Jean Michel Jarre
Equinoxe

When it comes to electronic music, Jean Michel Jarre must be considered an authentic milestone. Beyond the artistic value, his greatest merit was to "commercialize" electronic music. Until his arrival, synthesizers marked the great experience of German cosmic music, thus remaining in the realm of cultured avant-garde. Jarre liberated synths from this golden prison, gifting the masses with the astonishing sounds (for the time) of the most advanced sequencers. To succeed in his endeavor, he abandoned the suite format (necessary for the Germans) for a more conventional song format, accentuated catchiness, and introduced the danceable element with this album. Jarre had no metaphysical pretensions like the cosmic couriers; he only wanted to provide, as he himself admits in the CD booklet, a demonstration of the great possibilities of the latest developments in the electronic field (we are in 1978).

The previous "Oxygene", a mythical album that everyone, even subconsciously, has in their memory due to it being plundered by TV themes and services, paved the way for "Equinoxe" where Jarre definitively found the path to follow. Composed of eight purely instrumental parts, interconnected, it offers 38 minutes of French " grandeur ", but above all, it proves that regardless of the less "noble" purpose of the operation (still criticized today by the most extreme avant-gardists, and admittedly by a certain somewhat snobbish critique), Jarre was a virtuoso of synths. The sounds he manages to shape are truly remarkable for the period, typically analog and beautiful. Every time you listen to the album, you realize a different sound layer that was previously ignored, demonstrating the complexity of the project. In short, "commercial" electronic music but done as it should be. It starts with the almost new-age ambient watercolor of part 2, which continues with classical influences in the third, until you're swept away by the irresistible ride of the famous part 4, and the danceable rhythm of the equally famous fifth. The hammering notes of part 6, which seem to come out of a vintage video game, prelude the episode where the French spirit emerges the most: the exhilarating crescendo vortex of part 7, a triumphant and intoxicating melody worthy of being the star of his most famous show at Place De La Concorde, with half a million Parisians in delirium. The show, (because the best definition for his electronics is "spectacular") ends under the rain of a sad 50s orchestral band, rigorously synthetic.

Epic album, it paved the way for a "consumer" genre that benefitted many artists, most of whom lacked the talent of the Frenchman, who later experimented with solutions not always up to his fame.