Yann Tiersen may have been just another boy who turned his back on Mozart and Satie to make friends with Iggy Pop and Mick Jagger. Maybe he listened to the Stooges and Joy Division between violin and piano lessons, so by the time he was a teenager (to his parent’s horror, I imagine) he was playing guitar in a punk band.
But Tiersen is all grown up now, and his resumé stands out from the average punk rocker, having composed soundtracks for major films like Goodbye, Lenin! and Amelie. The classical training, it turns out, served him well. And the punk thing lended a dynamism that made a whole lot more sense mixed with classical music than one would have thought.
Currently, the most substantial text on Yann Tiersen’s website is a single, telling quote: “Let’s live in an enormous world of sound we can use randomly, with no rules at all. Let’s play with sound, forget all the knowledge and instrumental skills, and just use instinct – the same way punk did.” And it’s true that when you know the rules well enough, it’s permissible to break them. Tiersen’s first extensive tour in the States does just that -- pulling together acoustic instrumentation, electronica, and rock to create a genre-bending performance.
The band of six began the set with a constant string of high-then-low ambient keyboard melodies while Yann frantically strummed a mandolin, switching quickly to violin once the drums and bass kicked in. The effect was theatric – profound, arresting, and pregnant with significance beyond musical experimentation. The first song blended seamlessly into the second, the title track from his new album, Dust Lane. A robotic female voice uttered fragments through the speakers, “…skyline…on dust lane…again and again…walking…time…talking to many people…on…dust lane.”
The group did not give a “Yann and His Band” impression with Tierson in the spotlight and the rest as passive support with heads down and hands glued to instruments. Rather, it felt like a genuinely collaborative, synergistic effort. Each member had something unique to offer. The bassist switched from (bass) guitar to bass clarinet midway through "Dust Lane," then followed Yann’s lead with a melodica for an intermittent solo before a very rock-n-roll jam session. The drummer was barefoot. And the keyboard/soundboard guy was involved in a near-constant non-verbal dialogue with Yann.
One distinct characteristic of Tiersen’s latest compositions is an unbroken string of melody produced either by keys or melodica that changes pitch slowly like long rolling hills, as opposed to short, choppy tones – think hummmmmhummmmmhummmmm as opposed to huh-hum-huh-hum-huh-hum. There are were exceptions, of course, as the band proceeded in unpredictable fits and starts, first with a quiet mandolin, violin, or piano solo, then without warning or conventional crescendo they collapsed into a calculated flurry of noise.
If there were lyrics, I couldn’t decipher them, especially about six songs deep when Andrea from Breathe Owl Breathe sang a number – or rather, chanted, screamed, hummed, and shouted a series of ohhh-eeee-yaaah’s with a spiritual intensity that moved me but perhaps would have been more effective had I been able to hear the subtleties of her voice.
The next song started me thinking that Tiersen was laying the framework of a story right in front of us. He sang about something which, again, I could not understand. But the odd thing was it had no major emotional crux. Until that point, the songs had been erratic and blustery – screeching high, thundering low, and then stopping dead in their tracks before any patterns could be recognized. This song, in its tedium and lack of highs and lows, highlighted the brilliance of the rest. Appropriately, a gentleman standing in front of me was “Shazamming” each song (iPhone/Pad’s answer to “Googling” songs without typing. Just record, send, and shazam! the artist name, song, and album appear on the screen within seconds.), only to be given an error message each time. Whether this is an unfortunate distraction or a totally awesome gadget depends on how you’ve interacted with it (i.e. guy at concert keeps blinding you with it vs you use it to win a $5 bet that the song playing on repeat in the Target pharmacy is indeed Starfucker). The point is that the songs sounded improvised, which renders these things useless, and I think Shazam! would agree with me. I have to admit I kind of like that, because sometimes just the weird, pattern-less, mysterious experience of something is more virtuous than a distilled explanation of it.
