shadow wrote: Wed Sep 11, 2024 8:17 am
I'm sorry, but bringing the succes of those others purely down to Jarre is the most insane take I've seen in ages. You're telling me, that Vangelis, the man who made some insane bangers years before Jarre ever managed to do Oxygène owes his succes to Jarre?!
Vangelis did have success before Jarre, but we are talking about electronic music. Vangelis was an amazing musician, but to be totally honest, he is not an electronic musician the same way Jarre has always been. Vangelis came from the prog rock scene, he was a more traditional rock musician and then, of course many of these artists started to use synthesizers to achieve that experimental sound, Pink Floyd did the same. Then, in the 70s, Vangelis started to make more and more electronic tracks, so in that late 70s analog era, he actually was Jarre's colleague. But then came the digital era. Jarre already moved away from the analog sound in 1980 and started to use the Fairlight on Magnetic Fields, then came Music for Supermarkets, Zoolook, etc. and he never really looked back. Vangelis on the other hand never embraced the next step of electronica, he openly admitted it, he disliked making music with a computer, he said that he prefers real time composition. So eventually, his sound became less and less electronic and went to make that 'orchestral' or neoclassical stuff, which is not really my cup of tea, as I'm an electronic music fan. Just like Kraftwerk, he never embraced the electronic sound of the 80s, 90s, 2000s or 2010s.
Now here is the issue: while I do think Vangelis did fantastic music in that time when Jarre did Oxygene from a compositinal side and he definitely did experiment a lot in that early era, when you compare the actual sound design and of course the mixing, Jarre was just leagues ahead of Vangelis. The original mixing of Albeido 0.39 - and again, I love the music on this album - is simply a disaster compared to Oxygene. And the sound design is much more of its time than the timless sound of Oxygene. So from a technical side, Jarre was way better and when it comes to electronic music, sound really matters. And here, we see the real difference between Jarre and Vangelis. Vangelis criticised Oxygene for basically being too simple. Because he did not really understood that the focus was not on complex melodic structures or chord progressions, but on building a soundscape. He criticised Oxygene from a traditional musician point of view.
The truth is: Vangelis and Jarre had totally different approaches to music making and quite different personalities. Vangelis was a better piano player, a very skilled traditional musician, but when it comes to technical innovation, which is a key for someone who wants to keep up with the electronic music scene, Jarre was way ahead. And I can't blame Vangelis, again, he was a prog rock artist while Jarre already kept experimenting with a tape recorder as a child and then went to GRM. In terms of mentality, Vangelis was more like some of the older Jarre fans, an old school guy who does not use Ableton, L-ISA, an IPhone, does not have an IG, Tiktok or Discord and prefers the old ways. JMJ and Vangelis were really different in so many ways and they just happened to do somewhat similar thing in the late 1970s.
what can I say. 
