Zoolook

Zoolook is the seventh studio album by the French electronic musician and composer Jean-Michel Jarre, released in November 1984 by Disques Dreyfus. Much of the music is built up from samples of singing and speech in 25 different languages recorded and edited in the Fairlight CMI digital sampling synthesizer. The album spawned two singles: the title track and "Zoolookologie".

Composition and recording

Zoolook was greatly influenced by Jarre's former mentor Pierre Schaeffer and Schaeffer's musique concrète, taking samples from everyday life and human voices in 25 different languages from all over the world. The sample-based approach, which had been initiated on Les Chants Magnétiques (1981) and continued on Music for Supermarkets (1983), was expanded on this album. Some fragments were recorded digitally by Jarre and then played back and edited on the Fairlight CMI. This process was done together with Frederick Rousseau for three months.

I've always been involved in ethnic music, though I thought the way a lot of people have been using ethnic music was a little superficial. Sometimes it works, like the Brian Eno stuff, it worked the first time, but for me what was more interesting was not making a particular statement about recording in Africa or in China, but taking some sounds and having exactly the same attitude as when you were in front of a Moog 55 or a modular system, replacing the oscillators with a bank of actors or people, treating them through the Fairlight or the EMS synth, and establishing an orchestration using only voices.

Some of the vocals were recorded during Jean-Michel's travels, while others are instead the result of his work with Xavier Bellanger, a French ethnologist who during his travels recorded "a large collection of tapes". For this album, Jarre used synthesizers like the Moog 55, ARP 2600, some by EMS, the LinnDrum machine, the Yamaha DX7, the Matrisequencer 250 designed by French sound engineer Michel Geiss for Equinoxe (1978), and the E-mu Emulator.