TS:Jean Michel Jarre vs Vangelis

I guess that Vangelis will walk away with this, but I'm listening to Equinox for first time in years and am being swayed by it.

Sorry, Equinoxe.

Do you guys realize that like 6 out of the 10 biggest concerts of all time were Jean Michel Jarre? WTF?

I do!! I really cannot explain this guy's odd, nearly unparalleled popularity overseas - his music is quite anti-"hit" and nobody ever really talks about any of his albums past Zoolook (and most just leave it at Equinoxe!)

his gigs are massive son et lumière events is the main thing, i think

I was introduced to JMJ's music via Konami's Yie-Ar Kung Fu video game, in the 1980s. For some reason, Magnetic Fields IV was the soundtrack at the beginning of the game.

his gigs have definitely taken on a life of their own, but I'm thinking if you didn't know already there is no way you'd guess that Jarre was in the Guiness book so many times

I am legitimately torn on this.

For Oxygène alone, I have to go with JMJ.

Anyone heard music for supermarkets?

Vangelis. I mean, c'mon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PR6LY9i96qU

Music for Supermarkets iirc was mostly reworked into tracks for Zoolook and Rendez-vous (which is a latter day record I'd recommend)

It's coming up...

It's coming up...

It's coming up...

...it's Jarre :)

Really comes down to Laser Harp vs Blade Runner

JMJ easily, but I'll explain why tomorrow. Heard the Radio Luxembourg broadcast of "Music for Supermarkets" at the time, it wasn't up to much. But I didn't tape it cos I was young and stupid and the reception was shit.

I'm sure I've mentioned this but the similarity between side 2 of Equinoxe and La Dusseldorf is really quite striking to me

I can sort of see that actually.

a lo-fi cassette aircheck of the radio broadcast of 'music for supermarkets' is on youtube now. it's got one or two things that didn't wind up in better versions on the next two but it's mostly for hardcore fans.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yZG9p3IeVY

the Oxygene 30th anniversary concerts are on youtube as well, and unlike many jarre concert videos of hilariously questionable taste, they are right on target. no laser harps or city-wide fireworks, just a stage full of nearly every modular synth & organ from the 60s to present day patched up and waiting a turn. if you have even a passing interest...

I lean strongly Vangelis but really my main feeling towards Jean Michel has for twenty years been confusion, resulting from my older brother, back then mostly into happy hardcore and things of that ilk, considering him an untouchable unparalleled musical genius.

Nobody has mentioned 'Chariots of Fire'

so happy OutdoorFish mentioned 'Chariots of Fire'

I have only listened to Chariots of Fire and Blade Runner as far as Vangelis is concerned. I am cool on both and understand they are highly rated within his catalogue? Obviously that one Moroder-style jam from Blade Runner is top notch. I love also that one very dissonant parts of Chariot-- on the LP version of the soundtrack, there is 1.5 minutes of dark ambient music before "Jerusalem" that was formative to my 4-year old ears.

In comparison I have at one point owned every JMJ album on CD including "The Concerts In China" and "Jarre Live"

Ask me about any 90s JMJ record
Ask me about any 90s JMJ record

Milton - that video is fantastic!! Never seen a Moog keytar before!

Thinking about trying out Waiting for Costeau. I do think that Rendezvous is pretty decent but Revolutions turned me off the guy for a good while.

Vangelis for these two things:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0QQJfPi3ps

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sT4S-CeMfW4

but he's got much more!

In the mid-80s, and before I really got into music, my computer nerd friends and I listened to nothing but Jarre. The only record I've bothered to revisit a couple of times since then is Equinoxe. It's pretty good. Takes me back to being 16, reading Cerebus comics.

I'm sure I've mentioned this but the similarity between side 2 of Equinoxe and La Dusseldorf is really quite striking to me

New Age of Earth by Ashra is rather Jarre-like.

I've never heard Vangelis beyond the Chariots theme and Blade Runner.

after that Jarrett vs. Vangelis thread I gave Vangelis such a good effort. Bought several albums, and enjoyed them, but he never really knocks me over. Jarre I almost never listen to but back when Oxygene was one of the best LPs to have on while smoking bowl after bowl

Jarre and drugs lol does not compute

Um....I believe it's Jarre without drugs that doesn't compute.

Has anyone remixed Jarre so we can take ecstasy and dance to him?

Yes, but you don't have to remix JMJ to take ecstasy and dance to him. I'm sure the original version Equinoxe 4 has been played out hundreds of times.

gonna vote Jarre cuz Zoolook is so awesome. still not totally familiar with all of the Vangelis stuff but Jarre is all time for me.

that jarrett v. vangelis thread was true entertainment, thanks for even trying aero

jarre's discography is fairly easy to tackle, it's just 1976-1984 solid, and then extreme caution afterwards (parts of rendezvous and costeau are ok, but 80's synths ushered in a dark age for nearly every 70's veteran)

in high school (mid-80's for me) vangelis was too ridiculous to spend any time with. but as time passed I'd occasionally encounter a jawdroppingly beautiful track that would shut me up. in the late 90's when I went back to trawl through mainstream 70's electronic a little more comprehensively, nostalgia had kicked in, and by my 30's that ridiculousness was just a full-on asset. I mean there are moments so pompous that no one in their right mind should ever have even dared and they are glorious

plus, sagan

my short rec list for people who've stopped at Chariots and the official Blade Runner album (which have moments but are comparatively tame): 666, Earth, Heaven and Hell, L'Apocalypse de Animaux side 2. then for weird, See You Later, Beauborg. tons of high points on the other albums as well but the ratio-to-schmaltz gets dangerous.

/ratio of schmaltz-to-high points

voted jarre btw, I still play Zoolook sometimes and when the 3D version of the Oxygene concert showed up in my youtube bar I totally stopped working on everything and got out my 3D glasses

Deserted Palace any good?

not really

oxygene is fantastic but I can't not pick my man vangelis with blade runner, cosmos, and l'apocalypse... under his belt

I didn't know this until RECENTLY like VERY RECENTLY but that is Laurie Anderson on "Diva", duhhhh. Thanks for the tips Milton

Jarre is okay, but Vangelis is in my top 10 artists of all time, so this is no contest. People who only know him as the "moody soundtrack composer" of Blade Runner and Chariots of Fire are missing out a lot, his catalogue is so deep, ranging from catchy synth pop (the Jon & Vangelis albums, especially The Friends of Mr. Cairo) to crazy operatic synth prog workouts (Heaven and Hell) and atonal electronic avant-garde (Beaubourg). Of course his moody soundtracks are good too, though I preferer Opera Sauvage and Antarctica over the better known ones.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajQSz8EQScg

It's slightly unfair for me to choose Jarre over Vangelis because I know so little of the latter's music and would probably love it if I heard it, but JMJ is so linked up to my life in many ways that I have to choose him.

I was 8 in 1977 and when I heard "Oxygene 4" I was astonished - it was a huge turning point for me, only aware of music that was on TOTP or my parents' collections, to hear something completely synthesised. I was aware of "Autobahn" as a single but had heard nothing like it before, I taped it off the radio on my crappy little mono radio cassette player and played it all the time, as only an 8 year old can. My father borrowed the album and taped it for me - minus "Part 5" because he mistook the burbling synths at the start for a crackle on the LP. Two years later I heard an interview with Jarre on Radio 4 completely by accident, twiddling the dial and hitting "Equinoxe 5" in mid flow. I begged my father to buy me the tape of the album and he did and I took it everywhere, even to school. I also found that "Equinoxe 1" was being used as the music to "Holiday 79". I found a cassette of "Oxygene" and played both tapes all the time, even writing my own lyrics to them (which I still sing sometimes). On holiday in May 81, actually on my birthday, I saw an ad for "Mag Fields" in The Times, and bought it one Saturday morning in June, before our family went up to Usk to visit our cousins on a farm. This was the last time we visited the farm because I fell in a hole of pig swill and nearly drowned, so my first listen to "Mag Fields" was while I was having a bath trying desperately to clean myself up. Traumatic? Only a bit... "Concerts in China" was given to me as a present for Xmas 82 as the first record to play on my Sanyo music centre (see my post on the "Junk Culture" thread about that.) "Zoolook" was bought with a WH Smiths voucher won in an IBM inter-schools computer competition in which I came second in South Wales in Autumn 84, but that again was all traumatic due to other circumstances involving my diary being stolen in school and oh you can imagine what chaos that caused... Anyway, that's why JMJ's music - certainly the early stuff - means so much to me. It's knitted into the fabric of my life. By the late 80s there were other things happening and his music was less important to me, but for the early stuff he wins. Each piece of music has its own memory - I used to sing "Mag Fields" in my head during PE lessons (I sat out PE in school because of my eyes) while watching which ever girl I had a crush on jumping over gym horses. That reads like a fantasy. It wasn't. That's enough. Sorry to ramble and get personal as ever.

And I didn't really talk about the music either... Later...

i'll prob come around on this at some point and see the light but jarre mostly sounds like somebody has set up a sequencer and is aimlessly browsing a bunch of presets. listening to that link milton posted upthread, finding it seriously lightweight and humourless, not liking orchestral style arrangements. so little movement in the sounds for a 'synth god' he really doesn't get much mileage out of the gear. motif with one cheesy sound lasts for a bit, another mofif floats in, some dramatic noises, a burble or two, on to the next section.

he seems to set his (incredible) gear up so it does *exactly* what it was designed to do and then feeds it some really average/obvious control information. blehh. not for me. you could do most of this with a few andromeda A6s- easily.

i did quite like the bit when the beat first came in. now he's doing that famous bit, they can really groove these guys lol(!)

again, i feel like i'm probably wrong about all of this and something will shift in my tastes and i'll be the biggest JMJ fan ever, but not really getting it yet.

anyway, i like a bunch of stuff vangelis has done, adore the aphrodites child record, the cosmos soundtrack is really cool. the slidey soundproofing doors from our studio came from his old studio in london. so he gets bonus points for that.

Rob M I loved that post a whole whole lot, great stories.

Me too

@ Crackle Box, you got it backwards, the seminal JMJ records were made before presets existed. If anything, later presets were modelled after the sounds JMJ brought into the public consciousness.

Listening to some Vangelis this morning, he's kind of a CS-80 genius, every track has some sparkle motion that is unique to that synth. BUT it all sounds sooo square

My much-older gay English half-brother brought over Zoolook on a cassette and dubbed it for me, I was 10. We listened to "Ethnicolour" and tried to decipher all the lyrical fragments. "Eyesore eyesore! Duh-yi-yuh-yi! Where's my liquorice allsorts?" etc. I didn't hear JMJ again until I watched Gallipoli.

xposts

yeah i'm aware of that but it doesn’t really help me like it. i grew up reading Future Music magazine and Sound On Sound and his music reminds me of all the **FREE SAMPLES WITH THIS MONTHS ISSUE** and the cheesy demos that got sent in by synth nerds. there was a bit that i really quite liked then flicked over to the youtube and somebody/he was gurning away with a ribbon controller, which of course, should be awesome, but it just wasn’t.

anyway, def going to investigate more, ur favourite youtubes are welcome. I’ll come around to it, I usually do when I have these kind of reactions to things, could never get into tangerine dream, my gf played me phaedra without telling me what it was and it blew my mind, massive TD fan now…

gf otm

Zoolook really is a cool record. I mean it is full-on digital hell from the 1980's, but nobody really did vocal sampling quite like that.

Still though I guess I have to vote Vangelis, if only for the records that Milton mentioned. I remember choking up when I first heard "My Face in the Rain", what a beautiful tune that is! Also he was a massive influence on one of my favorite songwriters ever (Susumu Hirasawa) so I have to give him the nod for that alone!

"Zoolook" is crazy really - all those vocal samples as a rhythmic bed or lead instruments, and then a funky as all hell rhythm section of Marcus Miller and Yogi Horton, and some guitar solos by Adrian Belew too. JMJ would never make a record as adventurous again, and that's a shame.

do you JMJ fans like that BT guy?

before they shut the internet down entirely everyone itt needs to rove out and DL themselves one of the extended fan-assembled versions of the Blade Runner soundtrack. There lots of variants, it's kind of a constant arms race to assemble the best sequence/squeeze the best sound of of the sources etc. Just look for one that was assembled in the last couple of years. Mine is the length of one long CD and completely rules, it's like having a whole 'nother record of Another Green World instros.

Watched that Jarre "Oxygene in Your Living Room" thing on YT. Amazing machinery but what a drag to watch/listen to. And this coming from a fan of " Oxygene"! The whole thing comes across as an exercise in gear preening.

Jon - if you can ...ahem ... email me leads for that version I would be eternally grateful!

This is some amazing footage. To my ears the music here has never been released. The last 5-10 minutes are especially pretty.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9iwEy9esXw

there's lots of info on blade runner sdtrk wiki re: the bootlegs...

okay JMJ "diva" is a keeper, amazing! hints of laurie anderson, czukay, talking heads. i love it

is there a burnt out balearic re-edit, there really should be

CJV, the place I got it from is a private board with logins etc and i can't log in to it at work. I will look when I am at home and still if they still got de lynx.

@ Crackle Box, it is actual Laurie Anderson on that track

Hmm I gave JMJ's big 90s hit Chronologie another listen this morning and it's better than I remember. Chronologie IV is very charming

Is any of Vangelis's post-Blade Runner stuff any good? (so like, post 1982?)

The Bounty sdtrk is good but is only officially available in a (apparently quite faithful) rerecording by a synth maven dude.

Yeah - "Mask" and "Soil Festivities" are wonderful. His albums with Irene Pappas (sp?) are majestic. I like some of "Direct" as well.

Is any of Vangelis's post-Blade Runner stuff any good? (so like, post 1982?)

― frogbs, Tuesday, March 12, 2013 12:59 PM (18 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The City is my favorite vangelis record

i'll prob come around on this at some point and see the light but jarre mostly sounds like somebody has set up a sequencer and is aimlessly browsing a bunch of presets.

presets or not, this is pretty much how i feel about jarre. i can enjoy it for nostalgia's sake but to me it all *sounds* pedestrian.

This is a great recent(ish) Vangelis cut. The album 'Voices' doesn't reach the peaks (geddit) of this but is still worth checking out. Used to advertise washing machines in the UK.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OH0lWZ_Qgg&hd=1

Jarre is notorious about presets. he's always had the budget to be an early adopter, amassed a ridiculously huge arsenal of gear, and then just uses the things straight out of the box. here is a particularly hilarious youtube of someone easily recreating an entire Zoolook-era outtake from a single Fairlight library disc: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1bFY_kzWtQ

and his melodies are almost hilariously simple at times, but let's face it when you first get a new instrument, one of the first things you do is play scales just to establish a frame of reference

the appeal of that 30th anniversary concert for me is almost precisely because it's a museum piece, meticulously and slavishly recreated. this is probably not most people's cup of tea; there are no musical surprises. but as a student of 70's electronics, actually getting closeups of each of those modular beasts is unavoidably gratifying. these instruments are both huge and fragile, and so I have a bit of emotional investment in seeing a work that everyone has related to only as a studio recording get a live performance realization half-a-lifetime later

That's why I liked the video too. You just don't get to see that equipment outside of poorly recorded vintage videos scattered around Youtube. Sound quality is good too.

As far as Jarre's composition skills - ultimately this is why I prefer Vangelis, as Jarre sometimes had that feel of a dude who just didn't put much thought into what he was composing, just that he wanted to capture a certain mood. I feel like he'd be a good jingle writer! But deeply emotional stuff like, say, the second half of Animeaux...forget about it

well to be fair the same criticism could be leveled at a lot of Papa's stuff too

I'm 2 minutes into that 30 minute long 'Shirtless Vangelis In The Studio' clip Jay Vee posted with the women and the bass drums and yeah this is just making the entire concept of a vote pointless

Papa = Maurice? I always feel like his melodies are too damn bizarre to be jingle-y. Jingles from a very harmonically perverse universe perhaps.

Maurice and JM together would have been formidable. Papa's command of percussion forces plus son's facility with synths. MJ was always pretty clunky in his employment of electronics (exception: Year of Living Dangerously which imo is really fucking moody and cool)

all I remember from the Year of Living Dangerously soundtrack is when they drop Vangelis' l'Enfant (by Papa I meant Papathanassíou)

but yeah Lawrence of Arabia > Dreamscape

The 'preset problem' affected a lot of musicians in the 80s tbh, and can't just be placed on Jarre. I think this was mentioned in the "Junk culture" thread where the title track's main bed was shown to be an Emulator preset also used by Vangelis on the "Blade runner" soundtrack. Yes, synths were harder to program in the 70s and that helped make the sounds more original. Jarre was lucky to get to presets early - as mentioned, he was an early adopter - so he didn't appear to be as cliched as others following him. And I don't care if "Moon machine" is all presets, I still love it, it's what you do with 'em at the end of the day that matters.

I must admit I don't find his music trite or unemotional, but he really should use minor keys more often. Loved the "Oxygene" performance for all the same reasons as Milton above - to see those instruments in detail in one place making that music is lovely for me.

This happened in the 60's too, with the mellotron! An early Crimson song had the same intro as "Rocky Raccoon" but it turns out that it was a preset.

My problem with Jarre is that he seems to be quite limited as a composer - he does catchy, jingle like melodies well, the occassional rumba, and a lot of long, atmospheric overture like pieces. After Equinoxe, there would be the 'epic' synth piece with a bunch of slap bass, which I felt never quite meshed. I haven't heard past Revolutions so maybe he learned a few new tricks.

There is way more to write on this topic than I have the mental capacity to right now but suffice it to say that what Jarre may lack in melodicism (and that's debatable) he more than makes up for in sound design. Say what you will about slap bass but Zoolook--"Ethnocolour" in particular--is positively peerless.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Capitaine-- I sent you an ilxmail!

Thx Jon - just responded!

Playing "The concerts in China" right now - I had forgotten just how grand (in every sense) "Fishing junks at sunset" is. A really lovely amalgam of the Chinese orchestration and his own music.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

lol honestly can't remember how I voted

I don't think I did!

Hahaa I voted and can't remember how I voted either! I guess the consensus is that Jarre is marginally better.

Surprising result! I didn't vote because I don't know enough JMJ but I have heard his early (pre-Oxygene) stuff and it's not very good.

Nonetheless, Vangelis deserved to win for the 2nd side of "L'Apocalypse des animaux" alone