Apr 152016
 

You might not be a fan of this kind of music.  Don’t let that prevent you from listening to the video!

Excerpts from the dialogue:

music is the thing that can humanize even the most abstract moment.”

“Technology can actually increase privacy.”

“Saying that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different to saying you don’t care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say. It’s a deeply anti-social principle, because rights are not just individual, they’re collective.”

“What may not have value to you today, may have value to an entire population, an entire people, or an entire way of life tomorrow. And if you don’t stand up for it, then who will?”

(Click on the black square.  It will take you past the advertisement.)

French electronic music pioneer Jean-Michel Jarre and NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden have collaborated on a track called Exit, which will appear on Jarre’s forthcoming album, Electronica Volume II: The Heart of Noise. The collaboration came about after Jarre gave an interview to the Guardian last year and asked if he could be put in touch with Snowden

 

MORE ? . . . 

The Guardian’s coverage of the Edward Snowden NSA leaks has had a wide variety of repercussions, but perhaps none are as improbable as the latest: a collaboration between the 32-year-old whistleblower and French electronic music pioneer Jean-Michel Jarre, on a techno track to be released this weekend.

“Edward is an absolute hero of our times,” said Jarre, whose piece with Snowden, called Exit, appears on his forthcoming album of collaborations, Electronica Volume II: The Heart Of Noise, the former CIA employee making an unlikely appearance on a list of special guests that also includes the Pet Shop Boys, Gary Numan and rapper Peaches.

“When I first read about him, it made me think of my mother,” said Jarre. “She joined the French resistance in 1941, when people in France still thought they were just troublemakers, and she always told me that when society is generating things you can’t stand, you have to stand up against it. The whole Electronica project is about the ambiguous relationship we have with technology: on the one side we have the world in our pocket, on on the other, we are spied on constantly. There are tracks about the erotic relationship we have with technology, the way we touch our smartphones more than our partners, about CCTV surveillance, about love in the age of Tindr. It seemed quite appropriate to collaborate not with a musician but someone who literally symbolises this crazy relationship we have with technology.”

The Guardian passed on a contact for Ben Wisner, Edward Snowden’s solicitor. “I had no idea if he would be interested,” Jarre said of his contact with Wisner, “but he loved the idea, thought Edward would love the idea and put us in contact. I sent him a demo of the music, then had a meeting with Edward over Skype, 90 minutes of conversation, where I gave him the understanding of what I wanted to do, we talked about his situation, the reason why he did what he did, then we recorded his vocals.”

Jarre subsequently travelled to Moscow to meet Snowden. “I wanted to film him, because I want to play the track on stage. I think it’s important if I’m playing at festivals with a young audience that the statements in the track are promoted and exposed. We spent three hours together, we filmed him, we talked about a lot of things.”

Snowden declined to speak to the Guardian about the track, but in the video Jarre shot in Moscow, he claimed to be a fan of electronic music – “The melodies I remember with the most fondness are from video games” – and said he was “really surprised” by contacted by the author of the 12m-selling album Oxygène and holder of the Guinness World Record for attracting the largest concert audience in history. “It was something I wasn’t expecting. As an engineer, someone who’s not really cool, it was something of a treat to collaborate on a big cultural project.”

 

 

 

 

 

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