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René Aubry

With music composed for shows by Carolyn Carlson, Pina Bausch and Philippe Genty, soundtracks for films, and 15 albums to his name, René Aubry is a popular, prolific and discreet composer. This native son of Epinal is self-taught and has traced his own career as a composer of "songs without words". And yet, like many other sound producers cast in the same mould (from François de Roubaix to Pascal Comelade and even Ennio Morricone), René Aubry has become a permanent landmark in 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.
He started to work with his brother, "in the footsteps of Catherine Ribeiro and François Béranger".

But it was an encounter with Carolyn Carlson that propelled him into following a less frequented path. René Aubry became a "composer of ballet music" while making it a point of honour to release albums that were a pleasure to listen on their own.

A composer, multi-instrumentalist and engineer of his own sound, René Aubry worked alone on albums blending classical harmonies and modern instrumentation, samples of voices or violins "pinched from Beethoven, Stravinsky or Puccini". Archivists are driven to despair because his albums can be classified in all the shelves of a record shop; classical, ballet, New Age, new music, rock, french pop, or ethnic music from all over the world.
His ambition to appear on stage appeared at a later period, and despite himself. At the beginning of the nineties, when the organisers of the Festival des Musiques Possibles, Time Zone, in Bari, Italy, asked him to give a concert, his initial reaction was to say no. But after repeated requests, he gave in "following nearly three years of telephone conversations"! In 1994, he finally participated in the festival with Philip Glass, Nusrat Fateh, Ali Khan and David Byrne. Not bad for a first stage performance!
In 1997, he composed Signes, a ballet by Carolyn Carlson, first performed at the Bastille Opera House, which won an award at the "Victoires de la Musique classique et jazz", in 1998.

The albums entitled Plaisirs d'amour and Invités sur la Terre set in motion a return to more acoustic composition thanks to his determination to continue his stage appearances. The timid tinker who used to handle his musical craft on his own had learned how to make instrument players work on his music, and above all, he started to enjoy his contacts with the public. He performed a series of concerts and criss-crossed Europe with his septet.

And just when he seemed to have settled into this "system", this unpredictable artist, with his great love of freedom, came back to surprise us with Seuls au Monde, a sombre and electric record marked by September 11.

Since he released Projection Privée, a fantasy on San-Antonio, the famous character of Frédéric Dard ; Mémoires du Futur is a sober and stripped-down album, with a melancholic vision ; and Play Time with 18 themes that are dear to his heart, with the musicians who accompany him on stage.

Collaborations
with Carolyn Carlson

Out of focus

Signes

Let the grass grow

Don't look back

Going home

Steppe

Still waters

Blue Lady (solo)

Underwood

Undici onde

Slow, heavy and blue

Trio (1979)

Amble

Running on the sounds of a thousand stones

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