Pioneering French musician Jean-Michel Jarre is performing live on a virtual stage in social VR platform VRChat this weekend.
Jarre, who helped define the electronic music genre starting in the mid-70s, will premiere his so-called ‘Alone Together’ concert on June 21st at 9:15 PM CET (local time here).
The live performance is slated to last 40 minutes and take place in a virtual environment built by VRrOOm, hosted in VRChat. The concert will be accessible to users with SteamVR headsets including Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and Valve Index.
Additionally, the night will also see what organizers are calling a “silent broadcast” of the virtual concert in the courtyard of the Palais Royal in Paris, France. Students from schools of the performing arts will be able to listen to audio via smartphone-tethered headphones and watch the concert live on a big screen. Jarre will be hosting a chat session with students afterwards.
“Having performed concerts in extraordinary venues, virtual reality will now allow me to play in unimaginable spaces while remaining on a physical stage” says Jarre. “Virtual or augmented realities can be to the performing arts what the advent of cinema was to the theatre, an additional mode of expression made possible by new technologies at a given time.”
The 71-year-old Jean-Michel Jarre is best known for his genre-defining 1976 album Oxygene, which sold over 1.7 million albums in France alone. In contrast to other VR concerts lately, Jarre will be performing and mixing live. Check out a quick taster of Jarre’s music below.