QUINQUIS, the new moniker of Yann Tiersen’s wife, Émilie, provides the support tonight. The pair are conducting this tour via boat, sailing around the UK and stopping at places to indulge their passion for Celtic languages. She plays synth-driven ballads, singing in breathy, melodramatic Breton for the most part, occasionally employing some driving beats. She’s very chatty throughout, expounding on the inspirations of each song, which mostly revolve around death. The final song is a distorted cover of ‘Take My Breath Away’, inspired by a serious bout of Covid.
Tiersen himself is very much the opposite; he begins by loosely explaining what he’s planning to do, then leaves the music to speak for itself. He starts with a gorgeous 20 minutes of solo piano (joking with the crowd to “yawn loudly” if it’s too boring), mostly taken from his two most recent albums. Though he does play ‘Pern’, from 2016’s ‘Eusa’, a beautiful piece that glistens in its fast-paced melody, proving that Tiersen’s technical ability remains undimmed despite his expanding musical interests.
The middle portion of the show slides into relatively abstract electronics, with plenty of synth-noodling that splits the difference between Jean-Michel Jarre and the Stranger Things soundtrack. Émilie returns to sing on a few songs, stopping the show from veering too close to truly experimental.
For the final half hour or so, Tiersen is in full DJ mode, with a selection of his most muscular tracks that wouldn’t be out of place at the club night that was following this performance. It also looks like the most fun he’s fun all night. Much of the crowd look a little reticent to cut a rug, but the drunk Fringe tourists who appear to have dropped in on a whim are having a great time. There’s a pretty encore to finish things off, Émilie giving her all to what I can only assume is a poignant, heart-wrenching ballad that Yann scores with signature panache on the synths.
Whatever angle you approach Tiersen’s music from, there’s certainly a lot more going on than the plaintive piano he’s most famous for. It might not make for the most cohesive of performances, but when you start off like Phillip Glass and end like Avicii (slight exaggeration), that’s just par for the course.