He was the darling of epic ambient electro in the 70s and 80s, now Jean-Michel Jarre is continuing to push boundaries with Oxymore, his 22nd album. Prog catches up with the French sound artist to find out more about the immersive project that pays homage to musique concrète pioneer Pierre Henry, and the VR world that accompanies it.

Words: Dom Lawson Images: François Rousseau

The metaverse beckons as Jarre creates a whole new world of sound.

Back in the technologically primitive days of the mid-20th century, the musique concrète movement was truly revolutionary. It was instigated by engineer and musicologist Pierre Schaeffer and his colleagues at Club D’Essai, a studio based within Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française (aka RTF), France’s national broadcasting agency, in the 40s. Based on the premise that sounds could be collected, manipulated and turned into music using the nascent recording technology of the era, musique concrète was an intrinsically progressive endeavour, and one that has had a profound and enduring impact on music of all stripes. For Jean-Michel Jarre, Schaeffer and his most notable collaborator and composer Pierre Henry are the starting point for everything that he has conjured from his machines over the last 50 years. Notably, Henry was Jarre’s mentor during his studies in Paris in the late 60s, and he pays direct tribute to his former tutor and the whole musique concrète movement on new album, Oxymore: a noisy, opaque and challenging piece of work that takes Jarre’s music into a whole new, immersive world.

“Until the two Pierres began their experiments, music was done only with notes,” Jarre says. “Suddenly, you had these guys saying that music is also about sounds. They were recording noises and mixing them, by taking the sound of an engine and mixing it with a clarinet, or taking the sound of a bird and mixing it with an electric guitar. They created this organic approach to music that, in my opinion, has not really been recognised properly. It’s really the origin of the way we make music today.