Amazônia

Album review

Forty-five years after Oxygène, Jean-Michel Jarre returns to the border between the artistic and the ecological with this new album dedicated to the lungs of the Earth, the Amazon. This is the soundtrack composed for the Amazônia exhibition by Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado, which will open in May 2021 at the Philharmonie de Paris. Salgado presents more than 200 photos and videos from his six years in the region, focusing on the relationship between humans and biodiversity. The exhibition was an impressive piece of work that presented a challenge for Jarre to set to music. "It was a question of not falling into a purely scientific or ethnomusicological approach, nor into simple background music", he explains. "I therefore set up a sort of toolbox, containing musical elements, whether orchestral or electronic, intended to recreate or evoke the timbre of natural sounds, to which were added sounds from the environment and finally human sources (voices, songs, instruments) from the archives of the Musée d'Ethnographie de Genève.”

Clearly inspired by his subject, Jarre has released one of his best records, in terms of coherence, concept and ideas. Thanks to the binaural recording technique, which allows for ultra-precise reproduction of sound in space, he offers long pieces of eight or nine minutes that push at the limits of trance sounds, such as the opening Amazônia, Pt. 1, all strings and percussion, with stormy synths in the background, encompassed by forest noises. On Amazônia, Pt. 2, a distant techno beat guides us through a stifling forest, while Pt. 3 takes an intoxicating ethno-trance twist on the ending. Jarre often leans towards musique concrète on this record but he also throws out some tasty loops that mix techno and ambient. An album worth digging deeper into. © Smaël Bouaici/Qobuz