Jean-Michel Jarre owns one of the largest collections of electronic and electro-acoustic instruments on earth. He has finally written the book that explains why. Machines: A History of Electronic Music arrives November 24, 2026 via Thames & Hudson, and it is the first book of his career.
The premise is elegant. Rather than narrate a century of electronic music, Jarre tells it through 130 machines from his own archive, each one specially photographed, running from iconic modular synthesizers to rare prototypes and bespoke one-offs. The story opens on Luigi Russolo’s 1913 Futurist manifesto The Art of Noises and moves through Surrealism, the Bauhaus, and the avant-garde radio laboratories, into Westdeutscher Rundfunk, Radio France, and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. From there it tracks tape manipulation into analogue synthesis, then the digital revolution, 3D recording, immersive multimedia, and AI-assisted performance. Every leap forward gets a machine attached to it.
He brought company. Armin van Buuren, Richie Hawtin, Gary Numan, Vince Clarke, Johnny Marr, and Nick Rhodes all contribute, alongside Gillian Gilbert of New Order and Nicolas Godin of Air. The personal thread runs underneath all of it. Jarre writes about the reel-to-reel machines that fascinated him as a child and his studies in Paris under Pierre Schaeffer at the Groupe de Recherches Musicales, woven together with archival material, technical schematics, and sequenced stills from his live shows.
Few people could write this book with a straight face. Oxygène dragged electronic music out of the avant-garde and into global culture in 1976, and the twenty-plus albums since have moved 85 million copies. He has turned the Eiffel Tower, the Great Pyramids of Giza, the Forbidden City, and the Dead Sea into stages, collecting Guinness World Records along the way, and more recently headlined the Paris 2024 Paralympic Games Closing Ceremony and played Coachella and Pompeii. With the 50th anniversary of Oxygène landing across 2026 and 2027, the timing feels deliberate.
368 pages, 400 illustrations, $65 hardcover.
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