Edward Snowden is now dabbling in techno music
Famed whistleblower Edward Snowden took on the NSA and now he is taking on a new challenge -- techno music.
He has teamed up with electronic music pioneer Jean-Michel Jarre to collaborate on a techno track called Exit, which will appear on Jarre’s upcoming album, according to The Guardian.
The song will be part of Jarre's album Electronica Volume II: The Heart of Noise and came about after Jarre said in an interview that he would love to be in touch with Snowden.
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"It’s certainly not something I was expecting as an engineer – someone’s who’s not really cool."
Snowden was surprised but excited about the prospect.
“It’s certainly not something I was expecting as an engineer – someone who’s not really cool," Snowden told The Guardian. "It’s a treat to be invited to collaborate on a big cultural project.”
Jarre went to Moscow to film Snowden for the project, which featured Snowden speaking rather than singing. He will also be featured in a video created to accompany the song, which Jarre plans to play on stage in concerts.
Jarre told The Guardian, which put him in touch with Snowden, that he created the “hectic, obsessive techno track, trying to illustrate the idea of this crazy quest for big data on one side and the manhunt for this one young guy by the CIA, NSA and FBI on the other."
Snowden rose to fame in 2013 after leaking a cache of documents that exposed NSA spying on American citizens.
His role in the NSA leaks piqued Jarre's interested in Snowden, and he said the track's title "Exit" is a direct reference to his decision to expose the agency.
“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,” Jarre said. “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."
Jarre believes Snowden is a natural fit for his album.
"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 said.
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Megan Specia was Mashable's Assistant Real-Time News Editor and joined the team in September 2014. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism & Mass Communications from the University of New Hampshire after growing up in the Jersey 'burbs. She made her way to New York via a four year stopover in Dublin. Megan previously worked as a journalist and editor at Storyful in both Dublin and New York. Before all of that, though, her claim to fame was as head cake arranger and purveyor of all things sweet at Queen of Tarts cafe in Dublin, where she developed a serious addiction to macarons.
