Two electronic albums - part 1

okay I was sarcastic admittedly but the comment  'soulless and bland' is something I would only ever reserve an opinion for something like production line pop music created by Stock Aitken and Waterbracket. Oxygene is probably not the masterpeice it's often made out to be but it does have enough good moments to elevate it above eighties pop music imho.

The stupid little confused emoticon. I would ban that bugger from this forum , we could all use it just because we don't like someone else's opinion

Much electronic music is repetitive and virtually ALL of it could be described as 'devoid of any soul ,emotion or passion' as you put it. Give me an example of EM that isn't? I believe of any genre its probably the most personal and difficult to get a grasp of. I couldn't tell you why I like Vangelis - Beauborg for instance. Something that was knocked up in a lunchtime yet it has something about it.

Jarre was a student of EM so it may seem that all his work is derivative yet I struggle to compare his music to anyone else. The nearest to Jarre to my ears is Edgar Froese solo work Stuntman which came a couple of years later. That has much of the same feel but of course if anyone was copying anyone it was Froese copying Jarre.

My favourite JM Jarre album is Rendez - Vous. That has some truly epic material and memorable moments (Ron's Piece for instance). Its even fun in places but I guess that's bland and souless as well.

 Very under-appreciated composer.

 each to his own and there is no accounting for taste. To my ears it's simplistic, repetitive and has some well-timed synth sci-fi effect noises all over it, but it is completely devoid of any soul, emotion or passion - even Tomita managed to squeeze more emotion out of electronic music than this. It certainly does not conjure feeling of fear, panic, anticipation or any other emotion that you'd expect on Turkish battlefield in WWI. So I think you maybe influenced by the visual more than the aural in that - maybe that works "brilliantly" for you but for me that was a most incongruous piece of film scoring. Sometimes incongruent film-scoring really does work brilliantly, A Clockwork Orange being a prime example, but not in this case, I half expected to see Empire Stormtroopers to come marching over the hill firing laser-rifles "pew-pew, pew, pew-pew-pew, pew, pew". 

Soon after the initial excitement of hearing electronic music played on day-time radio (Oxygène Part IV) I bought the album and was woefully disappointed by the whole thing, it sounded bland, derivative and soulless to my ears - it's electronic Pop Corn (Hot Butter) and not in the same league as the Tangos (or even Oldfield). I've played it maybe a couple of times in the past 38 years and it hasn't got any better, I'd much rather listen to father Maurice than son Jean Michel (Maurice wrote the soundtracks to Lawrence of Arabia and Dr. Zhivago).