Search - Jean-Michel Jarre :: Odyssey Through O2

Night-Driving

Christopher | Wengen-en-esprit | 03/02/2005

(4 out of 5 stars)

"With every window rolled down and the moonroof slid back, my car becomes a veritable wind tunnel barrelling through the backroads of Colorado. Blasting this album while tunnelling my way through the crisp air becomes a dream-like experience I can never forget. And I have a ton of these experiences with Jarre's music.

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My sister gave me this album as a birthday gift. Since I am, on the average, not a fan of remixes, I would have never picked this up unless it was given to me. In this case, however, Jarre's music is still there, and the re-mixers don't make a mockery of it, either.

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Tracks 1 through 12 (which remix different Oxygene pieces, not necessarily in order) flow together easily, becoming an eerie or thumping transcendent voyage, almost on an atomic level.

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After this, though, tracks 13 through 17 are a form of music that's too harsh and take forever to get anywhere. There's no flow, no symmetry. I feel the mixer was concentrating more on drum-beats while shoving the melodies into the background. The only exception to these tracks is 16, Apollo Four Forty's remix of Rendez-Vous 98, which isn't half bad. I've never heard the original mix.

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Included on this album is a *very* curious interactive and avant-garde music video program called JArKaos. Once installed on your computer, you listen to the music while tapping at your keyboard, thereby changing and morphing images on your screen. Not unlike a screensaver, really, but you can explore what each key or several held at the same time does. The back of the album claims "an infinite number of visuals" although I think I ran the program into the ground myself after several attempts at being prolific. The visuals themselves were created by students of SupInfoCom, a school for digital artists. You can learn more about them, at a very wacky website, here: http://www.supinfocom.fr/index.html

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By no means does this album replace Jarre. But I've grown fond of it for my own reasons."

3 1/2 stars actually

Christopher | 03/25/2001

(3 out of 5 stars)

"What you get here is other elecronica artists remixing Jarre's "Odyssey 7-13" album. Not a bad idea but not as good in execution either. Part of the problem is that Jarre is legendary, while the re-mixers may or may not become legend. Tangerine Dream had the right idea in doing the new mixes themselves. Basically what you get then, is what sounds like each re-mixer writing his own rhytm and beat, then "sampling" Jarre's work for the melody. Iamgine a more danceable Jarre, and you get the idea. Sure, I like it alright now, but will I in a year or so? The answer is an emphatic "maybe", thus 3 1/2 stars."