Oxygene

Oxygène was made in an apartment. Jarre recorded it between August and November 1976 in a home studio set up in his flat in Paris, on eight tracks, with a handful of synthesisers and a rhythm machine — the EMS VCS3 and AKS, an ARP 2600, an Eminent 310U organ, an RMI harmonic synthesiser, a Mellotron.

What came out of that room was unlike anything around it. Six connected parts, no vocals and no band, moving as a single flowing journey through landscapes that don't exist — melodic enough to be pop, strange enough to be avant-garde, and produced with a clarity his earlier work hadn't approached.

Nobody wanted it. Labels turned it down before Disques Motors released it in France in December 1976, with Polydor taking it internationally the following year. "Oxygène (Part IV)" became the single, and the album went on to sell in the region of twelve million copies, making Jarre an international artist almost overnight and setting the template for everything that followed.

The cover is Michel Granger's painting of a flayed planet emerging from beneath a peeling Earth — an image that turned out to be as durable as the music, and one Jarre has returned to across the decades.

Released December 1976.