Jarre, the son of film composer Maurice Jarre, had already cemented his reputation as a seminal electronic/new age figure with the late-'70s albums Oxygene and Equinoxe. But 1984's Zoolook was a more urbane effort, fleshing out tape-looped voices with gurgling, washy synthesizers and on-the-money live players, notably Zappa/Talking Heads guitarist Adrian Belew and Miles Davis bassist Marcus Miller. Less cosmic pretense and more information-age irony, Zoolook, with bizarre titles like "Wooloomooloo" and "Zoolookologie" had as much to do with media-manipulators like Laurie Anderson-who also makes a cameo-as proto-ambientists like Robert Rich or Brian Eno, with whom Jarre is usually bracketed. --James Rotondi
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