Always on the cutting edge of new technologies since his beginnings in the 70s at Pierre Schaeffer's GRM (the  music research group of the French Broadcasting and Television Office, where concrete and electronic music were born), Jean-Michel Jarre has conceptualized an augmented reality concert to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the Palace of Versailles. The French artist, who had already given a concert in virtual reality for 2020's Fête de la Musique (a French music celebration that takes place on June 21st each year), set up his machines and donned his virtual reality headset once again in the famous Hall of Mirrors for an hour-long show on Christmas Day, December 25th, 2023. A limited audience was able to attend the "concert-production hybrid" live at the palace, but it was also broadcast to the metaverse to be watched via virtual reality.For Versailles 400, Jarre took an understated approach, with a concert lasting precisely an hour, a duration undoubtedly linked to the exceptional conditions imposed by the location. He starts off with music evocative of Jean-Baptiste Lully, using a harpsichord and vocals modified via a talk-box ("Le Château"), before going on to the hit "Epica Oxygène," delivering a rather rhythmic show, slowly but surely transforming the Hall of Mirrors into a techno rave or a new wing of the ISS. After the Egyptian pyramids and the Red Square, Jean-Michel Jarre can check yet another historical site off his list. © Smaël Bouaici/Qobuz

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Released in 1976, Oxygene proved to be a massive hit for French electronic musician Jean-Michel Jarre. The son of film composer Maurice Jarre, the synthesizer player sought to create warmer sonic textures through the technology of the time, and the result was this pioneering six-part album. Oxygene's bizarrely creepy cover, featuring a skull underneath the peeled-away surface of the globe, belies the music's lush beauty, though it does point to haunting moments such as "Oxygene III." The record's most recognizable track is the majestic "Oxygene IV," which features percolating synth lines and spare, nearly imperceptible beats. While the album would lead Jarre to international fame, especially in his native France and the rest of Europe, it also proved to be a recording that he struggled to top, even going so far as to release a sequel, Oxygene 7-13, more than 20 years later. For aficionados of late-'70s electronic acts such as Tangerine Dream and Vangelis, this bold outing is essential.© Eric Schneider /TiVo

After belatedly celebrating three decades in the game with 2022's 30 Something, Orbital released their tenth studio album, Optical Delusion, in 2023. The duo emerged as pioneers of rave culture back in the late '80s, and they've always produced dance music with a social conscience as well as a concern for the environment. They released a silent track in reaction to the anti-rave Criminal Justice Bill in 1994, and they recorded 1996's "The Girl with the Sun in Her Head" using a mobile solar power generator belonging to Greenpeace. 2018's Monsters Exist commented on the corruption of the planet's political leaders without naming names, and urged listeners to consider the state of the world and embrace progress. The visuals during the album's live tour drove home these points, yet the shows were clearly meant as raves and not political rallies, and the new material fit perfectly alongside updated versions of the duo's classics. Optical Delusion is Orbital's post-pandemic album, and it conveys the panic of witnessing the world fall apart while also remaining thankful to be alive and involved with the dance music scene. Most of the album's tracks feature guest vocalists, giving Orbital's concerns more of a voice than ever. On the effervescent dance-pop tune "Are You Alive," Penelope Isles' Lily Wolter defiantly resists being screwed over by capitalism, then clears the way as the splashy synths and elevated beats take over during the track's second half. Jason Williamson, the bloke from Sleaford Mods, directly blames the masses who keep voting crooked politicians into office over the rumbling punk bassline and pounding kicks of "Dirty Rat." Mediæval Bæbes appear on "Ringa Ringa (The Old Pandemic Folk Song)," reminding listeners that an innocent nursery rhyme has a longstanding association with the Black Death. Dina Ipavic's near-operatic vocals soar along with the sublime glide of "Day One," while Anna B Savage provides a more introspective narrative over the shuffling house rhythms of "Home." The two instrumental tracks are highlights, with "The New Abnormal" being an exuberant breakbeat-driven crowd-worker, while "Requiem for the Pre Apocalypse" is a chest-rattling drum'n'bass number that gradually reveals a brilliant light shining through the oppressive darkness. The nightmarish "What a Surprise" dices sinister voices into trap beats, and "Moon Princess" warns of computers that "try to make rational decisions." Even at their most dystopian, Orbital never lose their excitement for exploring new sounds, and Optical Delusion doesn't get bogged down in cynicism or nostalgia.© Paul Simpson /TiVo

At the invitation of the Paris City Hall, which had given up the fireworks display because of the curfew due to the Covid, Jean-Michel Jarre took us into the New Year with a live-stream trailblazing concert-spectacular set in the virtual environment of the planetary landmark Notre-Dame de Paris. The live show combined life-like concert visuals in VR with a real live studio performance from Studio Gabriel near the cathedral, while his avatar played inside a virtual Notre-Dame which had been entirely digitised before the fire in April 2019. The groundbreaking production left 75 Million viewers and virtual partygoers from around the world wondering which parts were real, and which were virtual. The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) made the event available to their national TV and radio partners around the world free of charge. For ‘Welcome to the Other Side’ Jarre’s visionary creativity partnered with the French start up VRrOOm, the City of Paris and under the patronage of UNESCO – becoming the official midnight image and countdown from Paris. Created, designed and produced in record-breaking 3-months, the 50 minute mixed-media project gathered a team of 150 technicians to recreate Notre-Dame de Paris and achieve a masterpiece blending an array of formats and skills. Jean-Michel Jarre conceived it "both as a message of hope for 2021 in the difficult times we are going through, but also as an opportunity to pay homage to Notre-Dame de Paris weakened like all of us". This concert, featuring tracks from Jarre’s most recent album Electronica, as well as new reworked versions of his classics, Oxygène and Equinoxe, gave the world a virtual inside look at the legendary landmark in a futuristic and festive way. This spectacular event is a milestone today in setting new standards for music entertainment tomorrow. " Virtual reality is a little bit today to the live show what cinema was to its creation for the theatre", Jean-Michel Jarre confided during the rehearsals. 

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Planet Jarre is a compilation album by French electronic musician and composer Jean-Michel Jarre, released on 14 September 2018  to commemorate Jarre's 50 years in the music business. A total of forty-one tracks were chosen by Jarre himself for inclusion, among them two new songs (Herbalizer and Coachella Opening). Jarre remastered, and in some cases "retouched", the tracks himself. During the process, he decided that he had pursued four quite different styles of composition and therefore divided the project into four "universes" - "Soundscapes", "Themes", "Sequences" and "Explorations and Early Works”.

Creating a legendary work is never straightforward, as many cinema fans have discovered the hard way. Jean-Michel Jarre didn't want the follow-up to his fabled album Oxygène to sound forced, so he imposed some technical restraints on himself as a kind of safeguard. Twenty years earlier, the French musician had left the Musical Research Group headed by Pierre Schaeffer. Seen at the time was as a group of idiots savant, it taught him how to grapple with analogue synthesisers. For Oxygene 7-13, which came out in 1997, Jarre decided to surround himself with these machines, which had propelled a whole generation into electronic music. The ARP 2600, the mellotron, the theremin and the famous TR-808 drum machine: they all contributed to the birth of techno and house.  Shut up for a whole year in his Bougival studio, Jean Michel Jarre sent himself on a journey to the centre of the Seventies, with experiments mirroring those of Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream. It's a stylistic exercise which cleaves successfully to introspection and homage (the record is dedicated to Pierre Schaeffer). Without knowing the dates, one could imagine that the two Oxygène albums were recorded back to back, between the opener Pt 7, which bears all the marks of the original Pt 8 with a little more trance, or the more dramatic, shadowy Pt 9, with its flights of synthetic strings – and which is in fact a torturous remix of Oxygène Pt 1 – which closes the circle beautifully. © Smaël Bouaici/Qobuz

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