Bio
Born in Strasbourg in 1963, Christine Ott is a virtuoso of the Ondes Martenot, an enigmatic electronic musical instrument invented in 1928 by Maurice Martenot. A classically trained student of Jeanne Loriod, she won a gold medal at the Strasbourg Conservatoire and a prize at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse in Paris in 1997. The "ondist" can be seen at renowned festivals and opera houses, performing the major works of the repertoire (Messiaen, Honegger, Varèse), on tour for ten years with Yann Tiersen, or alongside Radiohead, Jean-Philippe Goude or Tindersticks. Christine Ott is also a pianist and multi-instrumentalist who combines sensitivity, virtuosity and delicacy, and, in the end, a very singular composer. She has already published several acclaimed solo albums, all of which are part of an aesthetic between modern-classical and electronic music, in a space between Claude Debussy, Philip Glass and Brian Eno.
Christine Ott developed her solo career at the dawn of the 2010s. Her first album, Solitude Nomade, was released in 2009, featuring contributions from Yann Tiersen, Eric Groleau and Marc Sens. Seven years later, she joined the Gizeh label with her second album, Only Silence Remains, which was acclaimed by critics including The Wire and Les Inrockuptibles. In 2020, she released Chimères (pour ondes Martenot), an unprecedented album based entirely on Ondes Martenot; a sensual magma of sound produced by Mondkopf & Frédéric D. Oberland (Oiseaux-Tempête). The following year, she released her 4th album, 'Time to Die', 8 pieces that saw her switch from the 0ndes to the piano, from the Jupiter8 to the harp, from the Mellotron to the timpani for an introspective yet luminous journey. In 2015 she formed the side-project Snowdrops with Mathieu Gabry, with whom she has produced a number of stage creations and soundtracks for film and theatre. In 2020, the duo released an album entitled 'Volutes' (Injazero Records), which the British daily The Guardian named one of the 10 best contemporary music albums of 2020.
Her music, powerful and intense, always has a unique cinematic dimension. Stuart Staples made no mistake when he invited the artist to collaborate on Claire Denis' films. Christine Ott also wrote the original music for Roland Edzard's film La fin du silence, selected for the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes in 2011, and Snowdrops, the first feature film by filmmaker Phuttiphong Aroonpheng, which won an award at the Venice Film Festival in 2018. She works with a wide range of demanding collaborators, enthusiastically passing on her passion for the Ondes to her students at the Strasbourg Conservatoire. And to our great delight, Christine Ott never stops inventing, over and over again.
