‘OXYMORE’ is a musical journey where Pierre Henry's sounds interact with Jarre's new
composition in a sonic game of mirrors where the creator of Oxygene finds his inverted
doppelganger in ‘OXYMORE’ opening a vortex that sucks the listener into an anachronistic
back-and-forth where analogue and digital find a common playground. The project is inspired by
the French movement ‘musique concrete’ (concrete music) a genre of music composition that
utilises recorded sounds as raw material. The movement was first developed in the 1940s and
went on to revolutionise the way music is produced. With ‘OXYMORE’ Jarre takes this concept
and reinvents it with the tools of today. The album has been conceived as an immersive work in
one of the homes of musique concrete Radio France's ‘Maison de la Radio et de la Musique’
innovation studios (where Jarre first started experimenting with sounds at the start of his
career) in a multi-channel and 3D binaural version. Multi-channel binaural sound will
revolutionise how music is composed mixed and produced placing sounds and textures in space
in 360 degrees and can be easily experienced by any listeners with headphones. ‘OXYMORE’ is
the first commercial release of this stature which pushes the future of musical audio and sound
to this new level. Jarre said: This is a real moment of disruption for audio and sound
recording. OXYMORE is an attempt to illustrate and explore these new ways of linking technology
and music. Today we have technologies which allow us to explore composition in spatial audio
and that opens a whole new experience for us musicians in the creative process. For the
listener too it offers the experience of a more physical and natural way of listening to sound
and music. In real life our audio field is 360 degrees.” OXYMORE has been composed
specifically with the spatial audio experience at heart I even feel that the stereo mix is
even wider itself and that it has gained more space in the process. I’m convinced that this is
how music will be composed and produced in the future. The emotion also for the listener is a
huge next level jump like when we moved from mono to stereo.”
