Showing posts with label Equinoxe. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Equinoxe. Show all posts

Monday, July 15, 2013

Jean Michel Jarre's Equinoxe



A few years ago, while working at the bookstore, my good friend David spoke to me about the artist Jean Michel Jarre. I knew I'd heard the name enough to know there was some kind of a 'new age' connotation surrounding it, but not enough that I'd ever had anyone discuss Jarre's work with me, let alone introduce me to it. David is older than me and had a smattering the man's records from back around the time of their release. Based on David's discussion of Jarre I don't know that I'd consider him a fan per se - as an avid scholar and mathematician he seemed more the kind of person that would have been interested in Jarre's work at the time of its release based on the new technology and thought process that went into it. Basically this is synthesizer-composition and probably felt like someone using new technology (at the time) to make the type of compositions formerly performed with strings and woodwinds. During Jarre's heyday (70's/early 80's) this may have been akin to the future meeting the past, or mad futurist fiction meeting Mozart.

Or maybe not. Either way, like it or hate it there's something here. I've always believed that innovation is not always pretty, especially in retrospect. Equinoxe is not a place I can go often, but in the years since I copied the disc from David I've learned there is a very particular mind frame that I am sometimes in where I can hear this the way I'd imagine David first heard it, and that's pretty cool. Another example of time travel via one of the senses.

Just never all of the senses.