Welcome to the new BlahBlahCafe!

Having trouble registering? You can contact us at the "Contact us" link at the bottom of the page.

Le Vif magazine, 2022


Post Posted Fri Oct 21, 2022 11:12 pm
Dr_Jones


User avatar
Posts: 3729
Location: Leiden, Netherlands
Likes given: 194
Likes received  : 402

https://www.levif.be/culture/musique/av ... -metavers/

With his new album Oxymore, Jean-Michel Jarre ventures into the metaverse
bc2cbcfcc1c773cac30938755cccb27516927bdf.jpg
With his new album, Oxymore, Jean-Michel Jarre dives into the virtual universe and immersive sound. This was the occasion for a meeting with Løyd, the first Belgian DJ to have played in the metaverse.

At 74, Jean-Michel Jarre continues to look forward. His new album, Oxymore, was conceived in binaural sound (a technique that restores natural listening in three dimensions) and will serve as a pretext to venture into the metaverse. It is also an opportunity to pay tribute to Pierre Henry, "one of the two founding Pierre of musique concrète" with Pierre Schaeffer (see box below). "I was supposed to work with him for my album Electronica, but he fell ill and died in 2017." The collaboration will not take place. However, Pierre Henry's widow entrusted Jarre with a series of sounds from her husband's collection. They can be found today in Oxymore. A record that pays as much tribute to the past as it does to the future: hence the idea of organising a meeting between Jean-Michel Jarre and a producer of the new generation, Løyd, alias Maxence Lemaire, the first Belgian DJ to have played in the metaverse.

Born in 1995, Maxence was only 4 years old when the French pope of synthesizers performed in front of the pyramids of Giza for one of the concert-events that have marked his career. "It was when I started going out to clubs, at Fuse, at the age of 16, that I discovered electronic music. After that, I came across the Ableton software and very soon I got into production. After studying sound engineering, Løyd found himself teaching electronic music history. "So, of course, I know about Oxygène", the phenomenon album released in 1976, the first by Jean-Michel Jarre. He sums up: "I have lived through at least three moments of disruption: the birth of electronic music, the advent of the Internet and today, perhaps the most important of all, the development of the metaverse.
8514cf949a9b2b4be8d6614f81db28fb0e4fb524.jpg
Less is Oxymore
For the man who has just been appointed in France to head the "immersive creation" commission within the National Cinema Centre (CNC), the metaverse has all the makings of a new Eldorado - and not just a musical one, either, as a recent McKinsey report predicts that this "upgraded" version of the Net will generate up to 5,000 billion dollars by 2030...

With Jarre, this dive starts with the sound. For Oxymore, he composed directly with the idea of creating "3D" pieces, giving the illusion, through headphones, of being immersed in the music. Is this a pipe dream at a time when the younger generation has learned to be satisfied with listening to music on platforms not necessarily renowned for their sound quality? "Yes, and at the same time why deny ourselves progress? asks Løyd. Besides, we are only at the beginning of the upheaval. When we went from mono to stereo, people didn't question it," adds Jean-Michel Jarre. Immersive listening is the next step.
What interests me is to use the tools that correspond to the society in which I live.
Jean-Michel Jarre
By trying to get as close as possible to the "real", don't we risk provoking an effect of strangeness in the listener, as with certain hyperrealistic sculptures à la Duane Hanson or certain images with such a high definition that they destabilise? It reminds me of the early cinema-goers, who would stand aside when they saw the train coming into the station, thinking it was going to come out of the screen," says Løyd. It's a matter of habit. Having played in the metaverse, I have to admit that we are still far from a faithful reproduction of reality. I've done a DJ set in Decentraland: it's a lot of fun, but visually it's still very rudimentary.
68a3c8ec290d44194a251b25c2ae58ec3091ee34.jpg
Jean-Michel Jarre confirms: "We are really at the dawn of immersive techniques. This has not stopped him from imagining his own virtual universe, called Oxyville. "I like to play with constraints. Basically, today, we work with cubes. But what artistic movement is linked to this cubic aspect? Constructivism. Hence a city, a bit between Metropolis and Sin City, in black and white, because it requires less data. The idea is to propose a rather minimalist but aesthetic environment, which diverts the limitations and succeeds in exploiting the accidents, like glitches (editor's note: the image which blurs during live performances), a bit like Princess Lea in Star Wars. This can be very funny, playful, but also simply beautiful."
Having played in the metaverse, I must admit that we are still far from a faithful reproduction of reality." Løyd
Still, one can't help but find it comical to see the pioneer of mega-concerts - whether in the Forbidden City or at the foot of the Eiffel Tower - taking refuge in the virtual. "What interests me is using the tools that correspond to the society in which I live. Today, we know that concerts that bring together large crowds pose a lot of problems, in terms of safety, the environment, etc. Since the Covid, I have been able to use the tools that correspond to the society in which I live. Since Covid, I even have the impression that we have changed the paradigm. I don't think, for example, that I'll ever give concerts like I used to. It's not better or worse. I just connect with my audience in a different way. Sometimes with people who would never have come to see me. Earlier this year we did a showcase in a beta version of Oxyville. At the end of the show, I had a chat with the avatars present, who, behind the screen, are still real people. One of them was a girl from Manchester who was very enthusiastic and had been dancing the whole night. As the conversation went on, I came to understand that she was a quadriplegic and that this was the first concert she had attended. That's what metaverse is all about..."


Crazy in the lab
In 1968, Jean-Michel Jarre was 20 years old. That was the moment when he left his rock group to join the GRM, the emblematic Groupe de recherche musicale, founded by Pierre Schaeffer. It was an "experimental laboratory" where "a spirit as fiery as it was dogmatic, halfway between Professor Tournesol, Doctor Who, Einstein and the Shadoks", he writes in his autobiography, Mélancolique Rodéo, published in 2019 (Robert Laffont). At the time, he inevitably came across Pierre Henry, another distinguished member of GRM, whose Messe pour le temps présent and his hit Psyché Rock have since become part of pop culture. In his own way, Oxymore pays tribute to the late master. He was the first person to explore the idea of spatializing sound, back in the late 1940s," Jarre insists. With Pierre Schaeffer, they made a huge contribution, much more than we think, to the way we make music today, the way we work with sound matter. I wanted to wink at them, to highlight this French thinking, and more broadly this aesthetic ambition stemming from continental Europe. Because the explosion of the metaverse, of immersive worlds, also comes from there.







  • 2020 Zoolook.nl
    Powered by phpBB forum software