“WITH 360 AND MULTI-CHANNEL, YOU CAN GO INSIDE THE MUSIC…”

classical. While their music is maybe not that popular these days, the way that they defined the grammar and vocabulary of contemporary music, and the way we’re producing music now, is the key.

“Whether it’s hip-hop or rock or electro or techno, we’re all integrating noises into our music. These guys were at the origin of all this by saying ‘okay, we could mix the sound of a bird with a clarinet, or the sound of a washing machine with percussion’. This was totally crazy back then, and nowadays it’s a common approach to music production.”

Oxymore - which has been cut in stereo, binaural, and Atmos - comes from the word oxymoron: the idea of joining two elements which have nothing to do with each other to create something unexpected; that, Jarre insists, is what the roots of electronic music is all about.

“Electronic music started with people like Karlheinz Stockhausen in Germany stealing some filters off oscillators from radio stations made for maintenance, not made for music, and making music with them. The same goes with recording – noises from nature, cities, or the human body have been mixed with orchestral sounds or electric instruments. This is an oxymoronic approach in itself, so I thought it could be quite cool to conceive an entire album around this concept.

“When I did Oxygène (Jarre’s third studio album, released in 1976), I had no references because electronic music was really only just beginning. My references back then were more linked to movies or paintings than music. With Oxymore it was the same; I composed music for the first time not in stereo, but in multichannel 360.

“I learned from studying some of these great pioneers that stereo doesn’t exist in nature. When I’m talking to you, I’m talking to you in mono, or when a bird is singing it is mono; it’s the environment around us and our human ears which create our perspective of the audio, and ironically the audio technology today is allowing us to go back to a very natural way of listening to music.”

So we’ve essentially been compromising, listening to music in stereo for so long?

“For centuries, we have had a 2D relationship with music. When you are composing for a symphonic orchestra you have the violin on one side, the percussion in the centre, and the winds on the other side,” Jarre explains. “In a studio, we’ve had two speakers in front of us; at concerts, we’ve had the stereo PA system in front of us. It’s the same relationship that a painter has with a canvas. But with 360 and multichannel, these days you can go inside the music – it’s almost like the difference between a painting and a sculpture, in a sense.”

We chat about the challenges and indeed trends in releasing new music today. Although this isn’t yet the case across Europe, certainly within the major labels here in the UK, after completing a stereo production and mix (as standard), that song or piece of music will more than likely need to be re-mixed and released in an immersive format. Universal Music Group has been a huge adopter of this process after partnering with Apple on its Spatial Audio initiative.

As forward-thinking - and successful - as this has proven so far, there is still a long way to go: on the one hand, there is a huge demand for these mixes, but on the other, there is a serious lack of education in immersive mixing full stop, and there are very few ‘great’ Atmos mix rooms. It ultimately means that immersive mixes can differ in quality in sometimes volcanic proportions.

Jarre acknowledges this, pauses for a few seconds, and offers a creative curveball:

“For me, that process [of taking stereo and making it immersive] is a little bit like putting colours on a black and white movie. The game-changer is actually to conceive and compose the music from scratch in 360, which is of course something totally different in terms of the composition and production process, because suddenly you have to deal with a completely different space. I’ve always been obsessed since my early days with the relationship between music and space, and suddenly to be able to do an orchestral arrangement in space is like putting audio planets around your head. This is what Oxymore is all about.

“With 360, we as musicians still have a lot of limitations: Dolby Atmos, for example, was designed and developed as a device for the movie industry. Spectators can have the dialogue in front of them with the music and sound effects on each side and at the back. As musicians, we are much more egocentric; we need to have an equidistant relationship between everything, so actually even Dolby Atmos these days is not made for us.

“So for Oxymore, we actually had to adapt a technology not made for us. We’ve seen this never ending story of musicians hijacking technology which has not necessarily been developed for them, but then creating their own style from happy accidents that occur as a result of this ‘hijacking’ approach.”