In the morning never shave the antennas (Jean Cocteau)

Music composer, film director, writer, multimedia author, improviser, specialist of realtime synthesis instruments, artistic director...

Website (English version): www.drame.org
Blog (French only): www.drame.org/blog and on Mediapart
Installations : Nabaz'mob, Les Portes
iPad : Leonardo da Vinci's Dream Machine, USA 1968 deux enfants,
Boum !


After his studies at Idhec (Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinématographiques), Jean-Jacques Birgé conceives a passion for images and sounds, and particularly for their potential to produce sense and create emotions. Birgé considers sound as a counterpoint to pictures and dialogue, an extraordinary off-stage landscape and a wide opened window to imagination.

In 1975 he founded the record label GRRR and in 1976 the group Un Drame Musical Instantané. He composes for movies (I.Barrère, D.Belloir, D.Cabrera, P.Desgraupes, P.Morize, F.Reichenbach, F.Romand, J.Rouxel, R.Sangla, M.Trillat, la Cinémathèque Albert Kahn...), dance (J.Gaudin, K.Saporta...), photography (musical director of the Evenings at Rencontres d'Arles), theater, radio, and records about 30 LPs and CDs, plus 102 online albums (1284 pieces, 185 hours) free to listen or download on drame.org ! On stage, he plays live on silent movies (26 since 1976) as well as improvising and producing multimedia shows. For Le K with Richard Bohringer he was nominated at the 9ièmes Victoires de la Musique. His CD Etablissement d'un ciel d'alternance is a duo with writer Michel Houellebecq.

As a moviemaker, 20 years after La nuit du phoque (issued on DVD with the reissue of the cult-record Défense de), he directed Vis à vis : Idir et Johnny Clegg a capella. He received a BAFTA (British Academy Award) and the Jury Award in Locarno 1994 collectively for Sarajevo: a street under siege, and his short The Sniper was shown in more than 1000 theaters.

He composes his first electronic piece in 1965.
A specialist for realtime synthesis music instruments since 1973, he always lived among new technologies which offer to conceive strange and iconoclast objects.

Simultaneously to his work as a sound designer for exhibitions-shows (Il était une fois la fête foraine, The Extraordinary Museum, The Laying of the Hands, Passerelle, Le Siècle Métro, Jours de Cirque, L'argent, Pavillon Français de l'Expo Universelle d'Aïchi, Monuments to the Dead, GamePlay, Darwin, Carambolages, Rester vivant, Roger Ballen...) and urban spaces (impact survey of Grand Paris Metro), websites (BDDP-TBWA, Laurent-Perrier, Ville de Lyon, Compagnie Générale des Eaux, Rencontres Numer, Determinism, Else, Virtools, Adidas, Les Ptits Repères, Museum d'Histoire Naturelle, Musée de l'Immigration...), and CD-Roms (At the Circus with Seurat, Fenêtre sur l'Art, Europrix 98, AZ and Firmenich both Dauphin d'or at Communica, Le DVD-Rom du Louvre, Le Grand Jeu, Sethi et la couronne d'Egypte, Mr Men series, 9 Cahiers Passeport, 4 Salto & Zelia, Domicile d'Ange Heureux...), he asserts himself as a multimedia author with Carton (Enhanced-CD where an original game refers to each song), Machiavel (interactive video scratch of 111 loops, with Antoine Schmitt), and Alphabet, created with Frédéric Durieu and Murielle Lefèvre from Kveta Pacovska's book for children (Grand Prix Möbius International 2000, Prix Multimédia de la SACD 2000, Coup de coeur Trophées SVM Mac, Prix de la meilleure adpatation au Festival de Bologne en Italie, La Mention Spéciale au Salon du Livre de Jeunesse à Montreuil, First Prize CineKid en Hollande, GigaMaus en Allemagne, First Prize Package MMCA au Japon, et aux USA : Oppenheim Toy Portfolio Platinum Award 2002, Parents’ Choice Silver Honor 2001, Discovery.com Award of Excellence 2001, Software Magic Award Parenting Magazine 2001, Children’s Software Review All Star Award 2001, Choosing Children’s Software Best Pick 2001, Best Software Pick Edutaining Kids.com 2001).


With this CD-Rom he inaugurates a new direction of work based generativity and interactivity which let the player to discover each time a new interpretation (on-line et off-line). He regularly collaborates to creation sites lecielestbleu.org (with F.Durieu) and flyingpuppet.com (with N.Clauss).
For LeCielEstBleu he gets the Prix SCAM 2002 of the Best Internet Site meilleur site and the NarrowCast Content Award 2002 ... For Ulchiro on Flyingpuppet.com he gets the Prix du Centre Pompidou FlashFestival 2002...
Somnambules, together with Nicolas Clauss and Didier Silhol, got the Special Prize of Jury Senef 2003 (Seoul Net Festival), Prix de la Création Nouveaux Médias 2004 (Vidéoformes), 1st Prix France Telecom R&D Oone (Art Rock Festival), Prix SACD de la Création Interactive 2004, Prix ARS Electronica Net Vision / Net Excellence Honorary Mention 2004 (Austria) and is nominated among the 5 strangest sites at Yahoo! Best of 10 Years.
He designed the sound of Nabaztag, the smart rabbit, as well as Mir:ror and Dal:dal (Violet).
In 2010 the exhibition Révélations, une odyssée numérique dans la peinture at Petit Palais, Paris, receives the Grand Prix Stratégies 2010, Prix des Étudiants, Prix Produit Grand Public. Showed in 2013 at Hangaram Museum, Seoul Art Center.

The iPad and Android feature a fantastic new territory to explore (Leonardo da Vinci's Dream Machine, DigDeep, Boum !, Zephyr Collection, World of Yo-Ho, etc.).

Besides his daily blog (more than 4900 articles), Birgé wites in many magazines and teaches the relation between sound and pictures. His novels La corde à linge and USA 1968 deux enfants include images & sounds plus movies & interactivity for the second one!

In 2016 he works at Le Louvre, Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie, Panthéon, Palais de Tokyo, and
he composes the sound and musical score of the exhibition Carambolages at Grand Palais, Paris.
In 2017 TV5Monde publishes the web-serie Prévert Exquis (Award of the Best Francophone Project Cross Video Days TV5 Monde, Prix spécial du Jury Digital Ehon Awards) and GRRR publishes CD Long Time No Sea by trio El Strøm...
In 2018 the 100th Anniversary album is quite a surprise, followed by another one in 2020, Perspectives for the 22nd Century! In 2020 and 2023 : 57 musicians participate to the series of CD Pique-nique au labo.
In 2022 great releases: t
he reformation of Un Drame Musical Instantané with the CD Plumes et poils (2022), the LP Fictions of the duo Birgé and Lionel Martin (2022), several previously unreleased archives of Birgé (1972!), of the duo with Gorgé (1974) and of the trio of the Drame (1976 to 1984), the CD edition of the record Les bons contes font les bons amis of the Drame large orchestra (1983), new albums online with Gwennaëlle Roulleau, Fabiana Striffler, Csaba Palotaï, Sophie Agnel, David Fenech (2022), Fanny Meteier, Olivier Lété, Violaine Lochu, Tatiana Paris, Emmanuelle Legros, Matthieu Donarier, Hélène Duret, Rafaelle Rinaudo, Maëlle Desbrosses, Isabel Sörling, Olivia Scemama, Bruno Ducret (2023)...
In 2024, Apéro Labo are live recordings at Studio GRRR.

Website created in 1997 / Last update : monday, 18th march 2024 / French Daily Blog / © Jean-Jacques BIRGÉ / jjbirge@drame.org / Credits