After studying the cello at the conservatories of Montauban (France) and Montpellier (France), and then completing a Master’s Degree in Musicology at Université Paul Valéry (Montpellier), Julien Guillamat discovered music composition on a study trip at the University of Birmingham (UK). There, he completed a PhD in Electroacoustic Composition under Jonty Harrison from 2008 to 2014.

In the meantime, in 2008, Guillamat met Annette Vande Gorne, with whom he delved into the spatialized performance of acousmatic music. He participated to Ircam’s Acanthes Academy (Paris, France) in 2012. A year later, he founded Maison des arts sonores, a music creation association based in Montpellier and created the loudspeaker orchestra Klang acousmonium. Then, in 2014, he organized the first edition of the annual Klang! électroacoustique festival.

After teaching electroacoustic composition at the University of Birmingham for six years, he is now a professor of spatialized performance on acousmonium, sound recording techniques and commented listening of the electroacoustic repertoire at the Conservatoire royal de Mons / Arts² — École supérieure des arts (Belgium). He is also an active member of the Musiques & Recherches team in Ohain (Belgium).

As a composer, Guillamat relies on grain, tone and colour. His works mostly fall in the electroacoustic and acousmatic categories. Space is another key dimension in his works, and he performs the acousmatic repertoire on the largest loudspeaker orchestras in the world, notably in Europe.

Julien Guillamat was composer-in-residence at Opéra Orchestre national de Montpellier (OONM, France) in 2015-2019 and at the Totem(s) program of Centre national des écritures du spectacle (Villeneuve-lès-Avignon, France) in 2017-2018. He won 1st prize at the 2006 Summer Festival of Music composition competition (Birmingham), was a finalist at the 2010 Biennal Acousmatic Composition Competition Métamorphoses (Brussels, Belgium) and won 1st prize ex-aequo at the 2010 Spatialized Performance Competition Espace du son (Brussels, Belgium).

Guillamat is regularly commissioned by major public and private institutions such as Circles of Influence (UK), ministère de l’Éducation nationale (France), LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton (France), The Barber Institute of Fine Art (Birmingham), and OONM, among others.

Julien Guillamat has worked as a composer with Nathalie Stutzmann, Cyrille Tricoire, the Asko|Schönberg ensemble (The Netherlands), the Orfeo 55 orchestra (France), the Welsh National Opera (WNO, Wales, UK), the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group (BCMG), and REPertory Theatre (Birmingham).

He has also been featured at several international events, such as Sound Around (Copenhagen), Inventionen (Berlin), NIME 2011 (Oslo), Laptops Meet Musicians Festival (Venice), RedSonic (London), L’Espace du son (Brussels), Radical dB (Zaragoza), and Raum-Musik (Cologne), among others.

Guillamat is a member of the Déviation(s) trio and SOUNDkitchen (UK), and a founding member of Électroacoustique Laptop Ensemble de Montpellier (ELEM) and Europa Meta Orchestra (Montpellier).

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