Zoolook
// Released 1984 // Label: Disques Dreyfus //
Zoolook is the fifth album by Jean Michel Jarre, and released in 1984 on Disques Dreyfus. It makes extensive use of digital recording techniques and sampling. It is considered by many fans to be Jean Michel Jarre's most experimental album to date. Much of the music is built up from song and speech from over thirty different languages, together with other synthesizers, as well as more traditional instruments. Much of the tone of the album appears to be influenced by elements of musique concrète and by his time as a student of Pierre Schaeffer.
Parts of the album were reworkings of material that had already appeared as sections of the album Music For Supermarkets, released the previous year. Moon Machine, a track that later appeared on a flexidisc in Keyboard Magazine, the 12-inch release of Fourth Rendez-Vous, and the much later Images compilation album, was recorded for this album but not included.
It is one of the first Compact Discs labelled as DDD: Digitally recorded, mixed and mastered.
The voices heard on this album were based on recordings of speech and singing in numerous languages:
Aboriginal, Afghan, Arabic, Balinese, Buhndi, Chinese, Dutch (Ethnicolor II - 3:15), English, Eskimo, French, German, Hungarian, Indian, Japanese, Malagasy, Malayan, Pygmy, Polish, Quechua, Russian, Sioux, Spanish, Swedish, Tibetan and Turkish.
Some later Polydor CD issues contain remixes of the originally released
versions of "Zoolook" and "Zoolookologie" (by
François Kevorkian), and reverse the positions of these two tracks
in the running order. The original versions were re-instated for the
remasters that appeared in the late 1990s after Jarre's move to Sony.

