3 posts tagged “jarre”
The MemoryMoog went out of tune, the same for the ARP; we had very little time to set up everything. I tried quickly the Moog Liberation (the portable keyboard) and it had a constant vibrato that I couldn’t stop. We tried everything and eventually Patrick succeeded to make it usable.
I decided to go on stage with a maximum of energy and ready to cope with anything and….. everything happened!
First of all the Egg chair did not turn properly, the arpegiator of the MemoryMoog was blocked, the ARP was out of tune and I had to retune each of its oscillators live, one AKS had no sound, I had to switch the power off and on to make it work, I had to re-pitch the flute sound constantly all along Oxy 2, the DigiSequencer was blocked and I had to reload the sequence for Variation 2 and play something else in the meantime, the percussive sequence on Oxy 5 was hard to start and the Eminent went crazy on Oxy 13 during the encore..
But I felt Claude, Francis and Dominique really on the case full time and the audience totally with me from the beginning and it gave me the necessary energy to rage against the machines!
The Moog Liberation solo with its strange sound was probably one of the most inspired I’ve played since the beginning of the tour and the concert one of the most spectacular since the beginning as well.
The result was that the audience went really crazy screaming and doing the Ola at the end - we got the most animated standing ovation. ¡Viva Madrid…!
“When I got them out of storage and played them again, I realised something that even I had forgotten - that these analogue instruments are unique,” Jarre says. “Choosing to use these old synths instead of their modern equivalents is not a retro thing, it is not nostalgia, it is because technological progress has almost nothing to do with the quality of the instrument.”
“A violinist playing today would rather play a Stradivarius than any other instrument - a violin made 400 years ago. Many guitarists would say that the best electric guitars ever made were Gibson Les Pauls and Fender Telecasters from the 1950s or early 1960s. It is the same with these analogue synths.”
“They are totally irrational, unreasonable machines to work with. But this is the source of the inspiration,” Jarre says. “You could say I was taking the risk of all those accidents, but they are also sometimes the special moments. I did a few concerts in a nice theatre in Paris last year. One night, I had one Moog synthesizer that went quite berserk, but because the audience reacted to it - and because they realised then it was really live – it was fun. It creates something quite human, in an age when everything is so neat and clean.”
