Sony Music Catalog

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.