Categories: Festivals

Jean-Michel Jarre To Perform At Sónar 2016

A pioneer and a titan of electronic music since his groundbreaking debut album 'Oxygene', the French producer, musician and composer Jean-Michel Jarre will perform at Sónar for the first time this coming June 17, 2016.

Following a career spanning four decades, Jarre recently released ‘Electronica Part One: The Time Machine’, his first (double) studio album since 2007, on which he invited and collaborated with fifteen artists with whom he feels he shares a common electronic music DNA. Among those to have participated were reference points for electronic music including Vince Clarke, John Carpenter, Laurie Anderson and Tangerine Dream with Edgar Froese; prominent and established artists such as Massive Attack’s Robert "3D" Del Naja, Air and Moby, and more contemporary producers including M83, Boys Noize, Gesaffelstein and Fuck Buttons.

Jarre has already announced his follow-up, ‘Electronica Part Two’, which will feature collaborations with Jeff Mills, Julia Holter and Gary Numan to name but a few.

This year also sees the French artist’s return to the stage, and if his spectacular live shows in the past are anything to go by, his performance at Sónar by Night promises to be an absolutely unique experience.

A student of Pierre Schaeffer and Stockhausen, Jean-Michel Jarre’s successful career is marked by numerous milestones. Seminal albums ‘Oxygene’ and ‘Equinoxe’ are widely considered to be fundamental works in popular electronic music, a first reference in many households for the genre, and an inspiration for many of the next generation of tech savvy musicians. Jarre has also composed for fellow French artists, film and opera and collaborated with NASA in conducting what would have been the first live performance and recording in Space – had it not been for the explosion of the Challenger shuttle. He is also a UN Ambassador for UNESCO, President of CISAC, advocating for the protection of authors rights worldwide, and an activist for Human Rights.

Another of his great contributions to electronic music has been his visionary live shows, always imagined as sensory and technological experiences of colossal proportions, designed on city scale. Up to one million people attended shows in Paris and Houston and Jarre also performed in front of a Guinness-World Breaking audience of 3.5 million live in Moscow.

It can be said that over 30 years ago, Jarre was the first to invent and create the multimedia concert experience as we know it today, mapping buildings of cities around the world before anyone, lighting the skies with beams and pyrotechnics, offering his audience the ultimate, total immersion, sound and vision experience, which today is the ambition of every modern-day international festival.

Jean-Michel Jarre will join the likes of New Order, Flume, Four Tet and Laurent Garnier amongst many more at Sónar 2016. For more details, visit the official website of Sónar here.

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