My interface with the world has always been heavily sonic. Long before I was building Arkhorin, I was mostly decoding frequencies. First an active performer, playing steel drums, saxophone, and percussion in jazz ensembles, I soon pivoted towards composition.
This led me to a PhD in Musicology at Paris VIII University, where I enjoyed deconstructing sound. I focused on haptic interfaces and experimental composition using Max/MSP and Jitter. I was trying to touch sound, to give it physical form.
I also worked with avant-garde shakuhachi player Sabu Orimo. We created Sphères, using FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) to explode sounds into tiny spectral grains, and recorded Kamakura Juniso in forests and temples, capturing the ambient noise, the wind, the entropy. We were curating textures.
Then came the Crash. After relocating to Japan, I experienced a catastrophic sensory event: severe permanent tinnitus. All signals lost in the noise! I had to completely overwrite my creative programming.
For a while, I sought relief in pure frequencies. I began working with Crystal Bowls, performing live sets and creating video works where I played them alongside traditional instruments. Unlike the chaotic complexity of jazz, the bowls produced pure, resonant waves. I was trying to explore meditative states to quell the ringing in my ears (it didn't work).
At some point, I also became obsessed with the spaces where sound used to be.
This manifested in The Labyrinth, a project in Taiwan with singer Hsieh Yuan Ru and filmmaker Yann Moreau. We explored many Haikyo around the country—abandoned, decaying structures.
We scaled the Linkou Lightning Building, an unfinished tower spiraling 50 floors into the sky, and explored a rotting theme park swallowed by vegetation. These were "Extinguished Worlds" in real time.
But as the tinnitus made audio work increasingly fatiguing, my obsession shifted from the sound to the machine.
In Tokyo, there are two legendary spots for this: FiveG Music in Harajuku and Echigoya Music in Shibuya. Both are hidden inside generic, old buildings, packed with rare vintage equipment.
I spent years visiting them, collecting modular synthesizers. But I realized I was spending hours moving modules around—not to make music (although I made some, of course), but for the sole purpose of moving them. I was obsessed with the visual aesthetics of the grid, rearranging blank panels to make the setup look "cool." In the end, I had visually stunning synths, but no good tracks to show for it.
I guess I was building a machine that I couldn't bear to turn on anymore.
The epiphany arrived in an elevator in Shibuya. Echigoya Music is located on the top floor of a nondescript building. I had noticed several times that beneath the synth shop, there was a venue called the Ancient Egyptian Museum.
It sounded like a joke, but one day I decided to go in. It wasn't a traditional museum (the space is very small); it was more like a cabinet of curiosities, filled with Egyptian artifacts.
In that moment, the physical structure of the building revealed a creative structure in my mind:
My first iteration of the Arkhorin lore is simply the collapse of those two floors.
I created Kura Curiosa, envisionning a Modular Synthesizer for physical objects.
I eventually sold 70% of my eurorack modules, some back to Echigoya—my ears get tired too quickly (I still have a Nerdseq and a few modules, for fun). But I kept the logic. I am no longer a musician, but I am still patching shapes together. I just use screws and plastic instead of voltage and wires.
The Arkhorin Vaults are my silent synthesizer.
