The results were a clean, open mix that allowed Summer the freedom to lay down an astonishingly evocative vocal performance. Thus the bass sequence, the snares and hi-hats were all were products of the modular synth. In order to create their prognostic platter, they eschewed the typical instrumentation of disco music – telegraph guitars, thick strings, electric bass, and horns – and brought in a massive Moog IIIP system belonging to classical musician Eberhard Schoener who’s assistant Robby Wedel showed the producers how it’s basic sequencer could be synchronised to tape in order to record multiple tracks in perfect rhythmic lock-step. When producers Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte began work on Summer’s fifth LP, they envisioned a concept album on which each song represented a specific decade and with the final cut being an attempt to create something futuristic the track that launched disco, techno and a thousand other genres was born.
![youtube omd enola gay youtube omd enola gay](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Jl8Gdx7HPiE/hqdefault.jpg)
Famously, one of David Bowie’s sessions for the Low album was interrupted by a breathless Brian Eno who, having just heard I Feel Love, declared that it was “going to change the sound of music for the next 15 years.”
![youtube omd enola gay youtube omd enola gay](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/lsp-JAd-EYk/maxresdefault.jpg)
Released in the summer of 1977, it was a seminal slab of electronic disco unlike anything that had come before it. It is all but impossible to underestimate the impact of I Feel Love. These were then painstakingly overdubbed and layered onto eight-track tape, creating the mould for the countless lone home-recording artist/producers to come.
![youtube omd enola gay youtube omd enola gay](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/rqsG6DaiqWE/hqdefault.jpg)
Oxygene IV was recorded at home, in Jarre’s kitchen on a handful of instruments: an EMS VCS3, and Eminent 310 organ/string machine, an RMI Harmonic Synthesizer, and an ARP 2600. Oxygène – the album – treads just the right side of the line between classic and synth cheese and Part IV is a tune that, alongside Hot Butter’s cover of Popcorn and Space’s Magic Fly, thrust the synthesiser into the mainstream.Īdopted and integrated by big-name rock and pop musicians, sounds once associated with the avant-garde were now sprinkled amongst the electric guitars, electric pianos, horns and strings that formed the backbone of most hit records of the day. Finally firmly placing electronic music on the map Jarre was savvy to the fact that you can’t have a smash synth hit without a cracking tune too.