Emilie Simon

Emilie Simon blends a conservatory education in experimental music and rigorous theoretical training with dual careers as a film composer for wide-release projects and an electronic-pop artist whose work sits close to that of Björk or the Knife. Her characteristically gentle vocal timbre occasionally evokes the early recordings of both Kate Bush and Claudine Longet. Born in 1978 in the modest seaside town of Montpellier, France, to a musical household—her mother a pianist and her father a sound engineer—she began formal musical instruction while still a child. After completing conservatory studies in voice, she pursued further training in early-music repertory at the Sorbonne and in electronic composition at IRCAM, the Institute de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique Musique housed at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The resulting interplay between advanced electronic techniques and deep familiarity with historical vocal practices supplies the singular friction that runs through her output.

Her fusion of art-rock experimentation and accessible electronic pop first appeared on the self-titled 2003 album Emilie Simon, which earned favorable notices and later secured a Victoire de la Musique award for best electronica album. Filmmaker Luc Jacquet subsequently asked her to compose the score for his 2005 documentary March of the Penguins; the resulting music brought Simon a second Victoire de la Musique and a Cesar nomination, although Bruno Coulais’s score for Les Choristes ultimately prevailed. Drawing on the musique concrète techniques explored in that soundtrack—particularly field recordings of fracturing ice and other raw natural sounds—Simon’s 2006 album Vegetal extends the premise of Stevie Wonder’s Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants by pairing botanical lyrics with actual sonic samples captured from living plants.

American listeners first encountered a representative selection of her work with the 2006 compilation The Flower Book, which gathered material from her initial three European releases. In 2007 the album March of the Empress repackaged the March of the Penguins score together with two additional tracks, while the live recording Olympia also appeared that year. Her next studio effort, The Big Machine, consisted largely of English-language songs and reached stores in France and the United Kingdom in 2009, although domestic release in the United States did not occur until 2011.