La Cage / Erosmachine

Before the albums, before the concerts, there was a 7-inch single that almost nobody bought.

The two pieces were recorded in 1969, during Jarre's time at Pierre Schaeffer's Groupe de Recherches Musicales. They're electronic shorts, scored for sixteen oscillators, percussion and a musical saw — musique concrète in method, but with a pulse driving both sides, which is what separates them from most of what came out of the GRM.

Released on Pathé, it sold 117 copies. For decades that was assumed to be the whole story, the rest of the stock destroyed — until around 300 further copies turned up in an EMI/Pathé Marconi warehouse clearance in 2008.

The back sleeve carried an instruction: to be listened to loud, and in the dark.

Its afterlife is longer than its release. The rhythmic figure from "Erosmachine" resurfaces in "Chronologie Part 2" more than twenty years later, and both sides were finally reissued on the Essentials & Rarities compilation in 2011.