Oxygene 7-13

Album review

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