Jean-Michel Jarre - Les Chants Magnétiques/Magnetic Fields
#266
By Tom Mott
May 22 1981
Jean-Michel Jarre
Les Chants Magnétiques/Magnetic Fields
Genre: something you'd pipe into your floating isolation chamber after seeing William Hurt in Altered States
Allen’s Rating: 4.5 out of 5
Tom’s Rating: 3.01001010 01100001 01110010 01110010 01100101
Highlights: Well ... it's all just one really long piece ...
Allen’s Highlights:
Magnetic Fields #1
Magnetic Fields #2
Magnetic Fields #4
Jean-Michel Jarre is known for organizing outdoor spectacles featuring his music, vast laser displays, large projections and fireworks. He holds the world record for the largest-ever audience at an outdoor event for his Moscow concert on 6 September 1997, which was attended by 3.5 million people.
This sounds like that. Depending on your disposition and level of intoxicants, that will either elicit a "fuck yeah!" or an "oy vey!" Neither "good" nor "bad," but hovering between gloriousness and kitschy-kitschy-cul, like theme music for a 1981 BBC documentary on Future Shock.
If someone dragged me to a demolition derby with laser beams -- who am I kidding, I'd be doing the dragging -- and this was blasting, nay, PULSATING out of the speakers ... well yeah, I'd give it a 5.0.
Or if I found this in a used record store in 1992 and played it ironically at work until I un-ironically came to love it -- and then 30 years later had many fond memories wrapped up in it ... again, 5.0.
Or if Barbarella transported me up to her spaceship with wall-to-wall shag carpeting and put this one as we got to know each other ... again, 5.0.
Sadly, none of those things happened, so now I have to try and unpack this as best I can. Musically, it reminds me of ...
1. (76-77) Those one-minute intros Steve Miller added to Fly Like an Eagle and Jet Airliner.
2. (67) Parts of the Main Street Electrical Parade -- Baroque Hoedown by Perrey and Kingsley. Not the fun/funny bleep-blorp parts but the bombastic "BHZZZZZZZZZZZZZ PHWOOOOOOOOOZZZ" sonic waves that seem to trigger something in all of our reptilian brains.
3. (68-69) A Rainbow in Curved Air by Terry Riley.
4. (71-72) Wendy Carlos's Clockwork Orange soundtrack
5. (77) Tangerine Dream's Sorcerer soundtrack.
6. (73-74) Tubular Bells.
Steve Miller resonates: one-minute headphone jams that build anticipation for feel-good rock.
Terry Riley resonates with me: 1960s guru/weirdo/experimentalist mixing synths and tape loops, saxophones, and non-Western technology.
Perrey & Kingsley resonate with me: "Popcorn" playfulness with barnyard sounds, banjos, and Jetson beeps mixed in with the electronics.
But Wendy Carlos, Tangerine Dream, Tubular Bells ... meh. Playfulness is replaced with ponderousness. And this hits me more like that. It also sounds ten years too late.
I dunno. For someone who loves Kraftwerk and Perrey & Kingsley and Terry Riley, I'd be expected to rally behind this. There were some moments in Pt. 4 that were OK.
And Pt. 5 is bizarre. Jarre veers into lo-fi Mantovani Casio cheesy organ sounds. Something Doctor Kosmos pulled off with a straight face 10 years later at Spaceland. But subtract the layers of LA Weekly/Silverlake/early-20s-hipsterdom, and it's a hard pill to swallow. So it goes.
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https://open.spotify.com/album/7G4AN82pnj8i93f03cnm8D?si=DadpkarpQv6NJ-D8eNFD-Q
