Yann Tiersen for Yes Plz

When the film Amélie came out in 2001 it became an unexpected smash hit. Audrey Tautou as the “French Edition” Manic Pixie Dream GirlTM swept US audiences away, with the film garnering five Academy Award nominations in the bargain. The soundtrack, especially, became a shibboleth for a certain type of older millennial; in a year when the top five singles on the Billboard Hot 100 were by Lifehouse, Alicia Keys, Janet Jackson, Train, and Jennifer Lopez, Yann Tiersen’s whimsical, sweeping melodies—simultaneously recalling traditional French chanson and the minimalist compositions of Philip Glass—were a lifebuoy for nascent hipsters in the US.

Tiersen, however, is ambivalent about both the soundtrack and the international fame that it brought him. “I’m fine with it, of course,” the composer tells me over the phone from his home on the French island of Ushant. “The only part that is a big misunderstanding about the soundtrack is that it wasn’t a soundtrack in the first place. It was excerpted from my first four albums, which were already very linked to Ushant and to nature and central to those subjects.” Tiersen points especially to the song “La Noyée” (The Drowned Girl) off his third studio album Le Phare, composed after the one hundred year commemoration of the sinking of the SS Drummond Castle. The passenger and cargo ship was traveling 

from Cape Town, South Africa to London and wrecked off the coast of Ushant, killing two hundred people, one of which was a three-yearold girl named Alice Reid. “I was alone on the island, working, and I was obsessed with this girl, and I was feeling her ghost everywhere.” Tiersen tells me. “So, the song had nothing to do with Amélie.” 

Rather than dwell on the past, however, Tiersen revels in the present. His ninth studio album, All—which translates to “others” in Breton, the native language of the Brittany region in France—was released via Mute Records on February fifteenth of this year. Following 2016’s EUSA, All’s eleven tracks incorporate field recordings from the redwood forests of Northern California and the abandoned Tempelhof airport in Berlin as well as guest vocalists like black metal singer Anna von Hausswolff, singer-songwriters Denez Prigent, his wife Emilie Tiersen, and Gaëlle Kerrien. All is also the first album to be recorded entirely in the studio Tiersen built from an abandoned discoteque on the island. 

In many ways, All is both a pinnacle and a turning point for the forty-eight-year-old Tiersen, who is a restless artist—constantly seeking out and pushing the boundary on the limits of self expression. Growing up in Rennes, a small city in the Northwest of France, Tiersen was exposed to some of the most innovative bands of the late eighties and early nineties via the Transmusicales de Rennes music festival, renowned for revealing the “next big thing” in music. Having learned to play both violin and piano when he was very young, Tiersen 

threw himself into electronic music as a teenager, playing in bands while experimenting with sampling in his off time. “After a while, maybe it was a reaction to electronic music, but suddenly I started sampling acoustic stuff.” Tiersen tells me. “After spending so much time sampling vinyl, it occured to me to try sampling myself playing, and that’s how I became an acoustic musician at that time.” Over the summer of 1993, when he was twenty-three, Tiersen barricaded himself in his apartment, sampling himself playing violin, accordion, electric guitar, toy piano, and typewriter among other unconventional instruments, and forming those samples into the forty tracks that became his first two albums: La Valse des monstres in 1995, and Rue des cascades in 1996. 

Two years later, Tiersen made a fateful trip to Ushant to record his third album Le Phare. Named after the Phare du Créac’h, the lighthouse on the island, which is the most powerful in Europe, Le Phare demonstrates how Tiersen grew as a musician in the years since his first two albums gave him moderate success. Le Phare became Tiersen’s breakout hit, attracting the attention of the director Jean-Pierre Jeunet who decided to reach out to Tiersen to see if he could do the soundtrack for Amélie. Tiersen was working on his fourth album, L’Absente, but he gave Jeunet the run of his back catalog, and shared some songs from the upcoming album with him. And that, as they say, was that. 

The following is a transcript of our conversation, edited and condensed for clarity and length. 

Where you live now, Breton is spoken as the everyday language. Did you grow up speaking it? 

No. We have a big problem in Brittany, because the Breton language was forbidden by the French state and they had been really oppressive since the beginning of the twentieth century. The language was really endangered, and still is, because the French thought that knowing it would harm the French language. Which is the stupidest thing on earth, but ok. Also, Breton language used to be the same as Cornish, and is still very similar to Welsh, which, along with Brittany, used to be one nation. The French government classifies it as a dialect which is probably untrue because you can’t find a language that is further from French. But there are 200,000 Breton speakers now, which is quite good. We are the second highest after Wales in speakers of Celtic languages. In Ireland, of course, everybody knows Irish because it’s taught in school. 

Do you speak the language fluently now? 

Yeah, I relearned it. I make mistakes still, but it’s our everyday language with my wife and our kid. He’s twenty months and he’s already almost trilingual in Breton, French, and English. I think languages, and especially minor languages, are the treasure of humanity. They’re like ecosystems, nature. Native languages took in all the knowledge of the land and because of that they’re really important. The land and the ecology shape the way you think, and then you express that with the language. Losing those early native languages, which are really rich, and historically important, is a big loss. It’s exactly the same as biodiversity, it’s part of the Earth 

Can you talk about where you recorded this album? 

Because I live here—it’s a small island with eight hundred people and a really strong community—I wanted to build a studio here. There was an old discoteque which has been unused since 2002 because someone bought it on speculation, and shut it down, and it’s been like a ruin ever since, nothing’s been done with it. It was kind of like the heart of the island before that, because before being a disco it had been a hall for wedding parties, so it’s always been something with strong cultural significance. I’ve wanted to buy it for over ten years and four years ago it went up for sale. I’ve rebuilt everything, I’ve made it larger and higher, and added a venue and a cultural center and a studio. Because I live in this community, 

I wanted to open it up for workshops, and am working with the school. I wanted people here to understand that it is their place. I don’t know how many couples met at the discoteque and the wedding hall. 

You brought Gareth Jones in to co-produce the album and do the mixing. How did he get involved? 

Well we did Infinity together, he mixed the album with me, and I really enjoyed working with him. So of course I asked him to come over to do this one as well. This is the first time that I’ve worked with a producer, because I always produce my albums myself, but Gareth had a big input and helped me a lot. The studio was under construction as well at the time that I was recording the album. I wasn’t ready for the mix, and when I told Gareth, he said, ‘I can’t mix an album that isn’t finished, so I’ll come over to help you do the final takes.” And it became a really beautiful collaboration, he added a lot to the album and guided me towards not being stressed and had good ideas. 

You’ve said that you spent a month mixing the album, which you’ve never done before. What do you think was the main effect of that much time? 

That’s the real reason I built the studio. It used to be that when there were big studios the studio was a space that could push creation a bit further. Of course, nowadays, because we don’t have enough money, because everybody wants to change stuff until the end, we don’t have the luxury that we used to have to spend six months in a studio to re

cord something. I think it’s bad for music. Now that I have my studio, to be able to spend studio time that I’ve never had because it was too expensive, I want to make it affordable for other musicians to come here and have the same thing. The downside to doing that before was the money, but nowadays anyway, there is no money anymore, and you can’t really earn a lot of money with a studio, so the better attitude is to make a bit of money, and offer musicians time, because we’re not doing music for money anymore, but because we love it. 

You used field recordings throughout this album and in your previous one. What interests you about them? 

It’s because of a thing that happened to me in California four years ago with my wife. We were crossing California on bike and in the Lost Coast near Shelter Cove we took a track called Usal Road. We had twelve hours on the bike to do this bit, and after six hours we heard some noise on the forest side of the road, and after I saw a mountain lion crossing in front of me. It was really weird because he was escaping and going somewhere. Eventually I realized that he had been chasing us for half an hour. There was a car that passed, the first one we saw that day, and we stopped them and asked them to take us to the town in their pickup truck, but they went off to try to find it to take pictures of it. We had six more hours to go on the trail, and I had read that mountain lions don’t seek out contact with humans, and if you see one it’s because they see you as prey, so we really thought it was our last day. Of course we survived, but then I heard that last May in Washington state, two cyclists were killed and mauled by a mountain lion in the same situation. 

After that experience I realized how stupid I was. I was just there, I was cycling, but I was really stupid because it wasn’t my territory, I knew nothing about where I was. Because of that, because of not respecting where I was, and the rules of that place, I almost died. It switched everything in my mind, I changed completely, and I thought, “The most important thing is to know where you live, and to know your ecosystem and how it works.” No matter if you live in the city, the countryside, or like me, on an island, there is an ecosystem near you, and that’s what will decide between life and death. That’s the most important thing, the rest is nothing. 

After that I started the process to relearn my language, and to focus on nature. ⬣