* En anglais uniquement
Whether working with his project
Ensemble or under his own name, French multi-instrumentalist/composer
Olivier Alary makes music with a filmic complexity. Born in Toulouse, France,
Alary moved to London in the late '90s to study electro-acoustic composition at Middlesex University after completing a degree in architecture. He began making music under the name Hearing Is Our Concern and submitted demos of his music to labels including FatCat. After switching the name of his project to
Ensemble in 1998,
Alary released 2000's Sketch Proposals via
Aphex Twin's Rephlex label. The album caught the attention of
Björk, who commissioned him to remix songs from
Vespertine and
Medúlla, and also collaborated with him on the
Medúlla track "Desired Constellation." On
Ensemble's self-titled 2006 album, he worked with
Chan Marshall,
Lou Barlow, and Germany's
Babelsberg Orchestra, all of whom helped
Alary combine folky pop with symphonic arrangements.
Ensemble released another album, 2011's
Excerpts, but during the late 2000s the composer's focus moved increasingly to soundtrack work. This included the scores to Yung Chang's documentaries Up the Yangtze (2007) and China Heavyweight (2012), as well as music for fiction films such as Matias Meyer's Yo (2014) and Maxime Giroux's Felix and Meira (2014).
Alary's solo debut,
Fiction/Non-Fiction, collected selections of his film work; FatCat's classical imprint 130701 released the album in early 2017. ~ Heather Phares