Zoolook

Zoolook is Jarre's sampling record, and the furthest he has pushed into the avant-garde.

The material is human voice: recordings of speech and song gathered across a wide spread of languages — Aboriginal, Afghan, Arabic, Balinese, Chinese, Quechua, Sioux, Tibetan and many more — then cut apart and transformed electronically until the meaning is gone and only the shape of the sound remains. An ethnologist, Xavier Bellenger, worked on the source research.

The tool that made it possible was the Fairlight CMI, then a new kind of instrument, working alongside an arsenal that ran from the Moog 55 and ARP 2600 to the DX7, Prophet V and Linn drum machines. Even the guest performances were fed back through the Fairlight and reshaped.

Those guests are formidable. Laurie Anderson takes the lead vocal on the title track; Adrian Belew plays guitar and effects; Marcus Miller's slap bass drives much of the record; Yogi Horton on drums, Ira Siegel on additional guitar, Frédérick Rousseau on keyboards. Between them the album swings from the eerie build of "Ethnicolor" to the funk and pop of "Zoolook" and "Zoolookologie", with the darker "Wooloomooloo" and "Ethnicolor II" in between.

Released in 1984 on Disques Dreyfus. Recorded at Clinton Studio, New York, mixed at Croissy, France, on the Sony PCM 1610.