Earlier this spring, electronic music pioneer Jean-Michel Jarre released the musical score for Amazônia, the latest project by award winning photographer and filmmaker Sebastião Salgado which made its debut to high acclaim at the Philharmonic Paris.  A portion of the Amazônia exhibition--which was due to travel to Rome, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and London prior to arriving stateside, but was rerouted due to the global pandemic--is now on view in Los Angeles.  Now through November 13, a select number of images from Amazônia as well as others from Salgado’s catalogue are on view at the Peter Fetterman Gallery at Bergamont Station in Santa Monica, CA.   
 
Composed and recorded as a 52-minute score for the show’s Paris debut, Jean-Michel Jarre’s Amazônia is available in regular stereo version, as well as in a special binaural version, available digitally and alongside the 5.1. Surround Sound Version available via a download code in the CD & Vinyl.  All versions are available now.
 
Experience Jean-Michel Jarre’s Amazônia here:  https://jean-michel-jarre.lnk.to/Amazonia
 
Fans of Salgado’s work who are available to attend the Los Angeles showing or not are encouraged to experience Jarre’s work.  The binaural version, available on DSPs, provides the listener with a truly spectacular and immersive sound experience. Whereas stereo sound delivers a directive left-ear/right-ear sound, binaural audio, when listened to on regular headphones, creates a 3D surround sound experience, closest to our natural human auditory sense. Amazônia binaural was specially mixed in such a way that the listener feels right in the heart of the forest.
 
‘Amazônia’ is an immersive exhibition focusing on the Brazilian Amazon from Salgado’s six-year journey through the region, capturing the forest, the rivers, the mountains and the people who live there, and most of the work will be seen publicly for the first time. At the heart of the exhibit is an invitation to see, hear and think about the future of biodiversity and the place of humans in the living world.
 
Jean-Michel Jarre’s accompanying sound-creation is a symphonic world which will engulf visitors to the exhibit in the sounds of the forest. Using a blend of electronic and orchestral instruments with other real-life natural sounds.
 
All products are available here.
 
 “I wanted to avoid the ethnomusicological approach or creating background music. In the Amazonian forest, there is the dimension of nomadism; moving from one place to another, from darkness to light, from a gentle quietude to a latent threat, moving forward leaving reality behind to sink into the power of rites and dreams,” says Jean-Michel Jarre. “I built this music like a toolbox, made up of different sound objects, like a wandering through organic, natural, ethnic, orchestral and electronic elements, which would only pass by like in a forest that we would cross and leave behind us, temporary vestiges of a time and a space without end.”
 
Appointed ambassador to UNESCO in 1993, Jean-Michel Jarre is involved in many remarkable projects for tolerance and cultural pluralism, as well as for the defense of nature and the environment. For the ‘Amazônia’ project, he actively collaborated with the scientific team of the Museum of Ethnography of Geneva (MEG) to restore as closely as possible the sound identity of the forest and the people who inhabit it.
 
Jarre explains, “To represent the eternal human presence in this great green ocean, I selected incomparable sound material from the precious archives of the Museum of Ethnography in Geneva, unparalleled for their timbre and their dreamlike power. I composed ‘Amazonia’ in one go, day and night, in front of these photos scrolling in a loop in front of me, immersing myself in this immensity, familiar and mysterious, serene and disturbing, powerful and vulnerable... Sebastião Salgado's forest.”
 
Amazônia by Jean-Michel Jarre is available digitally in standard and binaural audio, as well as as CD and Vinyl via Sony Music Entertainment.
 
Show details:
Sebastião Salgado
Amazônia
Musical score by Jean-Michel Jarre
On view now through November 13, 2021
Peter Fetterman Gallery
Bergamot Station
2525 Michigan Ave., Gallery A1
Santa Monica, California 90404
Hours: Wednesday - Saturday 11am - 4pm
www.peterfetterman.com
 
Amazônia is also available as a hardback book via Taschen here.