Mathias Durand is a composer, improviser, singer, multi-instrumentalist.

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He grew up on the edge of the Chantilly forest near Paris, lulled by the romantic classical music of his pianist grandmother who was his first teacher.

 

As a teenager, he learned the guitar and other instruments as an autodidact, his masters were then Jimi Hendrix, Eric Dolphy, The Beatles and the psychedelic music of the sixties. He played in many bands, a lot of improvisation and texture work, and started producing music for other artists as well.

 

In parallel with these groups with very long pieces, he writes songs, and composes music for the image and the theater (Julien Signolet, Subodh Gupta, Neary Adeline Hay...)

 

He joined the acousmatic composition class of Régis Renouard-Larivière at the Paris VII Conservatory in 2006 and studied with him for five years.

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In 2009 he meets Santanu Bandyopadhyay in Calcutta was the beginning of his deep connection with Hindustani classical music.

In 2016 he meets his masters of Dhrupad, an ancient form of Indian classical music, the Gundecha brothers. At Ramakantji's invitation, he stayed with them and put his other projects on hold for four years. He receives a precious teaching on the primordial vibration through singing, the subtlety of a microtonal placement of notes and the very essence of the Raagas.

With their blessing he will be invited to sing at the Dhrupad Mela in Varanasi in February 2020.

 

In 2019 he joined James Thierrée's Compagnie du Hanneton and worked with him for his new shows, RooM and Mo's, as a pianist, guitarist, double bass player and musical director. They are on an international tour from 2022 to 2024.

 

With Julien Signolet he produces the immersive installation III at Collège des Bernardins, Paris in May and June 2023.

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He is commissioned by asH! and l'Orchestre de Chambre de Genève to create a serie of acousmatic compositions. They are created on the 4th of may 2024 at l'Usine, Geneva

 

Among the places that he performed can be noted Théâtre du Châtelet, Philharmonie de Paris, Musée du Louvre, Eglise St Esutache (Paris), Théâtre des Célestins (Lyon), Théâtre de Carouge (Genève), Rosalind Packer Theater (Sydney), Teatro Argentino (Rome), King’s Theater (Edimburg), Birla Auditorium (Jaipur), India Habitat Center (Delhi)…