Oxygène 7–13 (known as "Oxygène 2" on the Oxygène Trilogy box set) is the twelfth
studio album by French
electronic musician and composer
Jean-Michel Jarre, released by
Disques Dreyfus on 17 February 1997. It is the sequel to his 1976 album Oxygène released two decades before and used the same synthesizers. The album is dedicated to Jarre's former mentor, experimental musician
Pierre Schaeffer. The album cover art was created by long-time collaborator
Michel Granger.[3]
The CD cover used
lenticular printing to make the illusion of moving stars in the background.
Background
Oxygène 7-13 is dedicated to his mentor at the
GRM,
Pierre Schaeffer, who had died two years before. The album was recorded and mixed by Jarre together with Patrick Pelamourges and René Ameline respectively at Oxygene studio and Croissy studio. It was also the last album by Jarre featuring
Michel Geiss as collaborator.[4] It also had the collaboration of keyboardist
Francis Rimbert and programmer Christian Sales. He combined the "spherical sounds" of the 1976 album with contemporary rhythms.[5] Eschewing digital techniques developed in the 1980s, in an interview for The Daily Telegraph he said:
The excitement of being able to work on sounds in a tactile, manual, almost sensual way is what drew me to electronic music in the first place ... The lack of limitations is very dangerous. It is like the difference for a painter of getting four tubes with four main colours or being in front of a computer with two million colours. You have to scan the two million colours and when you arrive to the last one you have obviously forgotten the first one. In the Eighties we became archivists and everything became rather cold as a result.[6]
Release
Oxygène 7-13 was released in February 1997.[7] "Oxygène 7", "Oxygène 8" and "Oxygène 10" were released as
singles. A number of
remixes of Oxygène 7–13 tracks were made, including those comprising most of the album Odyssey Through O2.
The Orb's "
Toxygene" was originally going to be a remix of "Oxygène 8". However, The Orb "obliterated it" and reassembled only a few fragments for their new song.[8] The album was followed by a promotional indoor European tour,[7] and a concert in
Moscow, Russia in which he would break for the fourth and last time his record for the largest audience in an open-air concert with a total of 3.5 million.[9]