Yann Tiersen

Piano at four, violin at six, conservatoire study in Rennes, Nantes and Boulogne-sur-Mer — and then, in his teens, punk records: Yann Tiersen has spent a career declining to choose between those two educations. Born in Brest in 1970 and raised in Brittany, he built his early language from repeated figures, short and deliberately fragile tunes, and instruments the concert hall had largely forgotten, across La Valse des monstres (1995), Rue des cascades (1996) and Le Phare (1998). Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Amélie carried that music to an audience of millions in 2001 and brought him the César for best score. What came afterwards moved steadily away from it — electric guitars, analogue electronics and field recordings on Dust Lane (2010), Skyline (2011) and ALL (2019), and on EUSA (2016) and Kerber (2021) a body of work anchored to Ushant, the island off the Breton coast where he lives and records and whose acoustic is audible throughout. Rathlin from a Distance followed in 2025.