Chassol

Christophe Chassol is a French composer, director and musician with singular compositional methods. He is the creator of unclassifiable albums/films/performances, which he calls “Ultrascores”, musical journeys to the United States with Nola Chérie, to India with Indiamore, to Martinique with Big Sun and to Japan, with his latest work, Ludi, freely inspired by Hermann Hesse’s The Game of Glass Beads.

In addition to his concerts around the world, Chassol composes for film and television. He also collaborates with a wide variety of international artists, including Frank Ocean. Solange, Xavier Veilhan, Sophie Calle, the group Phoenix, and Sebastien Tellier. Chassol appeared on France Musique in 2017, when he became a weekly columnist for the morning show hosted by Saskia Deville. He now hosts a new television music programme, Ground Control, broadcast on Arte since October 2021.

On the occasion of the Basquiat Soundtracks exhibition at the Philharmonie de Paris in spring 2023, Chassol proposes a singular composition based on the painter and more particularly on one of his paintings, “Action Comics”.

Apart from the physical resemblance that strikes at first sight, there is something going on in Jean-Michel Basquiat’s painting that can be found in Christophe Chassol’s music. It is through their compositions, on canvas for one, on score for the other, that the comparison is most obvious. For they have this way of cutting, superimposing, sampling, composing over samples of their previous creations, which links them. Creating a background and composing on it with their own techniques.