My husband, Tony Langlois, who has died aged 64 during a procedure to treat an aneurysm, was an academic, ethnomusicologist, composer and festival founder.
For the past 17 years, Tony was a lecturer in media studies at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick. He co-led the Limerick Soundscapes community sound archive project and the Audio Research Centre at MIC.
He was an active member of the sound-art community in Cork, the city he made his home in 2006 after he and I met while arranging cultural exchanges between Ireland and Algeria. We married in 2013. That year, he co-founded the IndieCork film festival as a co-operative, curating the music programme. In 2019 he founded the 13th Parish, an international festival of independent film in Jersey; he was festival director until 2024.
Born in London, Tony was the eldest of the five children of Anne (nee Egan), a social security clerk, and Roy, a plasterer. Tony’s parents, who were both from Jersey, returned there with the family shortly after his birth. Tony went to De La Salle college on the island, leaving at 17 for a kibbutz in Israel.
He returned briefly to Jersey before moving in 1983 to London, where he worked in horticulture and as a van driver, studying at night for his O-levels. In 1984, he moved to Liverpool, gaining City and Guilds certificates in arboriculture and amenity horticulture while working as a tree surgeon and exploring sound composition with an experimental theatre group. Back in London, he studied for a certificate in ecology and conservation from the University of London (1985-86) and, in 1987, a higher course in horticulture, at Capel Manor College in Enfield, before moving to Belfast for his degree.
Tony had been awarded a scholarship to study ethnomusicology at Queen’s University Belfast, where he researched house music in Manchester, Belfast and London, and graduated with a first in 1991. He gained a doctorate in 1997, on music and popular culture on the Moroccan/Algerian border, with a focus on Raï music.
Whether it was for fieldwork or friendship, he travelled with an equanimity embodied in his later practice of Zen Buddhism. He had an instinct for making the right choice in difficult situations – a good survival resource when he ran into political upheaval in 1990s Algeria. Borders were of great interest to him. He would quickly correct wrong assumptions about Jersey and its political status. He eventually became an Irish citizen.
An instinctive environmentalist, Tony was curious about the night sky, nature and people, and enjoyed reading the Guardian. He was a warm, brilliant and funny man who went out of his way to help those in need.
Tony is survived by me, his children, Aislinn and Pascal, from his first marriage, to Caroline Harvey-Kelly, which ended in divorce, his grandchildren, Arlo, Auryn and Senan, and by his father, Roy, and his siblings, Kate, Jeff, Richard and Denise.
