nôtre Dame. At Versailles, Jarre wore a Lynx-R1 “mixed-reality” headset, keeping track of his movements between the chateau’s famous hall of mirrors and a digital world of kinetic structures and futuristic landscapes.