Amazônia is an immersive exhibition focusing on the Brazilian Amazon, based on more than 200 photographs and other media by legendary photographer and filmmaker Sebastião Salgado. He had spent six years in the region, capturing the natural elements and the local cultures.
Electronic music legend Jean-Michel Jarre has composed and recorded a musical score for the exhibition.
The first and rather central aspect is that this, after many years, marks a return to an ambiental, even musique concrète, soundworld that Jarre fans may know from only a few seminal works.
Apart from some of Jarre's early, pre-Oxygène, works, we have only heard this compositional approach in his sampling-based classic album Zoolook and in the mesmerising, final track of Waiting For Cousteau.
Amazônia will certainly "disappoint" Jarre fans who expect musical output that is either in the vein of unashamedly nostalgic re-visiting of classic albums like Equinoxe or in the quite heavily EDM-leaning mainstream electronic works we could hear in recent years.
It is not an album with driving sequences and rhythm patterns, certainly not one with sonic fireworks. There is something of the intimacy of the album Sessions 2000 in this, it feels and sounds like a highly personal project with great attention to detail.
An interesting aspect is that the album's many natural sounds are not actually field-recorded sounds, instead, they were created and/or assembled in Jarre's studio.
It is impossible to do a track-by-track 'usual' review of the album, as it is an overall sonic experience, with numbered tracks that seamlessly flow into each other. If we think of Tangerine Dream's Zeit or Atem, Vangelis's delicate and intricately minimalistic Soil Festivities, well, Amazônia firmly positions itself in that type of sonic Universe.
Perhaps the most charming aspect of the work is how the countless tiny details combine and how they change. We have occasional appearances of melodic motifs, very subtle sequences, pulsations, but the centre stage is occupied by the sonic elements that conjur the world of the Amazon rainforest.
It is a symphony of a very special and subdued kind, where the listener is trusted to pay attention to numerous tiny changes in the sounds and the musical elements. There are moments of 'tangible' electronic music, between ambiental soundscapes that seem to purely come into being and exist without any human intervention.
Admittedly, this blogger admires that particular quality in some seminal works by other EM greats like the aforementioned ones and certainly in works by Klaus Schulze - thus, in the case of Amazônia we are invited to an, overused word perhaps nowadays, immersive experience.
Amazônia simply seems to exist, filling the available space, floating in the air, with myriad infinitesimal sonic elements that arrange themselves into a veritable constellation of natural sounds.
It is music, it is a sound, for introspective times - whilst it can be as abstract as some works by Brian Eno, the evocation of the natural world works splendidly, and gives the album a highly organic feel.
This is not musique concrète that escaped from the labs of some electronic pioneers, not a sterile collage of natural and electronic sounds... It seems to breathe and have currents, undercurrents, pulsations of some greater organism - it has life.
As a landmark in the Jarre discography, Amazônia is a rare and unexpected change of direction after years of adventures in increasingly mainstream electronic music sub-genres. It is a surprise, and if the listener enjoyed Waiting For Cousteau or the sonic introspections of Ethnicolor from Zoolook, that listener will find Amazônia a mesmerising sonic journey.
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