Biography

Bastien Pouillès (*1994) is a French classical and contemporary accordionist, composer, improviser and multidisciplinary artist. He is particularly renowned for his work in contemporary and new music, improvisation and multidisciplinary projects (dance, theatre). His eclectic and constantly evolving repertoire often includes electronics or new technologies, close collaborations with composers, as well as old music and transcriptions. His international experience allows him to with many ensembles (CoPeCo, Ensemble for New Music Tallinn, LUX:NM, SPIIC, Les Espaces XAMP, Ensemble Hors-Champ) and to take part in festivals such as Sound Plasma, müriaadFEST (Estonia), akademie kontemporär, SUBITO!, blurred edge (Germany), Festival des Solutions écologiques, Festival Mondes Nouveaux, Festival Inventio, Tout L’Monde Dehors!, Musique dans la Rue (France), among others.


In summer 2022, he was musical director of SoundSteps, a performance project in Hamburg involving forty dancers and musicians from six countries. In October 2022, he released the album Traversée I with his duo Silhouettes Contemporaines, with Benoît Segui (multi-guitarist), which explores the connections between Renaissance and contemporary music and includes, among other works, his composition Pavana Electricae for accordion and electric guitar. In spring 2023, he works with Espaces XAMP by Fanny Vicens and Jean-Étienne Sotty, and creates SPACE, a project awarded by the Mondes Nouveaux programme. As a composer and performer, he created the music for the dance performance Cuentos de la Luna, premiered in Berlin in May 2023.


Bastien holds a Master’s degree in contemporary performance and composition (CoPeCo) from the CNSMD of Lyon, a highly selective international programme that allowed him to study in Tallinn (Estonia), Stockholm (Sweden) and Hamburg (Germany). Before that, he obtained Bachelor’s degrees in performance and pedagogy at the PESMD in Bordeaux, including an Erasmus exchange at the Hochschule in Munich (Germany). He also holds a Master’s degree in research and musicology from the Aix-en-Provence University. Passionate about transmitting his knowledge, he teaches accordion at the conservatoires of Villeneuve-le-Roi and Villiers-sur-Marne (Paris region). Bastien lives mainly in Paris.

Updated – August 2023