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Amberlight experimental5/29/2023 ![]() “ So it’s good that you have this mixture that comes from having electronic stuff in a big space.” “ You get the acoustics of the studio in there as well,” he says. What then followed, with producer Gareth Jones (Depeche Mode, Einstürzende Neubauten), was three weeks of working with electronics, sampling, re-sampling and processing sounds to create an engulfing soundscape where the tender tones of piano keys merge with gently pulsing electronics and an intense ambient milieu. These were then subsequently transformed, reshaped and processed. After spending the spring writing the piano parts, he went on to spend that summer meticulously creating a sample bank for the Elektron Octatrack using these parts as inspiration, following the chord progressions, playing them on instruments such as the Ondes Martenot, mellotron and harpsichord. Working in The Eskal, the studio he built on Ushant (the island where he lives, located 30 kilometres off the West coast of Brittany in the Celtic Sea), Tiersen’s process for the album’s recording was particularly involved. The context is the most important thing -the piano was a precursor to create something for the electronics to work around.” I worked on piano tracks to begin with but that's not the core of it, they are not important. Tiersen explains, “ You may get this intuitive thinking of, ‘oh it's piano stuff’, but actually it's not. On the new album, the piano is the source, but electronics are the environment that they exist within. It is both an evolution of what has come before, as well as a new space to explore. However, true to Tiersen’s nuanced and subtle approach, this isn’t a U-turn-like thumping piece of dance music but instead a beautifully textured, highly immersive and thoughtfully constructed electronic world to step inside of. One that begins with his most overtly electronic material to date. ![]() ![]() With that chapter now behind him, Kerber is very much a new one in Tiersen’s career. The goal was to put everything back in context.” “It's good to have an endpoint and a sense of reconciliation. “The purpose of revisiting and playing live some of my previous stuff was to gather a snapshot of what I've done and then move to something else and start again,” he says. It was about re-contextualising his own work. When he revisited his own back catalogue on 2019’s Portrait, this was not an exercise in nostalgia, rehashing past glories or an attempt to repeat previous ways of working. For him, context is everything and the context keeps changing. However, Tiersen is not one to stick to a formula. This multifaceted approach can be heard in the stirring piano minimalism of 2016’s EUSA, to the full band intensity of albums such as Infinity and Skyline - not to mention earlier albums such as Le Phare, filled with idiosyncratic compositions and a variety of textures. This exploration of the micro and the macro has permeated through much of Tiersen’s career, as an artist capable of vast expansiveness as often as he is intricate detail. “ It's the same experiment looking through a microscope as it is a telescope.” “I think there is a similarity between the infinite big and the infinite smallness of everything,” says Yann Tiersen. Previously purchased tickets will be honored. This event rescheduled from November 14, 2021. STG Presents Yann Tiersen at The Neptune on Sunday, June 12, 2022. ![]()
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