Oxygene 7-13

Two decades after the first album, Jarre returned to the Oxygène numbering and picked it up at Part 7.

The continuity is more than a title: he went back to the same synthesisers — the ARP 2600, the VCS3 and AKS, the Eminent organ, the CS80, Mellotron and theremin — and set them against the tools of 1997, including the TR808, an Akai MPC3000 and Logic Audio.

What results is the original's logic carried forward rather than repeated. Ambient passages and melodic themes keep colliding, and elements of experimental techno mark this visit to the Oxygène universe as belonging to its own decade: dance pulses under Parts 7 and 8, beatless stretches in Part 9, something close to neoclassical writing by Part 13.

The album is dedicated to Pierre Schaeffer, Jarre's mentor at the GRM, who had died two years earlier. Michel Granger returned for the cover art, which was printed lenticularly on the special edition so the stars behind the image appear to move.

Released 17 February 1997 on Disques Dreyfus. Recorded and mixed at Oxygène Studio, Croissy, with Francis Rimbert.