Yann Pierre Tiersen (born 23 June 1970) is a French musician and composer from Brittany. His musical career is split between studio recordings, music collaborations, and film soundtracks songwriting. His music incorporates a large variety of classical and contemporary instruments, primarily the electric guitar, the piano, synthesisers, and the violin, but he also includes instruments such as the melodica, xylophone, toy piano, harpsichord, piano accordion, and even a typewriter.
Tiersen is often mistaken for a soundtrack composer; he himself states that "I'm not a composer and I really don't have a classical background," but his real focus is on touring and recording studio albums, which are often used for film soundtracks. Tracks taken from his first three studio albums were used for the soundtrack of the 2001 French film Amélie.
Biography and career
The early years: 1970–1992
Tiersen was born in 1970 in Brest, in the department of Finistère, part of Brittany in northwestern France, into a French family of Belgian and Norwegian origins. He started learning to play the piano at the age of four, the violin at the age of six, and received classical training at several musical academies, including those in Rennes, Nantes, and Boulogne-sur-Mer. In the early 1980s, he was influenced as a teenager by the punk subculture, and bands like The Stooges and Joy Division. When he was 13, he broke his violin, bought an electric guitar, and formed a rock band. Tiersen was living in Rennes back then, home to the three-day music festival Rencontres Trans Musicales, which is held annually in December. That gave him the opportunity to see acts like Nirvana, Einstürzende Neubauten, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, The Cramps, Television, and Suicide. A few years later, when his band parted, Tiersen bought a cheap mixing desk, an 8-track reel-to-reel tape recorder, and started recording music on his own with a synthesiser, a sampler, and a drum machine. The 17-track-album was inspired by and written for the theatrical adaptations of Tod Browning's 1932 cult classic Freaks, and Yukio Mishima's 1955 version of Noh play The Damask Drum. In April 1996, one year later, he released Rue des cascades, a collection of short pieces recorded with a toy piano, a harpsichord, a violin, a piano accordion, and a mandolin. The title track, sung by French solo singer Claire Pichet, was used the following year for the Palme d'Or nominated French drama film The Dreamlife of Angels, and several tracks received greater exposure when they were featured on the Jean-Pierre Jeunet's film Amélie, five years later.