*** 180g BioVinyl LP ***

An audiophile LP transfer for an immersive tribute to a remote island off the coast of Brittany.

Having become celebrated for his score to Amélie (2001), the French composer Yann Tiersen moved to the island of Ushant (Ouessant/Eusa), and this album is a musical tribute to his home, comprising ten pieces about ten specific places on the island. In 2016, Tiersen published a collection of pieces called Eusa, which Jeroen van Veen has combined with his 2021 collection, Kerber, named after a chapel on the island, to produce Island. The album has been a best-seller on CD for its contemplative mood and beauty.

Among the 10 tracks, some offer the perfect soundtrack for contemplation on a long walk or staring out of a window on a train journey. Others seem predestined to be background music for study or relaxation. The pieces sound at times dreamy and wistful, at times bittersweet, at other times happily playful. With each song, your imagination can easily conjure a scene from a movie: a breakup after a fight in a cosy café or a nature documentary showing two baby birds opening their eyes for the very first time.

This isn’t a collection about isolation; it’s more an expression of awareness of your own environment and your place within it: a sonic encapsulation of the hyper-local. Tiersen relates this approach to a night spent studying the stars – which he himself does. ‘You can look at things that are thousands of light years away and relate your own existence to this really cosmic element,’ he says. ‘But you get that same feeling with the things all around you.’