peirr

Pierre Alexandre Tremblay was born in 1975 in Montréal, Québec. He studied classical guitar and music theory from an early age, and as a teenager discovered bass guitar with Jean-Guy Larin, Sylvain Bolduc and Michel Donato. He also studied composition with Michel Tétrault, Marcelle Deschênes and Jonty Harrison. He earned his BA in music at the Université de Montréal in 1998 and his doctorate at the University of Birmingham in 2005. From 2005, he taught and researched composition and improvisation at the University of Huddersfield, in England. Since 2024, he is research professor in composition at the Conservatorio della Svizzera italiana, in Lugano, Switzerland.

In 1993, he explored improvised music with Facteur X, which led to the formation of the contemporary jazz ensemble [iks] in 1996. He directed this ensemble for 11 years, recording seven albums, touring Europe and North America and spending three months in Senegal for a cultural exchange with traditional West African musicians. This journey was chronicled in Étienne Deslières's documentary film Le journal de sable. He is currently collaborating on a variety of projects, playing bass guitar and manipulating sound on a laptop. He has been a member of the contemporary jazz trio ars circa musicæ, played in duets, trios and quartets, often within the Loop Collective. He also works on pop music projects in studio as producer and bass guitar.

Strong of these approaches that he considers complemantary, Pierre Alexandre is now working on hybridizing his aesthetic approaches, which he feels complete each other, into a single, coherent poetic language. He composes fixed media, instrumental and mixed music, sometimes integrating video, improvisation and real-time processing. As a composer, he is fascinated by the listener's experience rather than the process of creation. He considers the perception of form extremely important, and gives ample room to the poetic impact of music. He also programs sound processing software, and freelances as artistic and technical director for contemporary music projects. He devotes the rest of his time to reading, photography and his family.