Jean-Michel Jarre – Chronologie (1993)

Jean-Michel Jarre's music belongs to my childhood, because my father was really into synthesiser music when I was growing up. At the same time, it always sounded like the future. Even now when I listen to his albums, there's something extraordinarily futuristic about his music. Many older people than me have said that what was amazing about 80's music was that it all sounded like the music of the future. I can really see what they mean when we're talking about synthesiser music. This album is more recent and in my opinion, not quite as good as Jarre's late 70's albums or 80's albums, but this is still quite nostalgic for me as my father had this album when I was young and I remember listening to it quite a lot while playing Hero Quest, a fantasy board game, with my friends, because we wanted something instrumental.



In the 90's, most of the electronic music had fast tempo and it was mainly made for dancing. I never cared about that kind of music, but this kind of ambient space music I really liked. This is still the case in many ways. I don't like EDM or techno, but I do like the more melodic than rhythmic electronic sounds. Even today, my favourite electronic bands are from the late 70's. Along with Jarre, I really like Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream and Tomita.

The art on this album cover seems to scream late 80's and early 90's. This is the time when all the kids were wearing Benetton outfits in neon colours and people had neon headbands when they were running. I'm too young to really remember that time really vividly, but when I look at old photos from that time, I can't help but wondering what the hell everyone was thinking.

Like pretty much all other Jarre albums, also Chronologie is basically one long symphony played with futuristic electronic instruments. These kinds of albums probably tried to function as the futuristic modern equivalent of classical music, because certainly the structure of the songs was quite similar to symphonies. There are highs and lows and fast and slow tempos on the album, but they can't really be separated into individual songs. The album is a whole that needs to be listened to from the beginning to the end. Because of this, it's a shame that there's a gap between the songs on youtube and this album is not on Spotify.

There are some really massive sounds on this album. In the part 2 there are some choral sounds along with heroic movie-style action music. This kind of sounds like a well-produced version of Nintendo's Megaman soundtrack. The film-like qualities of the music were probably why me and my friends wanted to listen to this kind of music while playing our fantasy games.

For some reason, none of the really well-known synthesiser bands seem to be from the English-speaking world that dominates otherwise the music world. I guess without lyrics, other countries stood better chance. Jarre is from France and there were numerous electronic artists from Germany, Japan and Greece.

I haven't listened to this album in a long time, but now that I listen to it, it definitely sounds a lot better than I remembered. I think now I'm more prepared to give Jarre's later work some credit as well. For quite a few years I thought the late 70's synth music was the only stuff that wasn't too cheesy.

Listen to the album on Youtube.