Every week, Time Travel conjures the ghosts of techno-futures past with selections from the dustiest corners of the WWW.
My friend Ana Roman turned me on to this cheeky video, "Zoolookology," by French synth maestro Jean Michel Jarre. Renowned for his heady analog synthesizer music and massive outdoor spectacles, Jarre was already crazy famous by the time this video debuted. In 1979, he played a Bastille Day blowout in Paris' Place de la Concorde that drew an audience of one million—his first world record of many—and was the first Western musician invited to play in post-Mao China in 1981. Zoolook, the album this song appears on, is considered Jarre's most experimental to date; it was widely promoted for having been recorded, mixed and mastered digitally. To explore these new digital recording and editing techniques, Jarre traveled around the world recording speech and singing in 25 different languages, including Balinese, Japanese, Sioux and Tibetan. The recordings were then brought to New York where Jarre composed the album, working with musicians like the jazz guitarist Marcus Miller, Adrian Belew (of the progressive rock band King Crimson), R&B drummer Horton Yogi and performance artist Laurie Anderson.The video for Zookologie had just as much fun with its digital effects as the music did with all that sampling. By including clips of seemingly random objects in motion, the video reveals the nature of the sounds being played. Models replace synthesizers and mouth the notes as if they were lyrics. Everyone is barraged by flashing animated shapes, and poor Jean Michel gets smeared in the end!