Bernard Xolotl

French Electronic Music Composer and Artist

Electronic composer Bernard Xolotl was born in France in 1951. As a teen, he was introduced to electronic music through the works of musique concrete composers like Pierre Henry and Pierre Schaeffer, although he found the early recordings of Pink Floyd to be more inspirational. At age 18, he realized that he needed more freedom to live and express his ideas than the one that France could provide him with. Therefore, he left his own country to travel the world. Along the way, befriending figures that included composer Terry Riley, and the man who became his music teacher, the Indian master Pandit Pran Nath. During the early 1970s, Xolotl began creating music of his own, working in studios across Europe and the US before settling in California in 1974, where he slowly built his own studio. Two years later he recorded his debut album "Music by Xolotl." Next came "Journey to an Oracle" that included participation of European musicians from his European travels in the summer 1977. In 1978, after completing a painting based on the Golden Mean with his wife Barbara, he started recording the album "Return of the Golden Mean" with the collaboration of Irene Gosnell on violin and later, Jonathan Kramer on cello and Cyrille Verdeaux on keyboards. With the latter, he released the album "Prophecy" in 1980. During 1981, in San Francisco, Xolotl worked on many projects with virtuoso violinist Daniel Kobialka and the record "Procession" was released in 1982. On his next album "Last Wave", Xolotl - long associated with his work on the Zeta guitar synthesizer - expanded his musical palette with many new instruments such as the Yamaha CS60 and the PPG. He then concentrated on building a professional recording studio in order to record and produce both his own and "world" music including Indian, Tibetan and experimental Acoustics. More and more computers and programs kept him busy and the release of "Mexecho" on CD was delayed until 1991. "Tristany" followed in 1997 and "Time Lapses" in collaboration with Olivier Masselot was released in March 2009. He has since concentrated on creating digital Images specially for his HD Videos which use music of his own large repertory and some of these can be seen on Vimeo, YouTube, etc...