Edward Snowden is releasing his first techno track this weekend thanks to French electronic music pioneer Jean-Michel Jarre.
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“Edward is an absolute hero of our times,” Jarre told The Guardian. “When I first read about him, it made me think of my mother. She joined the French resistance in 1941, when people in France still thought they were just troublemakers, and she always told me that when society is generating things you can’t stand, you have to stand up against it.
“The whole Electronica project is about the ambiguous relationship we have with technology: on the one side we have the world in our pocket, on on the other, we are spied on constantly,” Jarre added. “There are tracks about the erotic relationship we have with technology, the way we touch our smartphones more than our partners, about CCTV surveillance, about love in the age of Tinder. It seemed quite appropriate to collaborate not with a musician but someone who literally symbolises this crazy relationship we have with technology.”
Jarre’s album, “Electronica Volume II: The Heart Of Noise,” will feature collaborations with an eclectic list of artists including the Pet Shop Boys, Gary Numan and the rapper “Peaches.” Snowden’s track, called “Exit,” will feature him speaking rather than singing.
The Guardian, which broke the story of Snowden’s leaks on the NSA in 2013, reports that it was responsible for putting Jarre and Snowden in touch after Jarre met with the paper. The two initially spoke on Skype before Jarre traveled to meet Snowden in Moscow.
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“I wanted to film him, because I want to play the track on stage,” Jarre said. “I think it’s important if I’m playing at festivals with a young audience that the statements in the track are promoted and exposed. We spent three hours together, we filmed him, we talked about a lot of things.”
Like Snowden, Jarre also has a place in the history books for having the largest live audience in history. An estimated 2.5 million people watched him perform at the Paris la Defense in 1990 for a celebration of the French Revolution’s 200th anniversary.
