Pierre Bastien

Flûtes d'Outre-tombe, 2025

For several years now, Pierre Bastien has been building ensembles of flutes arranged in a circle and rotating above a wind tunnel. It's a way for him to go back to the cradle of humanity. He quotes anthropologist André Schaeffner, who, in his Origine des Instruments de Musique, evokes Lucretius, who "proposes that even before singing, people first imitated with their mouths 'the limpid flight of birds', and that the wind in the reeds gave them the idea of blowing into the hollows of the reeds". The present version of these devices is one of the most complex, with two blowers instead of one, and each of these mouths blowing into two contiguous instruments instead of one. The result is ghostly chords and melodies, albeit generated by a mechanical and automatic system.

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Pierre Bastien

Born 1953
Based in Rotterdam

"From free improvisation and the inventive jazz scene to electronic circles, Pierre Bastien is an artist whose unique creative grid has left him free for over 40 years. From his obstinate bass playing in the legendary "Rock'n'Roll Station" with Jac Berrocal and Vince Taylor to Pascal Comelade's Bel Canto Orchestra, of which he was a member from the start, Pierre Bastien's collaborations with a whole circle of singular artists have been numerous over the years, leading him to work with Pierrick Sorin, Aphex Twin, Robert Wyatt and Issey Mikaye. Pierre Bastien's music, built around traditional instruments, motors, objects and paper, is at the crossroads of scholarly and popular music. (...) Organized around miniature, fragile machinery, as well as shadows, images and superimpositions, Pierre Bastien's concerts and installations open up a space for visualization that exists as much on stage as under our eyelids: otherworldly flutes, headless hands, female musicians, loops and water bubbles played on the trumpet form a matrix from which a singular magic awakens, that of the tiny moments that transform certain concerts into great moments." Marie-Pierre Bonniol