Music for supermarkets

In 1983 a group of young artists invited Jarre to provide the sound for the Orrimbe show, an exhibition of supermarket objects remade as art, running at the Jean-Claude Riedel gallery through June. He recorded the music between February and May.

Somewhere in the process the logic of the exhibition took hold of the record itself. Everything on the gallery walls would be auctioned afterwards as a unique object. Jarre decided the music should be one too — a single copy for a single owner, like a painting, and not, as he put it, a worthless commercial product.

One copy was pressed at Averton in the presence of a bailiff. On 6 July 1983 it went under the hammer at the Hôtel Drouot in Paris, alongside the works from the show, and sold for 69,000 francs. The master plate was destroyed in public at the auction. Proceeds went to charity.

That left one problem: nobody would ever hear it. So that same evening Jarre went to the Radio Luxembourg studios and had the album played through once, side one to side two — the only broadcast there would be, with listeners invited to tape it. Every version circulating since descends from that transmission.

The inner sleeve held eleven Polaroids documenting the making of the record step by step, with a twelfth space left blank for the buyer to add a photograph of themselves. Released 6 July 1983 on Disques Dreyfus. About thirty minutes.

Pieces of it survive in plain sight: material from these sessions resurfaces on Zoolook and Rendez-Vous, and the Planet Jarre box includes a demo excerpt.