Jean-Jacques Perrey advanced the reach of electronic music both on his own and through partnerships with Gershon Kingsley. Across a string of 1960s releases he deployed Moog synthesizers, the Ondioline, and magnetic tape to achieve that end. In his own liner notes he stated cheerfully that avant-garde circles had never been his target. Perrey instead aimed to spread electronic sounds through lighthearted melodies and uncomplicated arrangements. As a result his recordings sit nearer to easy listening and space age pop than to any experimental edge, lending them a nostalgic tone rather than a forward-looking one.
During the early 1950s Perrey grew captivated by the Ondioline, a keyboard that prefigured the synthesizer by replicating the timbres of other instruments. He abandoned medical studies to represent the instrument as a salesman. In the early 1960s he relocated to the United States and took up work in television, radio, and recording studios. The albums he issued on Vanguard throughout that decade, whether solo or as half of Perrey-Kingsley, reached the widest audience and let him display his array of electronic devices, signal treatments, and tape manipulations. The pieces that resulted were buoyant and childlike, revealing the strong influence of his prior work scoring radio and television jingles. Viewed chiefly as novelties rather than breakthroughs, they resurfaced in the 1990s after Perrey appeared in RE/SEARCH’s Incredibly Strange Music volume.
He returned to France in 1970 and continued contributing to radio, television, film scores, and other musical undertakings. By the 1990s he had resumed recording, first joining French electronica duo Air and then issuing the solo album Eclektronics. Additional projects followed, among them 2008’s Destination Space, which the eighty-year-old Perrey completed with fellow composer Dana Countryman. Consistent with the pair’s experimental bent, the album substituted artificial, computer-generated vocals for performances by human singers. Perrey died in November 2016 at the age of 87.
