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Dan Deacon – America
Deacon's last album, 2010's Bromst, found the composer turned electro–prankster–maverick caught in two minds. Desperate to shed the madcap-eccentric tag he had acquired by basically making very silly [multicoloured] techno, he had banned the word "quirky" and was bigging up his degree in electro-acoustic composition from the New York Conservatory. The result was an album straining at the leash of juvenilia and caught between his two personas, with each one apologising for the other.
But what a difference a couple of years make. Where Bromst felt occasionally uncomfortable making thoughtful music, America revels in it, the first half weaving tapestries of harsh electronica around fine orchestral loops to generate drones and endless harmonics that calmly mesmerise and terrorise. And while side A concentrates on the more thunderous end of Deacon's tastes to great effect, the album's real appeal lays in the second half's 22–minute suite of "America" songs, apparently inspired by Deacon's first trip outside the States in 2007. Although he retains plenty of deeply synthetic noise across each of the four movements, Deacon scores it for a chamber orchestra, and in doing so laces the electronic savageness with wonderful melancholy and delicacy, and the result is like Fuck Buttons filtered through Aaron Copland and Steve Reich at their most bucolic. An idiosyncratic, heroic treat.
Jean Michel Jarre – Oxygène
In 1976 no one had really heard of Jean Michel Jarre. Few, apart from one or two disparate souls and some Kraftwerk fans, had heard the sound of synthesisers, unless it was during a 20-minute solo provided by the likes of Rick Wakeman or Keith Emerson. Then came an attractive Frenchman with his ambient chillout music by way of musique concrète.
Oxygène is essentially classical music played on synthesizers. This might not sound instantly attractive or something that might be popular. And yet it has proved to be both, selling over 12 million copies, being the basis for much that followed electronically in music and launching a career which has seen Jarre perform before many of the biggest concert gatherings on earth. But why?
For me the essential attraction of this album is that it is just good, well-thought-out music. Jarre is both a synthesist and a thoughtful musician. He takes care to formulate each sound precisely. He realises he is creating a whole from organic parts and not just composing ditties. The work stands as a whole piece in six movements. The intrinsic warmth of the instruments he is using (which encompasses such classic instruments as the Arp 2600, Moog Minimoog and EMS VCS 3) shines through and Jarre makes good use of the tools at his disposal. That he even integrates the basic Korg MiniPops drum machine, a simplistic tool at best, is all to his credit.
This album is, then, warm, atmospheric and ambient. One can easily close one's eyes and drift off for its 40 minutes and be taken to another place. Jarre introduces synthesisers as living, breathing instruments that are alive, sentient, almost intrinsically biological in nature. If Kraftwerk present a robotic side to synthesisers in The Man-Machine then, with Oxygène, Jarre is presenting something very immanent, very human. To do that with a collection of electrical components, which is all any synthesiser really is, marks out an album that is very special indeed.
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