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
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The collaboration, which features Snowden speaking, rather than singing, came about after
Jarre gave an interview to the Guardian last year, to promote the release of the forthcoming album’s predecessor, Electronica I: The Time Machine. He asked if it would be possible for the paper to put him in touch with Snowden – whose revelations about surveillance carried out by the US National Security Agency were published in the Guardian – for whom he’d devised a “hectic, obsessive techno track, trying to illustrate the idea of this crazy quest for
big data on one side and the manhunt for this one young guy by the CIA, NSA and FBI on the other”.
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.”