BIRRD

About

Imagine a style of electronic music that’s perfect for dancing in a dark club or lazing on a sunny beach, and you have imagined BIRRD’s music, with its cosmic harmonies and re-constructed real-world sounds that combine to form a highly personal and deeply melodic version of machine music. Curiosity—a distinct approach to life—gives birth to new forms of expression, which in turn create new desires. In the case of 34-year-old Stefan Vogel, alias BIRRD (the Anglicized version of his German surname), curiosity has fostered soaring discovery. With the covid lockdowns came the ideal opportunity to devote himself to his passion: melodic electronic music that is at once laid back and dreamy, but with swing, evoking such disparate scenes as the Corsican coast and the New York skyline, which are among the numerous inspirations for this Franco-Italian-American artist. Following on from his debut EP “Alba”, released in 2022, which won over audiences with the track “Void Loop”, BIRRD hit the stage at Transmusicales Rennes. This notable launch attracted the attention of the Louvre, which commissioned him to compose pieces inspired by six of the museum's masterpieces and then to perform them once a month in the form of a guided tour. This year-long collaboration with the Louvre led to the release of the EP "Nocturne Insolite au Louvre" in June 2023. Since then, Stefan has played a number of solo dates, and is already announcing his tour, including live shows alongside such artists as NTO, Fakear, Mezerg, and French 79. In France and Europe, (Netherlands, Germany, Denmark) and also in the US and Canada. For his third EP, "Alter Echo", scheduled for release in February 2024, the sound of water and the depth of oceans will serve as inspiration for his new pieces. He is now working on his first album to be released in 2025. BIRRD has travel coursing through his veins, hence his ongoing desire to seek out new horizons. Nothing, however, predestined him to be a composer of emotional, energetic techno. He starts with guitar and keyboard, playing in blues band. When the band split up he turned to composing with machines, starting from simple motifs to create beautiful sounds. Having shed his initial belief that electronic music necessarily had to be brutal and loud, he incorporated the influences that have colored his music ever since, including Pink Floyd’s guitars, Worakls, NTO, Joris Delacroix, Rodriguez Jr.’s synthesizers, and Stephan Bodzin’s melancholy. Four years spent in Munich exposed him to the local techno scene and confirmed his true love: melodies, harmonic progressions, the combination of the epic and the sensitive, where the urge to dance is just one of several possible reactions. BIRRD is a paradoxical personality, a traveler tethered to his base in Rouen, a composer of electronic music that is just as much at ease in a grand hall as in one’s living room, flirting with techno but without the bleakness. He records his own sounds, stays clear of factory presets, and nurtures his own sonorities comprising everything from the surf on a beach to a bicycle shifting gears. Through harmonic loops, from clear techno roots to inspiring melodies, BIRRD eloquently conveys his passion.