Pierre Estève (born February 11, 1961, in Cahors, France, is an electric singer-songwriter and composer with a wide range of styles, a musician, a contemporary artist acclaimed for his digital installations and sound sculptures, as well as a researcher and a journalist writing for the French musical press. After benefiting from classical music and orchestra through training with the French Conservatoire de Musique institution, he is a specialist in virtual symphonic orchestras and world instruments. He is especially well known by the public for composing the music for the soundtrack to various video games, ads, documentaries and films. A multi-instrumentalist, he collects instruments from the five continents but also all kinds of natural and sonorous materials. Estève also creates installations based on interactions between the public with natural acoustic materials and technologies, using materials that he creates himself.
Early life and education
Pierre Estève was born on February 11, 1961, in Cahors in the French Pyrenees, and spent most of his childhood in Avignon. He started to study music around the age of 4, and 2 years later he enrolled in the Conservatoire de Musique in Avignon where he took up his piano studies. During his childhood, Pierre was very sensitive to the sounds of the natural backgrounds he evolved within. His experiences are the source of his artistic interest in the world's musical instruments and sonorous materials.
It was during his teenage years when he wrote his first composition. After graduating high-school with a major in Maths and Science, he went on to study engineering in the Marseilles Maths Sup Institute. There he made the decision to devote himself entirely to his musical training.
Estève then studied conducting orchestras as well as baritone singing. He received diplomas in fugue, harmony, counterpoint and musical analysis, and then obtained the gold medals in guitar, chamber music and musical theory at the Conservatoires of Avignon and Montpellier.
First steps in the music industry Pierre Estève bought his first electrical guitar at the age of 13, and then in 1978 he purchased a Roland Jupiter-4 synthesizer on which he leads thorough, endless experimentations. The mastery he developed of those instruments led him to work as a session musician from a very young age, and that is when he created his first recordings. Around the age of 16, he joined a progressive rock band called "Aube en Hiver" (Winter Dawn) and he developed a series of compositions based on the Book of the Dead.
Around the middle of the eighties, the musician played as the first guitarist for the Canto General under the direction of Jean Golgevit. In 1987, he signed a contract license with WEA. He released his first solo recording, Atout Cœur, a 45 rpm vinyl record. Pierre Estève became one of the major artists in his record company which led him to make a few TV appearances. Feeling completely alien to the universe of television broadcasting, he developed an interest in writing soundtracks for the silver screen and, fulfilling a desire for autonomy, started writing the soundtrack to various commercials and promotional spots beginning in 1989.
In 1992 he recorded the first collaborative album for Radio France, under the name of Gloobi Doo-wap. Not released for sale, the record and the tracks therein were aimed at being used as musical illustrations for the radio stations in the group. During that period, he also writes new songs and develops several rock projects. The various orders which he delivered enabled him to acquire a recording studio.
Into video game design In 1995, he got in touch with Cryo Interactive, an editor and developer of video games. At that time the French game-making studio was working on the sequel to Dragon Lore, and offerrf him to direct and complete the sound design to the new episode. Intrigued by the innovations and structural and sonorous experimentations allowed by video games, he accepts to compose and record the soundtrack to Dragon Lore II within a very short span of time. Deriving his inspiration from composers such as Carl Orff or Basil Poledouris, he wrote a score in a baroque and epic spirit, with the addition of a few Oriental notes. Estève wished to go beyond the limitations of technology imposed by the instruments then available and samples his own sound library in order to obtain a satisfactory rendering. Owing to the technological limitations of the times, he had to elaborate most of his tracks from short patterns repeated in a loop, which he gradually and subtly builds upon. Indeed, each of the melodic loops had to keep within 512 kb and the final compositions were made up by blending them all together. Pierre Estève also built a sound motor with the help of the programmer of the game, which enabled him to create musical variations according to the scenario. This particular experiment was a defining moment in the composer's career as it was a first step towards the elaborations of interactive installations as from 2000. Dragon Lore II was released in December 1996 and the soundtrack was actually published as an album in 2009.
After his work on his game, Pierre founds the label called Shooting Star by the end of 1996, and his part will be to extend and produce sound content for the music and audiovisual industries. Shooting Star publishes Esteve's first solo album under the name Bamboo in early 1997. This album was planned to be the first of a series of recordings dedicated to sonorous materials and matters.
Pierre Estève also acted as a musical consultant on the music and the French dubbings of Versailles 1685, developed by Cryo. He also designs the sound effects of the cinematic for the two games which come after Versailles in the same collection: Egypt 1156 B.C.: Tomb of the Pharaoh (1997) and China: Intrigue in The Forbidden City (1998).
From Atlantis to The 2nd World With Dragon Lore II, Pierre Estève developed a passion for the interactions allowed by music and the virtual environment of video games. Round the end of 1996, he meets composer Stéphane Picq. In the same period of time, Cryo developed what would become one of the greatest successes of the studio: Atlantis which takes place on the lost continent in a time before Antiquity. A large part of the design of the game thus consisted in inventing the various cultural elements involved in making up the Atlantean society, and that would include the Continent's music. Estève and Picq thus offered to compose it, which offer the studio accepted.
The two musicians started to work together from the beginning of 1997 onwards. During the eighties, Pierre Estève had become more and more interested in world musical instruments bought either in Paris retailer shops or during journeys abroad. Thanks to this collection, Estève and Picq imagined and played a primordial music which matches the universe of the game, as they blend together various influences from all over the world, while they integrate electronic musical instruments. Each of them writes and plays approximately ten tracks and also collaborates on four tracks of the original soundtrack. Close to the creative team of Cryo, they also created the design of the game's aural atmosphere, especially when there is an interaction between the music and the sounds. The two composers drew from those random sound loops whose objective is to make certain atmospheres more lively, the goal being to avoid the player having the impression that a same audio loop keeps playing on and on in a given context.
Alongside those experiments, the two composers created an interactive, non-linear slide-show under the form of a travel diary in the world of Atlantis. For this they use various drawings and preparatory watercolours by Thomas Boulard, the graphic designer of the game, and integrate their own music into it. Numerous quotations from writers and known poets, or written by either of the two musicians, punctuate the ambulation, inspired by the atmospheres of the game. The whole lot gives a complementary vision of those. In 1997, Cryo launches Atlantis: The Lost Tales. So as to give the soundtrack its full dimension, Shooting Star published it as a double sound album with one interactive track under the English title of the game. The quality and great originality of the music are acclaimed by many magazines and periodicals, some of which not belonging to the press specialised in video gaming. The album rapidly met with success.
After this collaboration, Pierre Estève was chosen by Canal+ Multimedia in order to create the sound and music of their future games. The first of those, The 2nd World, developed by Cryo, was a pioneering experiment in the area of virtual online games. In this game the player is immersed and evolves in a 3D rendering of Paris. It was distributed with an adventure game which takes place in the same universe, Légendes Souterraines(Legend of the underground). Pierre Estève was in charge of designing the soundtrack to all of this and wrote music which departs from the exoticism of Atlantis, while still developing a syncretic sound with strong spiritual connotations, with between others Gregorian chants and mechanical sounds. The whole proved particularly dark, in perfect adequation with the very sombre context of the games.
The soundtrack was published and released by Shooting Star in parallel to those games. Like Atlantis: The Lost Tales, the CD contains an interactive CD-ROM track including original drawings by Stéphane Levallois, the designer of the two projects. They were introduced as a multimedia slideshow this time with a vast number of animations, making the experiment interactive. The 2nd World and Légendes Souterraines are published in 1997. The album, called Obscura, was released at the beginning of the following year.
In 1998, Estève was entrusted with the design of a soundtrack for a new Cryo production, a game of divine simulation called Deo Gratias. The composer makes up mystical atmospheres dealing with the original divine chaos, while including unusual pop sounds within some liturgic sounds. Following the request by a lot of fans, the album to the original soundtrack appeared in 2014, on a dematerialised media.
On the same year, the French publisher also worked on the adaptation of the comic book series Black Moon Chronicles, published by French publisher Dargaud, as a video game. The game takes place in the fantastic medieval universe created by the screenwriter François Marcela-Froideval. Pierre Estève writes the whole of the music and sound effects to this production. During the development, the TV channel La Cinquième shot a new story on the composer, entitled Au Son de la Lune ["To The Sound of the Moon"]. The original soundtrack was published in July 1999.
In 1999, Cryo created the sequel to Atlantis. Pierre is entirely in charge of the music of this new game. This time the script takes place after the submersion of the continent. The player is, through the means of trance, led to being incarnated in three characters from civilisations very far from each other in space and time. Estève thus combines the instruments in his collection which evoke more or less the countries visited throughout the game (Ireland, China and Yucatán). He endeavours to represent the universe not only physical but also spiritual of the cultures which the player meets with. The organisation of the soundtrack is built up in a segmented way in four parts. Estève uses certain music originally composed in a different way from Atlantis II. In this regard, the track entitled "Highlands" was written during a trip recently undertaken in Ireland and illustrates a part of the episode of the game situated in this country.