Monday, February 19, 2007

Song of the day: Yann Tiersen's "Rue des cascades"

While I've been too busy in the last days and my "song of the day" rubrique hasn't been updated for a while, the artist and song I propose today more than make make up for all that delay.

There is one (perhaps only one) musician whose concerts I would in no way miss, should he perform anywhere around the place I were located. This person is Yann Tiersen, a true musical genius (unequalled composer; superlative player of pretty much any conventional music instrument, not to mention that he uses many unconventional ones!- I am not kidding, see the evidence below). Unfortunately, I wasn't lucky and didn't yet get a chance to actually see him on stage: the last missed opportunity was exactly a week ago, on Monday the 12th of Feb, when he performed in Amsterdam's Paradiso (and when you think that he could have done so in all the years I was fulltime in Amsterdam!). Nothing unexpected, the tickets for his concert were sold out long time before the date of the concert. I have written a bit on Tiersen and his music also before, inter alia already mentioning some of my favourite pieces from him and linking to some excellent clips available on YouTube; hence, I will not repeat myself - and cut short the introduction for the purpose of this post.

The song for today (and for the last 5 days or so...) is Yann Tiersen's sweet & intriguing "Rue des cascades" (vocals Claire Pichet). The linked clip contains sequences from the movie "La vie rêvée des anges" (which I haven't yet seen, but it is on my list of "must see movies"), which has "Rue des cascades" as one of its soundtracks. Talking about movie soundtracks, Tiersen has got a lot of experience and outstanding successes with those (and this includes basically the entire soundtrack set for one of my favourite movies of all times, "Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain", likely his most famous). See also a live interpretation of "Rue des cascades".

I believe that all of Tiersen's creations are masterpieces in their own right (as I already stated, this guy is a genius); however, given time and space constraints (next to youtube availability...), I'll single out only an additional few of my top favourite ones, next to those I mentioned in my old "Monochrome" post and to today's song of the day. Such outstanding pieces are: "La boulange" (excellent original clip of this song!) or "Comptine d' un autre été" (with a perfectly assorted videoclip!). You can also watch the whole short (about 12 min) animated movie "Le cyclope de la mer", with superb music composed entirely by Yann Tiersen (first part movie, second part movie).

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