Jean Michel Jarre’s Calypso LSD Nightmare

We love Jean Michel Jarre – as much as any self-respecting synth blogger should – but this over the top performance of Calypso is an LSD nightmare of excess.

Or as I Have Synth notes:

Calypso musician army playing in unison. Check.

Two mechanical voodoo monsters. Check.

The musical manifestation of a horrible, never ending LSD dream. Check.

What do you think? Could Jarre have left out a steel drummer or two, or maybe a mechanical voodoo monster?

Leave a comment with your thoughts on Jarre’s Calypso performance!

via Zanoni69:

Jean Michel Jarre. Calypso Parte 1 completo con los Amoco Renegades. En directo. Concierto La Defènse 1990.

17 thoughts on “Jean Michel Jarre’s Calypso LSD Nightmare

  1. All LSD jokes aside… I watched this video for the first time when I was 9, just before Christmas one year — they used to broadcast these Jean-Michel Jarre videos in Brazil around the holidays, for some odd reason. When this came on, I popped a tape in the VCR and recorded it. I only had part of it, but I watched it over and over. That Christmas I got a tiny Casio for my “Santa Claus” present. Those two events made me a synth geek 🙂

  2. I think it’s a combination of the repetition of the song parts and the blair-witch style camera work. It works, I think, in a Brazilian Carnivale kind of way. Not my favorite piece from JMJ though.

    I always found this piece, in contrast to the rest of the album, odd (this piece being hyperactive and the rest being ketamine-stupor-slow).

    Honestly though – he put on a dynamite show like no other.

    I WANT that custom curved keytar.

    1. Did you notice that the steel drums had no mic's on them? I play pans and keys, and I know that steel drums can't get that loud without amplification. 😉

  3. Oh yeah. There's no way those pans would've been that audible without some serious amplification. Even a full-sized panorama band would've been hard-pressed to cut through all that. I did see mics on a couple of pans around 4:44, though.

    While I thought I could pick out some real pan somewhere around the 5:30 mark, there was definitely quite a bit of electronic pan action coming from at least one of the keyboardists. (Sounded more like MIDI sounds than samples to me.)

  4. Jarre's a master at doing these big, over-the-top, shows. This crazy showmanship is why he plays in front of a million people instead of bands like Kraftwerk.

  5. I was at this concert in la defense district (14/07/90). This tune was one of the highlights of the night – it got the audience jumping and cheering. It attracted an audience of about 2.5 million and was, at the time, the world record for the largest public performance. (previously held by JMJ and subsequently broken by JMJ). Yes, parts of the concert was play-back (eg, laser harp).
    Was it a nightmare? Well, 19 years later people are still commenting on this tune at http://www.synthopia.com – It was REMEMORABLE!

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