Les Chants Magnetiques

Track Listings

1. Chants Magnetiques, Pt. 1

2. Chants Magnetiques, Pt. 2

3. Chants Magnetiques, Pt. 3

4. Chants Magnetiques, Pt. 4

5. Chants Magnetiques, Pt. 5

Les Chants Magnetiques,Jean-Michel Jarre,Dreyfus,Electronic,New Age / Meditation

Tracks:

Les Chants Magnetiques Part 1
Les Chants Magnetiques Part 2
Les Chants Magnetiques Part 3
Les Chants Magnetiques Part 4
Les Chants Magnetiques Part 5

Customer Reviews:

still good.......2007-06-10

Electronic tunes at their best. Listen to this and chill. I still chill with this after all these years.

Number Four's a classic.......2006-11-07

This is Jarre's fourth album (the third being Les Concerts en Chine), but it's offically the third STUDIO album - hence the misconception. As others have pointed out, it's Jarre's first foray into digital synthesizer, but that doesn't make it any less a substantial piece of work. And yeah, there is the odd-ball piece of circus organ music at the end, but as any serious Jarre fan knows, he did that because he always had a thing about circus organs when he was a kid. He clearly explains that in his documentary on Oxygene Moscow. Don't rip the album because you personally didn't like or agree with his inspiration and chioce of a last track. find out the reasons WHY he did that. It's not like they guy just decided he needed filler material...

Chants Magnetiques.......2006-03-14

Chants Magnetiques~ Jean-Michel Jarre is a good album but it is not anywhere close to his first two albums. Oxygene and Equinox are much more consistent. Magnetic Fields has some nice tracks but the keyboard sounds are terrible compared to the first two albums. I know that this was one of the first albums to use digital keyboards and for the most part it sounds like using protoype keyboards and that is not a good thing. Jarre is here steering a bit too much in the realm of art for arts sake and it does sound a bit too avantgarde at times, but still nowhere close to the zoolook disaster that he releases some years later. On the whole a pretty decent album that lacks consistency and could have been so much better but it is alright and gets 4 stars.

Superb followup to Oxygene and Equinoxe.......2005-10-01

Jean Michel Jarre emphasizes his wonderful creativity in Music Concrete. His beautiful electronic melodies are enhanced even more by articulate environmental sounds and voices. A definite 5 stars, minus 1 star for the corny Kimball organ music on the final track.

Third great album by Jarre.......2004-07-01

Le Chantes Magnetiques (Magnetic Fields) was really Jarre fifth or so album, not third, since he released a couple albums before Oxygene in the early '70s (for example, Deserted Palace in 1972), and singles as far back as 1970 ("La Cage"). But since most people never heard anything he's done before Oxygene (because those albums are so hard to come by), most simply regard Oxygene as his debut. Magnetic Fields continues more or less in the same vein as Oxygene and Equinox, except now more emphases is put on rhythm. He also got himself some new digital equipment, in this case a Fairlight, which was the first digital sampler. Made in Australia, and introduced in 1979, it was basically a keyboard with a computer-type monitor and a light pen. The rest of the synthesizers on this album are actually analog (like then-state-of-the-art polyphonic, as well as his old stuff from the '70s), as the first true digital synthesizer wouldn't appear until 1983 with the infamous Yamaha DX-7 (which Jarre happily used starting with Zoolook). Aside from the Fairlight and polyphonic synths, he was still using his ARP 2600 and EMS synths, although he seemed to cut back on his Eminent (an organ-like instrument with the sound of a string synth, as heard on Oxygene). The album starts off with "Part 1". This was the very first time he ever did a side-length cut, and this piece succeeds. It's kinda strange that he'll be doing that in an era where many other acts, both electronic, and the few prog rock bands that survived to the 1980s, had pretty much given up on side-length cuts (in favor of more pop-oriented material). The classic Jarre sound is still there, with lots of emphasis on rhythm. "Part 2" gets bogged down by annoying electronic handclap sounds, while "Part 3" features some kalimba-like sounds (presumably from the Fairlight itself) while at the same time harkening back to the likes of Oxygene with the Eminent. But I always felt "Part 5 (The Last Rhumba)" was the album's real low-point. He seems to always fall flat when he tries to explore world music with his electronic style (for example the Caribbean steel-drum laced calypso influence of the first three cuts on En Attendant Cousteau aka Waiting For Cousteau). Here, of course, he's going for Latin music, Jarre style, that means entirely on electronic equipment, synthesizers and drum machines. Aside from the final cut, it's nice to see Jarre entering the new decade (the 1980s) without much problems. To me, this is his best '80s, but for those new to Jarre, start with Oxygene and Equinoxe.