Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
What is important to me is that the world understand that the problems of the Dead Sea concern not only residents of the region but humanity.
My mother, who was in the Resistance in the Second World War, passed away at 96, and it was like she was 60. I almost have to apologise for my genes.
My first break was in my home country with some pop songs that became hits, writing for French singers Christophe & Francoise Hardy, which became hits.
I consider music like a mirage in the desert. You're obsessed with the ideal piece of music, and the more you think you're getting closer, it's not there.
I have always been of the opinion that when those in power are promoting actions and ideals that risk harming or impeding us, people should stand up to this.
I collect robots. They're mainly Japanese, American, and especially Russian - small robots, big robots, and old toy robots made between 1910 and the Fifties.
Bands like Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream, who I respect, have a very robotic, dehumanised approach. They're almost an apology for machines. It's very German.
Some collaborators might join forces in certain cities or special concerts. I'm excited to share the stage with some prestigious people that I love and respect.
The paradox is that Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, and all the tech giants are bigger fans of music than some of the executives working at major record companies.
Sometimes, you try something, and it works in terms of success. That doesn't mean you like what is a hit. Sometimes you like the most obscure song on your album.
Back in the Seventies, we had a romantic, poetic vision of the future, like it was in the movie '2001: A Space Odyssey.' It felt as if everything was still ahead of us.
I think that you have to seriously have fun, or taking serious things in a light way and obviously, for me, before all, music is made of fun and pleasure and excitement.
I feel very privileged to have played China, and the pyramids, all these fantastic places, but it created a kind of smoke curtain between the audience and me as a musician.
What may not have value to you today may have value to an entire population, entire people, an entire way of life tomorrow. And if you don't stand up for it, then who will?
When I began making electronic music, the only thing I was thinking about was creating music that I really liked. I didn't think about what effect it would have; I was busy doing it.
All those ethereal string sounds on 'Oxygene IV' come from the VCS3. It was the first European synthesizer, made in England by a guy called Peter Zinoviev. I got one of the first ones.
The whole 'Electronica' project is about the ambiguous relationship we have with technology: on the one side, we have the world in our pocket; on the other, we are spied on constantly.
I used to play in rock bands. Then I went to the first school of electronic music in the world. It was in Paris headed by one of the most important people involved in electronic music.
I've always been involved in the visual aspect of my work, and moreover, it's very important in days where technology allows us to push the boundaries even more than when I started out.
I have played a few times in Barcelona, including the fantastic Olympic Stadium. It's undoubtedly one of my favourite cities in terms of the people, arts, food, architecture and design.
Saying that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say.
I was recently realizing that I've probably spent 80 percent of my life in studios! It's very difficult to do that and still have a private life; it's very difficult to do anything else.
I thought we had opposite visions of electronic music. Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk had a very robotic, mechanical approach. I had a more impressionist vision - a Ravel/Debussy approach.
When you have a young man, I mean, questioning the power in place for love of his country, not to say 'stop' but to say 'be careful about the abuse of technology,' I think it deserves to be promoted.
Governments can help support European music by promoting public awareness that when people take music that doesn't belong to them, they undermine the future of those very artists whose work they enjoy.
Electronic musicians are quite like writers or painters. They are quite isolated in their home studios. We often don't have that the opportunity to collaborate with that many people, like in rock or jazz.
At the time, 'Oxygene' was considered a totally 'far out' concept... What was 'in' at the time was disco, hard-rock, and the early days of punk... and moreover, 'Oxygene' was instrumental. And I was French!
When you think after 25 years of Mao, Chinese people had no idea about western music or even western culture. They had no idea about James Dean or the Beatles or Charlie Chaplin, modern music or modern cinema.
Generation after generation, there is this never-ending, contemptuous, condescending attitude to the next generation or the next way of thinking: music, art, politics, whatever. And I have never been like that.
One of the first things I created was music for the Paris opera's ballet troupe. That was the first time that electronic music was played at the opera. I really like the relationship between the music and the choreography.
I remember, for my fifth birthday, Chet Baker sat me on the upright piano, and he played just for me for a few minutes. I can still remember the pressure of the air on my chest. It was my first physical contact with sound.
People are rejecting the power of the elite, but individuals such as Snowden are doing so in a positive way, trying to change things for the better. He is a very intelligent man and obviously interested in electronic music.
When I heard Edward Snowden's story, it reminded me of my mother in a strange way. She was in the French resistance from early on, 1941. At that time, the Resistance were considered troublemakers - even traitors - in France.
People don't realize enough how important and influentical John Carpenter has been in electronic music. He did his soundtracks by himself, using mostly electronic and analog synthesizers. He's a cult figure with DJs these days for good reasons.
When I was at the Group for Musical Research, with this idea of discovering electronic music, I quickly realized that that it was a very interesting and exciting approach to music, but I also saw that it was very intellectual and quite dogmatic.
Most of the time, when you are in the studio, you are revealing yourself; you're a bit naked. You can express your weaknesses, your awkward way of approaching sound. Sharing these intimate moments is like inviting somebody into your private room.
I think that in any language when you have a real relationship, and there is love and respect between people, infidelity is always something difficult to accept - whether you are Chinese, British, French. I think that is a universal concept... or problem.
Suddenly, we are putting ourselves as the next dinosaurs. It's rather dark; we have narrowed our dreams. It is time to restore our visions. And so it's not a nostalgic idea; it is based with this unconscious need to restore a kind of dynamic for tomorrow.
In a lifetime, you can say, yes, you have instances of pleasure, of happiness, you like some of your work, but your work is the entire story, and if you are not satisfied with a few moments of a few parts of that story, you would like to be able to adjust that.
Pursuing music eats into your life to the point where there is no space left for anything else. You are lucky if you find a partner who is able to understand that, but even then, they will only understand it for a while, and then things get - you know, difficult.
Think about when you listen to a song on the radio. You are not paying for it; it's not illegal to do it, because the rights have been paid for on top, beforehand, by the radio station, by the network. We have to find exactly the same kind of system with the Internet.
I was always interested in mixing experimentation with pop music, and Brian Eno, Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream - we were all doing it at the same time, just very isolated from each other, all in our different cellars, in different worlds, without the Internet - underground in every sense.
What is very interesting when talking about electronic music is that - I would say that rock and roll is called the ethnic music born in America that invaded the world. Electronic music is certainly kind of ethnic music born in countries like Germany and France that has invaded the world.
We have lost our vision for the future. Before, we say, 'Nothing will be the same. Cars will fly, and we go to the end of the universe.' We have this kind of naive but exciting idea of the future. Now, the vision has been reduced to ways to select our garbage and how to survive global warming.
With the violin, for example, one understands culturally that the sound comes from the instrument that can be seen. With electronic music, it is not the same at all. That's why it seemed so important to me, from the beginning of my career, to invent a grammar, a visual vocabulary adapted to electronic music.
The major rock instruments and classical instruments were designed for performance, for sharing the music with an audience, and then later people put microphones on them and recorded them. But for electronic music, the opposite was true - they're designed in laboratories, and later, we tried to put them on stage.
The value of streaming platforms is estimated at a few billion dollars, and creators can only afford a pizza without pepperoni at the end of the year with the revenues. Without musicians, all those platforms wouldn't exist, so we urgently need an appropriate and sustainable business model for musicians for the 21st century.
My first synthesizer was the VCS3. I got it in Bristol in the late Sixties, long before Pink Floyd used them. I had to sell an acoustic guitar and an old reel-to-reel tape recorder to raise the money. You can do fantastic things with modern computers, but you cannot use them in the same intuitive, spontaneous way you can a VCS3.
For AERO, I wanted to revisit in 5.1 some existing tracks in order to give them that space I had imagined when I originally composed them, and also to compose some new tracks for this new technology. All of the existing tracks in AERO have been performed with the original instruments, re-recorded and spatially arranged/spatialised for this new dimensional sound experience without betraying their very essence.