Edward Snowden made a techno song with French electronic music legend Jean-Michel Jarre. No, really. Just let that sink in for a second. You good? Okay.
The track is called “Exit” and it comes from Jarre’s upcoming album of collaborations, Volume II: The Art Of Noise. It’s more than 6 minutes of driving techno featuring odd stops and starts, what sounds like a sped-up sample of Cybotron’s “Clear” and Edward Snowden talking about the surveillance state. Oddly enough, the track would make the perfect soundtrack to a hacking scene from a movie made before the majority of people knew what hacking was.
The song came about after Jarre asked The Guardian to hook him up with Edward Snowden and the paper obliged.
“I had no idea if he would be interested,” Jarre told the paper, “I sent him a demo of the music, then had a meeting with Edward over Skype, 90 minutes of conversation, where I gave him the understanding of what I wanted to do, we talked about his situation, the reason why he did what he did, then we recorded his vocals.”
In a video that Snowden later recorded with Jarre, the famed NSA leaker revealed how he feels about electronic music.
The melodies I remember with the most fondness are from video games, with a kind of generated 8-bit music. And those kinds of chiptunes have really made a resurgence in modern musical culture today,” he said.
Jarre has been busy. On top of Volume II, he was recently spotted collaborating with Damon Albarn on what we assume will be the new Gorillaz album.
(Via SPIN)
