Composer Igor Stravinsky wrote in the magazine Kultur und Schallplatte in 1931 that there will be a greater interest in creating music in a way that will be peculiar to the gramophone record. Already in the early 40s French composer Pierre Schaeffer was creating music by using natural existing sounds as a collage of sorts. He developed the theoretical basis for what was called musique concrète. Pierre was in his older age mentor of Jean-Michel Jarre when he was working for the Groupe de Recherches Musicales in 1969. Zoolook is the result of that influence.
Zoolook was released in 1984 as Jarre’s seventh studio album. The title track and Zoolookology were released as singles. The music is formed around tracks of spoken voices from 25 different languages. Jarre used parts of the previous album Musique pour supermarche in some of the tracks.
Since I will never own that particular record, I want to say something about it here. It was made by a field recording, only one copy was ever made, and the matrix was destroyed immediately after. Yet there are 33 people on Discogs that claim to have it. At least 32 of those are wrong. Talk about limited editions!