With compositions for dances by Carolyn Carlson, Pina Bausch and Philippe Genty, film scores and 14 albums to his name, René Aubry is a popular, prolific and discreet composer. This native son of Epinal has forged his own path as a self-taught composer of songs without words. And yet like other sound artists cast in the same mould (from François de Roubaix to Pascal Comelade or even Ennio Morricone), René Aubry has settled into our musical world. As a young man, he developed a passion for the...
With compositions for dances by Carolyn Carlson, Pina Bausch and Philippe Genty, film scores and 14 albums to his name, René Aubry is a popular, prolific and discreet composer. This native son of Epinal has forged his own path as a self-taught composer of songs without words.
And yet like other sound artists cast in the same mould (from François de Roubaix to Pascal Comelade or even Ennio Morricone), René Aubry has settled into our musical world.
As a young man, he developed a passion for the guitar but was more attracted to the soft arpeggios of Leonard Cohen than the biting riffs of Led Zeppelin.
Together with his brother, he set out to work “in the footsteps of Catherine Ribeiro and François Béranger”.
However, it was his encounter with Carolyn Carlson that propelled him along a less crowded path. René Aubry became “a composer of ballet music”, while at the same time making it a point of honour to produce albums for the pure pleasure of listening to music.
As a composer, player of numerous instruments, and his own sound engineer, René Aubry works alone on his albums, blending classical harmonies with modern instrumentation, samples of voices or violins “taken from Beethoven, Stravinsky or Puccini”. Archivists tear their hair out in despair because his work has a place on all the record shops shelves: classical, ballet, new age, new music, rock, French variety, and world music.
The urge to appear on stage came to him later and despite himself. In the early nineties, when the organisers of the “Festival of Possible Music”, Time Zone, in Bari, Italy, asked him to give a concert, he initially refused. However, after much persuasion, he eventually gave in “after nearly three years of discussions over the telephone!” In 1994, he finally shared the festival’s line-up with Philip Glass, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and David Byrne. Not bad for a baptism of fire!
In 1997, he composed Signes, a ballet by Carolyn Carlson, with the première held at the Opera Bastille, winning an award at the "Victoires de la Musique Classique et du Jazz" in 1998.
His albums Plaisirs d’amour and Invités sur la Terre were the starting point for a return to more acoustic compositions as a result of his determination to continue his stage experience. The timid tinker, who handled his musical craft on his own, learned how to make instrumentalists work on his music and, above all, to appreciate contacts with the public. He performed one concert after another, travelling all over Europe with his septet.
And as soon as he seemed to have settled into this “system”, this unpredictable artist, with his love of freedom, again astonished everybody with Seuls au Monde, a sombre and electric record marked by the 11th of September. In this record, he went back to his programming and tinkering to share with us his alarmist but lucid view of our world.
His Projection Privée, a fantasy centred on San-Antonio, the famous character of Frédéric Dard, was released in 2004 and included the original soundtrack of the film Malabar Princess.
Allow yourself, today, to be tempted by the new Opus of René Aubry, whose liberated career is a reminder that this atypical artist, constantly acclaimed by a local public, deserves more than ever to be celebrated!
In reality, Memoires du futur is an album with ethereal overtones, a timeless work, punctuated by songs, including Viendras-tu avec moi?, a highly influential title that is breathtaking and out-of-the-ordinary, like its performer. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.
