Yann Tiersen (born 23 June 1970) is a French Breton musician and composer. His musical career is split between studio recordings, music collaborations and film soundtracks songwriting. His music incorporates a large variety of classical and contemporary instruments, primarily the electric guitar, the piano, synthesisers and the violin, but also instruments such as the melodica, xylophone, toy piano, harpsichord, piano accordion or even typewriter. Tiersen is often mistaken for a soundtrack composer; as he is quoted about himself: "I'm not a composer and I really don't have a classical background," but his real focus is on touring and recording studio albums, which are often used for film soundtracks. Tracks taken from his first three studio albums were used for the soundtrack of the 2001 French film Amélie. Biography and career The early years: 1970–1992 Tiersen was born in 1970 in Brest, in the department of Finistère, part of Brittany in northwestern France, into a French family of Belgian and Norwegian origins. He started learning to play the piano at the age of four, the violin at the age of six, and received classical training at several musical academies, including those in Rennes, Nantes, and Boulogne-sur-Mer. In the early 1980s, he was influenced as a teenager by the punk subculture, and bands like The Stooges and Joy Division. When he was 13, he broke his violin, bought an electric guitar, and formed a rock band. Tiersen was living in Rennes back then, home to the three-day music festival Rencontres Trans Musicales, which is held annually in December. That gave him the opportunity to see acts like Nirvana, Einstürzende Neubauten, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, The Cramps, Television, and Suicide. A few years later, when his band parted, Tiersen bought a cheap mixing desk, an 8-track reel-to-reel tape recorder, and started recording music on his own with a synthesiser, a sampler, and a drum machine. Debut and national acclaim: 1993–2000 Before releasing film scores under his own name, Tiersen recorded background music for a number of plays and short films. During the summer of 1993, Tiersen stayed in his apartment with an electric guitar, a violin and a piano accordion, recording music on his own; he was guided by what he calls "a musical anarchic vision". By the end of the summer, Tiersen had recorded over forty tracks, which would most be used later on for his first two albums. Tiersen's