Jean-Michel Jarre gave a new start to analogue synthesis. Now he goes digital.

From the opening scream of Jean-Michel Jarre's new album, Zoolook, you can tell that this is something different. We all know Jean-Michel Jarre — he's the guy who made instrumental synthesizer music respectable, and, more to the point, made it a highly commercial proposition, with a number one debut album in the form of Oxygene. Zoolook, however, shows us a new Jarre, a man once again on the frontiers of experimental music.

Jarre's been relatively quiet of late. After the mixed success of the epic China Concerts — which were compared at the time to making a London audience sit through a three-hour Noh drama and asking them to make constructive comments afterwards — he concentrated largely on developing his facility on the Fairlight Computer Musical Instrument, on travelling, on his collection of fifties sports cars, and on his wife Charlotte Rampling. Magnetic Fields seemed a mixed success, and didn't really produce a hit single — and then Jarre did something astonishing.

Assuming that most musicians are in the business to be heard, pressing just one copy of an album which represents several months' hard work seems an astounding idea. But this is just what Jarre did with Music For Supermarkets, which was auctioned off as a unique work of art before the destruction of the master tapes and lacquers. The album did get played once on radio Luxembourg — Jarre appeared on TV ads, exhorting fans to "Bootleg Me!", much to the consternation of the continental music business!

I've not heard Supermarkets, but Jarre assures me that it's half-way in style between Magnetic Fields and Zoolook. So what exactly are we listening to on Zoolook?

"Well, I regard Zoolook as a new start for digital music in the same way that Oxygene was a new start for music with analogue synthesizers. Most of the album is played on the Fairlight, and my main technique has been to sample vocal sounds and to replay them in the form of rhythm patterns, melody lines and so on.

"I've used speech from all over the world — from France, China, different African countries, from Eskimos, from Indians, from my next-door neighbour in Paris. For most of the album the speech sounds are cut up and treated so that you can't hear any individual words, and the only exception to this is in the section which Laurie Anderson spoke on where she actually did speak directly onto the tape.

"But I do feel that the sounds retain some of the atmosphere given to them by their speaker, even if you can't understand the individual words. For instance, I believe that the sections of Eskimo speech will still give the listener some of the atmosphere of the Arctic — and there are no animal sounds for instance, it's all based on human voices."

Jarre's always been a compulsive traveller, and is particularly fascinated with the Chinese way of life. However, he dismisses some of the previous description of his albums — such as "music for the global village" for Magnetic Fields; "you can't always control what's written in press handouts", he laughs.

"I regard Zoolook as a new start for digital music"

However, it's pretty clear that he does have ambitions in the direction of universal communication — the very fact that the album sleeve for Zoolook contains notes in a score of languages tends to confirm this. Jarre speaks perfect English, and has even thought about coming to live in London, but doesn't feel he can leave his studio behind at this important time.

He explains, "I've recorded all the albums in my studio, which is a 24-track with all MCI equipment. Also I've spent a lot of time balancing the monitor sound, making sure there are no standing waves and so on. I've mixed the albums in some very large studios and it's surprising how poor they can be in this respect — in fact I feel that my studio is better than many of the top studios in the world in terms of monitor balance.

"Obviously at the moment the recording is dominated by the Fairlight, with a lot of the rhythms entered on Page R, the Rhythm Page software. But I've recently bought an old Moog 55 Modular System which creates some very warm sounds,and I still use many of the older analogue synthesizers. There's a lot of Yamaha DX7 on Zoolook, but many of the sounds on it were too precise and clinical. I did use the tubular bell sound — that was on the DX9 in fact — and a couple of other presets.

"In addition to the DX7 I used a Prophet 5, an Emulator, several EMS AKS and VCS3 synths, a LinnDrum Mk 1 and a LinnDrum Mk2, my custom Matrisequencer, a Simmons kit, and of course Adrian Belew played some guitar parts. I would have used the Emulator 2, which offers a lot of synthesizer-style sound modification, but the album was finished by the time it became available. In any case, I still want to use a lot of analogue sounds — it's the imperfection of analogue synthesizers that make their sounds so interesting."

Many people see Jarre as purely a studio musician, forgetting the epic nature of the China concert tour which involved three keyboard players, the largest Simmons kit ever seen, and a spectacular laser and light show sometimes taking power from a single socket in a typical Chinese concert hall. But then the Fairlight is basically a studio instrument — or is it?

"Well, by the time we did the China Concerts I'd had the Fairlight for a year and a half, so I was very familiar with it and I knew what I wanted it do do. Considering the conditions it behaved very well — we didn't have too many problems, and in fact we were able to allow all the musicians to tap into different facilities on the Fairlight at different points in the concert.

"There have been plans at various times to play concerts in England. For instance, in Paris I played in the Place de la Concorde on Bastille day, a free concert with an audience of half a million, and we were hoping to do the same thing in London — perhaps in Trafalgar Square. But at the time we just couldn't organise it — there were too many problems with blocking off the traffic in London and so on.

"At the moment the recording is dominated by the Fairlight... but I still use many of the older analogue synthesizers"

"Now I've got plans for some concerts in the Summer perhaps, but that depends on finding suitable venues. I'd like to play outdoors (has anybody told him about British weather?) and it might be a problem to find a venue of the right sort."

The obvious question is as to whether Jarre actually enjoys live playing or not?

"Yes, I do enjoy playing live, but it's the amount of organisation that has to go into it that I don't always like. You see I might be playing to an audience of many thousands, even up to half a million, and in some ways I'd much prefer to play for a smaller audience and have better contact with them.

"One of the advantages of live playing is the ability to improvise. On the albums every note is composed in advance, which of course you have to do if you're using the Fairlight's Page R facilities anyway. But in the live situation I can improvise a little, and on the Live At The Concorde single (now deleted) which Polydor released you can hear some improvisation on some of the themes from Oxygene and Equinoxe.

On the subject of singles, didn't Jarre have a release many years before Oxygene made its gradual but eventually massive impact?

"Yes, I made an eight-minute single with just a few hundred copies called The Cage. It was for a dance performance in Paris around 1968 and was done using very primitive equipment — just a VCS3 synthesizer from EMS and a couple of tape recorders. I also had a sort of oscillator bank which could produce different pitches, and by switching the oscillators in at different times I could produce a very simple sequence of notes. It was a very early sequencer if you like, but because I didn't have access to a multitrack tape machine I had to play and mix everything down virtually live. In fact I did two mixes, one for the single and one for the dance performance, and I think one was a little more successful than the other!

"There were only a few hundred copies pressed and I don't have now now, so if anyone out there has a spare copy!..."

Jarre's music has come a long way from the days of basic synthesizers and two-track tape machines, but it's retained one important element — a certain human touch which sets it aside from a lot of the other synthesizer music of the day. Zoolook has a certain air of unease in some passages — it's vaguely disturbing to hear human noises cut up and treated as musical instruments, but Jarre can't understand any sense of unfamiliarity. For him, music is very much the international language, and if that's the case, Jarre's massive appeal must make him the ultimate Polyglot.