In many ways, Jean-Michel Jarre is a natural fit for today's electronic music culture, with its fireworks and bombast. The French producer was a pioneer of flashy outdoor events—laser harps, pyrotechnics, crowds of a million or more, and budgets running into the millions, set in places like the Great Pyramids of Giza. His records sold like hotcakes—his 1976 debut, Oxygène, is said to be France's best-selling album ever—and featured spacy, arpeggio-laced fantasias, halfway between the "cosmic" synthesizer music of Tangerine Dream and the techno-pop of Kraftwerk, but they often veered dangerously close to kitsch.
The French musician's last new album was in 2007, but now he returns, borrowing a page from Giorgio Moroder's playbook, with an album clearly designed to introduce him to a new generation. There are 16 songs on Electronica 1 and 15 collaborators ("Automatic", a co-production with Yazoo's Vince Clarke, is in two parts), and they run the gamut, from titans like Tangerine Dream and Laurie Anderson to rising dance-music stars like Gesaffelstein.
Fellow synth maestro John Carpenter represents the electronic old school along with Anderson and whatever surviving members of Tangerine Dream are now using the name. The classical pianist Lang Lang lends a little high-culture gravitas, and Pete Townshend is here for some reason. Then, on the contemporary side, there's the French synth-pop soundscaper M83, one of the artists indebted to Jarre's sense of texture and volume, along with the adrenaline-loving techno producer Boys Noize, the prog-minded electronic duo Fuck Buttons, and the electro-pop singer and musician Little Boots.
But this diversity presents our first problem. Because unless you approach Electronica 1 as a collection of unrelated songs designed to be cherry-picked for playlists—and given the generic title, maybe that's the point—there's little to hold it together. In the first three songs we're taken from buzzing, high-energy techno-pop with Boys Noize, a billowing schaffel number with M83, and a weird New Order-goes-New Age pastiche with Air, and it never gets more coherent than that, unless you count Jarre slathering filters and bright, buzzing synths on everything like so much Cool-Whip as a common denominator.
And that brings us to our second problem: apart from a few songs—the moody "Automatic", with Vince Clarke, and maybe the goth-leaning Gesaffelstein track—the music just isn't very good. "Suns Have Gone" is an anodyne electro-house bouncer featuring a mopey Moby. The Tangerine Dream tune features some nice, pinging synths, but there are literally dozens, if not scores, of Tangerine Dream records you'd be advised to reach for first. "Rely on Me" saps Laurie Anderson's voice of its arch, critical qualities and turns her into the centerpiece for a sultry downtempo cut you'd expect to find on a Hôtel Costes compilation.
Maybe the song that makes the most sense is the Armin van Buuren collaboration "Stardust", and that's because the trance icon is most like Jarre himself in his fondness for whooshing effects, gleaming synths, and big, emotional-button-pushing chord changes. Of all contemporary electronic styles, trance is the only one where Jarre's influence is really felt; it would have made more sense to team him up with a dozen producers from that style, where a real back-and-forth exchange of ideas might have taken place. Instead, Electronica 1 is mostly a matter of superimposing one style upon another—sort of like tracing shapes on the pyramids with lasers.
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