Who would refuse to listen to the album that surrounded your youth, your childhood or even your entire life. The electronic scene did not yet exist in 70’s.
Electronic music was still considered avant-garde and provided a cultural shock. There was only a group of fans and some individuals.
For the rest of my life I heard nothing but electronic music. The energy was electric, I had no option, the combination between the music and the movement was euphoric.
I have come a long way but my music preference has not changed.
I have been to Trance parties in remote areas of the World, grooved to some Drum and Bass in Neuss, and chilled to Progressive House in Marbella.
It is a universal thing … there is nowhere I have been that does not have a version of electronic music. Festivals all over the World feature DJ’s, and they continue to draw crowds in the hundreds of thousands.
Music can be a spiritual experience. Music can be so many things to so many people.
Oxygène was first released in France on December 5th, 1976. It became a bestseller and was Jarre’s first album to achieve mainstream success.
It was highly influential in the development of electronic music.
His inspiration for Oxygène came from a painting by the artist Michel Granger, which showed the Earth peeling to reveal a skull.
A skull stands out from the Earth, an image in which Michel Granger deals with the threat of the Earth in a drastic and direct way.
The Earth and the Human beings have since been at the centre of the entire work of the French painter.
Jarre obtained the artist’s permission and the presentation was sold millions of times over 40 years ago as cover of the legendary study album.
What I like about this picture is that it isn’t necessarily pessimistic. It rather poses the question: Where are we going?
Oxygen makes up about one-fifth the volume of Earth‘s atmosphere today and is a central element of life as we know it. But that was not always the case.
Oxygen did not begin to accumulate in the atmosphere as oxygen gas until well into the planet’s history.
What the atmosphere was like prior to oxygen’s rise is a puzzle that Earth scientists have only begun to piece together.
Earth coalesced a little more than 4.5 billion years ago. Things had settled down by 3.8 billion years ago, when rocks appear in the geologic record.
By 2.7 billion years ago, a new kind of life had established itself: microbes, which were capable of using the sun’s energy to convert carbon dioxide and water into food with oxygen as a waste product.
These organisms became so abundant that by 2.4 billion years ago the oxygen they produced began to accumulate in the atmosphere.
The effect was profound. High in the atmosphere, the oxygen formed a shielding layer of ozone, which screened out damaging ultraviolet radiation from the sun and made Earth‘s surface habitable.
Nearer the ground, the presence of breathable oxygen opened a door to the evolution of whole new forms of life.
One of the enduring marvels of life on Earth is that, by producing oxygen, the earliest organisms created conditions that enabled subsequent, more complex forms of life to thrive.