Pierre Estève (born 11 February 1961 in Cahors, France) is an electric singer-songwriter and composer with a wide range of styles, a musician, a contemporary artist acclaimed for his digital installations and sound sculptures, as well as a researcher and a journalist writing for the French musical press.
[2] Pierre Estève bought his first electrical guitar at the age of 13, and then in 1978 he purchased a Roland Jupiter-4 synthesizer on which he leads thorough, endless experimentations.
Around the age of 16, he joined a progressive rock band called "Aube en Hiver" (Winter Dawn) and he developed a series of compositions based on the Book of the Dead.
At that time the French game-making studio was working on the sequel to Dragon Lore, and offerrf him to direct and complete the sound design to the new episode.
Intrigued by the innovations and structural and sonorous experimentations allowed by video games, he accepts to compose and record the soundtrack to Dragon Lore II within a very short span of time.
Deriving his inspiration from composers such as Carl Orff or Basil Poledouris, he wrote a score in a baroque and epic spirit, with the addition of a few Oriental notes.
Estève wished to go beyond the limitations of technology imposed by the instruments then available and samples his own sound library in order to obtain a satisfactory rendering.
Owing to the technological limitations of the times, he had to elaborate most of his tracks from short patterns repeated in a loop, which he gradually and subtly builds upon.
Pierre Estève also built a sound motor with the help of the programmer of the game, which enabled him to create musical variations according to the scenario.
After his work on his game, Pierre founds the label called Shooting Star by the end of 1996, and his part will be to extend and produce sound content for the music and audiovisual industries.
With Dragon Lore II, Pierre Estève developed a passion for the interactions allowed by music and the virtual environment of video games.
A large part of the design of the game thus consisted in inventing the various cultural elements involved in making up the Atlantean society, and that would include the Continent's music.
During the eighties, Pierre Estève had become more and more interested in world musical instruments bought either in Paris retailer shops or during journeys abroad.
Alongside those experiments, the two composers created an interactive, non-linear slide-show under the form of a travel diary in the world of Atlantis.
So as to give the soundtrack its full dimension, Shooting Star published it as a double sound album with one interactive track under the English title of the game.
Like Atlantis: The Lost Tales, the CD contains an interactive CD-ROM track including original drawings by Stéphane Levallois, the designer of the two projects.
In this regard, the track entitled "Highlands" was written during a trip recently undertaken in Ireland and illustrates a part of the episode of the game situated in this country.
During this period, he works first of all on a series of documentaries produced by the ZED Company, then records many other productions at a very fast rate, the latter revolving around themes close to the concerns of the composer, which include the environment as well as the development of new technologies.
En 2006 he is awarded with the " François de Roubaix " prize for the music of his film Les Samouraïs Noirs, by Jean Queyrat, at the FIFME in Toulon, in the South of France.
The same year, he collaborates with Infogrames and Moulinsart Multimédia as he designs the sound environment to Tintin: Destination Adventure, featuring the famous character created by Belgian comic book author Hergé.
So as to reproduce the atmosphere which underlies the game, Estève makes use of saturated electrical guitars or strident violins which personify the invisible presence of Count Dracula.
[1] These experiences will later play a most important part in the artist's developing an interest in world musical instruments and, more fundamentally, the sound matters on which he began to lead ground research.
Though his interest in such experiments may come through in commissioned projects such as Atlantis, they appear more conspicuously through a series of recordings he designed around materials and matters such as stone or water.
Although the first two albums were essentially played on previously existing instruments, Stalactica in particular is the fruit of years of research on the acoustic properties of caves, and particularly those of Isturitz, in the Basque Country.
It is presented in 2002 when he is given carte blanche by Kraft Foods within the framework of the Café Show happening organised in the carrousel du Louvre in Paris.
Over the years, the interest which Pierre has had for world instruments and in primordial cultures ever since his youth has turned into a fascination much deeper still for the natural materials themselves.
Through his work, he thus seeks to interrogate at various levels the relationship between the human being and the world, thus suppressing first and foremost the partitions induced by cultural conditioning.
[citation needed] It was in 1995, during the elaboration of Bamboo, that Pierre Estève started to put together a collection of world musical instruments.
His workshop boasts in particular a Javanese historical gamelan which once belonged to the royal family of Yogyakarta,[1] Raden Mas Jodjana, and also Celtic, Armenian and African instruments, ranging from the most elaborate pieces to the most primitive.