Equinoxe

Équinoxe followed Oxygène two years later and extended its logic rather than repeating it: the same dreamlike universe, built from melodic writing and futuristic sound experiment, but harsher in places and more rhythmically insistent.

Where the first album was made without a concept, this one has a clear shape. Jarre described it as a day in a life — waking in the morning, through to sleep at night — running as eight connected parts. The rain, water, storm and thunder that move through the record are as much part of the composition as the synthesisers, sitting alongside the ARP 2600, VCS3 and AKS, Eminent organ, Mellotron, RMI and a Geiss rhythm computer.

It was recorded between January and August 1978 in the makeshift studio Jarre had set up in his Paris apartment, onto 16-track MCI tape, and mixed at GANG Studios.

The cover is Michel Granger's Le trac, chosen when Granger brought several canvases to Croissy and projected each one at scale for Jarre to see. Those figures — the Watchers — became the album's lasting image, and returned forty years later on Equinoxe Infinity.

Released 1 December 1978 on Disques Dreyfus, distributed worldwide by Polydor from 1979.