The Sounds of Jarre

Here's an interesting thing from a few years ago. Comedian and musician Matt Berry interviews Jean-Michel Jarre about the process of creating his 1976 opus Oxygène.

Despite the space-command-center appearance of this hokey promo clip, the central element was actually an organ called an Eminent 310 Unique. He downplays the machine but clearly it was something a bit special, because the string sound was extracted into the ARP Solina a couple years later. Did the success of Oxygène have anything to do with that? Who knows, but maybe. Add the non-programmable Korg Mini Pops drum machine, and you're 90% of the way through creating this iconic record.

The magic happens, though, when he runs the organ through a Revox echo and an Electro-Harmonix Small Stone phaser pedal with a slightly dying battery. Like all EHX pedals, it's not the same these days but they do still make the Small Stone and it's still a great pedal ("Just forget it" says Jarre).

Jarre insists that nobody was running keyboards through guitar pedals at the time. I think that's probably true in his mind, because he's a capital-M Musician. He can play keyboard, and his strong melodies and mini-symphonies are what made such a weird record a mainstream success. But across the channel in the same era, British musicians in the Industrial genre were also running cheap keyboards through guitar pedals to create something far less palatable for the mainstream. Though both used a wide variety of equipment, Chris Carter of Throbbing Gristle and Richard H. Kirk of Cabaret Voltaire would definitely beg to differ that Jarre was the ultimate in synth innovation.

Still, it's a pretty amazing moment when Jarre builds up from the dry keyboard, to the onboardchorus effect, to the Small Stone pedal, to the echo, and suddenly the sound of "Oxygène Part 1" just manifests out of the air. Even on a podcast, Matt Berry's "holy shit" grin is audible.