Electronic music pioneer Jean Michel Jarre will release a new album next month with a surprising collaborator. Electronica 2: The Heart of Noise, volume two in a project that features work with Halloween director John Carpenter, Robert “3D” Del Naja of Massive Attack fame, and others, includes the track “Exit,” made with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. The track is streaming on Spotify.
Snowden provided the spoken-word accompaniment for the single: “Saying that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different to saying you don’t care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say. It’s a deeply anti-social principle, because rights are not just individual, they’re collective.” In an interview with Rolling Stone, Snowden spoke about the project and his love of electronic music:
“I’ve always appreciated electronic music. The melodies that I remember with most fondness are actually from video games where they generate 8-bit music, and those kinds of chiptunes have really made a resurgence in modern musical culture today,” Snowden stated. “And I think people like Jean Michel are the ones who really popularized that and made that possible for us to appreciate it as more than just sounds, as more than just background, but as actual culture.”
Listen to “Exit,” below.