Equinoxe Infinity

For Equinoxe Infinity Jarre worked backwards. For the first time he began with the artwork and let the music follow.

Michel Granger's original Équinoxe sleeve still stands, in Jarre's view, among the best album covers ever made — and its subject was the Watchers. Strange, unreadable figures. Watching us? Space? Machines? Some natural event? Nobody knows. Not frightening, but odd, and permanently mysterious. Forty years later Jarre picked them up again to continue the story.

He asked Filip Hodas, a young Prague-based artist whose work he'd recently discovered, to make two covers from Granger's world. One shows humanity at peace with nature and technology. The other is fear and distortion: machines taking over. With Oxygène, the cover pointed at a poisoned planet. Here the two images point at the two futures our appetite for innovation is currently opening up — and the album is the soundtrack to both worlds, some of it bright and melodic, some of it much darker.

Jarre considered recording it on the same analogue instruments he used in 1978, then rejected the idea: if he were the young man who made that record, he'd be using whatever exists now. So the album runs vintage hardware alongside current tools — including a granular synth prototype, the Tasty Chips GR-1, found on Kickstarter and used to process a child's voice on "If the Wind Could Speak", a deliberate thread back to "Band in the Rain" on the original.

Released 16 November 2018. Artwork by Filip Hodas, based on the original by Michel Granger.