A French composer, improviser, performer, sound engineer and sound director born June 25, 1964.
Thrust into the world of music and sound after listening to the music of Pink Floyd, Thierry Balasse taught himself drumming before following a course for sound technicians at ENSATT, the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts et Techniques du Théâtre. Thereafter becoming interested in the relationships between text, spoken voice and music, he became involved in sound engineering for the theatre.
In 1989, he met Christian Zanési, who led him to discover work in the studio, and then Pierre Henry, whose partner he became for the conception of loud-speaker orchestras and, at times, his performer. His encounter with Sylvain Kassap then Eric Groleau and a long residence with La Muse en Circuit led him to develop further his relationship to electroacoustic music: he reconnected with musique concrète, redefined spatialisation while continuing to use analogue tools. He became interested in sound objects, in rare instruments, and developed new instruments, as can be seen in Garlic for ‘bagues-larsen’ and theremin, first performed at the Festival de Montpellier in 2014.
An untiring and demanding researcher into sounds and tone-colours, he reconstituted Henry’s Messe pour le temps présent, performing it live with his company Inouïe (2015). Balasse often associates his sound explorations with the theme of space: Les pieds dans les étoiles (2009); The Dark Side of the Moon (2012); UniVerSons (first pedagogical performance, 2013); Cosmos 1969, la bande musicale de la mission Apollo 11 (first performed at the Maison de la Musique in Nanterre in 2018).
