YANN TIERSEN
From Amélie to island life: French artist takes inspiration from the natural world.
It’s never too late to be featured in Prog, as Rennes-born musician Yann Tiersen proves. Now 48, Yann released his first album, La Valse Des Monstres – a series of enigmatic accordion sketches – in 1995. But his music has transmogrified over the last decade or so, taking on a more wild, rustic edge, with long sonic meditations that you could loosely describe as post-rock. It’s music that reflects his environment: Ushant, a small, weather-beaten island in the Celtic Sea.
Tiersen’s latest album ALL evokes the ruggedness and beauty of Brittany, and of neighbouring Cornwall. If you listen closely, the drones and incantations may even conjure up druid-led rituals on tenebrous moorland, consolidated by the use of a Brythonic dialect throughout: “You know, my album is in Breton, which is really close to Cornish,” Tiersen says. “Ushant is in the Celtic region and 100 miles from Cornwall. It’s closer to there than it is to the French border for sure.” He laughs when he says this, a thinly veiled attempt to conceal his antipathy towards the oppressor. If his home is a vassal state, then where is the French border? “Beyond Rennes,” he chuckles. “I say that as a joke, but
I believe Brittany isn’t a part of France. Our culture is completely different.”
If you’ve never heard of Tiersen, then some of his music may well be familiar to you. In 2001, songs from his early albums were collected together and used as the soundtrack for Amélie, a whimsical French romcom starring Audrey Tautou that was a surprise worldwide hit. The soundtrack went to No.1 in France and did great things for his international standing. It also caused a kind of cognitive dissonance in Tiersen when his chansons were stripped of their context.
“I never actively did the Amélie soundtrack, I just said ‘yes’ to the use of my previous works,” he explains. “The music on the soundtrack has a strong link to Brittany, and there’s a darkness as well. There’s a song called The Drowned Girl which I wrote for the 100-year commemoration of the sinking of the SS Drummond Castle. It went down near Ushant and 200 people died. Ushant people buried the corpses and in the middle of them was a little girl called Alice Reid. When I was doing my first album I was obsessed with her ghostly figure in a way. Suddenly it’s on the Amélie soundtrack during a really happy scene in the middle of Montmartre. To take my songs and change the setting to Montmartre is just really, really weird.”
Back on Ushant, Yann recently built a recording studio in an old discotheque called The Eskal. It doubles up as a community centre where his wife Emilie teaches Breton. And ALL translates to the rest of us the realities of island life, especially through the most treacherous of seasons: “The record is about nature, and forces in nature can be good and bad. The sea is rough and we have stormy winters. But actually having that in front of us and knowing that if we go to the sea we will definitely have trouble is kind of comforting, because you know your place in the world. You’re in front of the elements and you know their power. It’s actually reassuring in a way.” JA
“THE RECORD IS ABOUT NATURE, AND FORCES IN NATURE CAN BE GOOD AND BAD.”