Electronic music pioneer Jean-Michel Jarre releases Oxymore, his twenty-second studio album and conceptually his most ambitious and groundbreaking to date. Oxymore is the first commercial release of this scale which fully utilizes multichannel and binaural sound (spatial 3D), with Jarre not just producing, but also composing and recording and mixed in audio 360 in the "Innovation" studios of Radio France. Jarre explains, "In real life stereo does not exist, our audio field is 360 degrees. Today, technology allows us to explore composition in spatial audio and that opens a whole new experience for us musicians in the creative process. Music will be more easily experienced by anyone with regular headphones or the new generations of sound systems, offering a more physical and natural way of listening to sound and music in full immersion."

Oxymore is a tribute to the French roots of electronic music which has had a major influence on the music production of the genre over the years. Oxymore is also an homage to the late French composer Pierre Henry, at the origin of Musique Concrete with Pierre Schaeffer, with whom Jarre had been intending on collaborating for Jarre's Grammy-nominated project album Electronica. Henry was an iconic figure in electronic and classical music, and one of Jarre's influences at the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) where he studied. Since his death in 2017, Henry's widow provided Jarre with original sounds which had been intended for use in this collaboration.

Oxymore is a musical journey back-and-forth between analogue and digital sounds. Says Jarre, "Pierre's work inspired me for Oxymore and working around some soundbites of his led me down a creative path that I may not have taken otherwise. I chose some of his sounds precisely from one track to another. Oxymore is also a tribute to the French way of approaching modern music, electroacoustic music, and my early studies at the GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales) where Pierre definitely influenced the future of electronic music worldwide, along with Pierre Shaeffer."

Jarre's new project is inspired by the French movement ‘musique concrete', a genre of music composition that utilizes recorded sounds as raw material. The movement was first developed in the 1940s and went on to revolutionize the way music is produced. With Oxymore, Jarre takes this concept and reinvents it with the tools of today. "I always thought that musique concrete, or electroacoustic music, actually had heavy and delicate aspects," he expands. "So, in Oxymore, I tried to include those two elements; Pierre Henry's music, but also electroacoustic music... as a kind of oxymoron, it stands on the pillars of delicate, intricate, subtle sounds and stronger, forceful, raw sounds."

180g vinyl 2LP-set with 32-page booklet.