Musician

Both my grandfathers were musicians. Louis, on my mum's side, was a drummer; and Friedrich, on my dad's side, was a pianist. I started taking piano lessons at a very young age and in high school, I traded my upright piano for a Yamaha PSR-47, later supplemented by a Korg X3.

After graduating, I studied musicology at university, and did my bachelor thesis on electronic music and how digital instruments transcended acoustic ways of producing sound, which was well received, despite a general lack of empathy for the subject. During this time, I was a member of a band called The Space Pigs and produced a couple of demo tapes that led to one studio album (Mythology) in 1996, consisting of eight experimentations of instrumental new age music.

1997 marked the start of a fifteen years long hiathus, due to conflicting priorities and general lack of time, and it is only after I got divorced in 2012 that I went back to playing and composing.

Today, my home studio consists of a Roland Fantom G8 workstation, a Korg R3 vocoder, a Roland AX-Synth keytar, a Boss RC-30 loop station, a Audio Technica PRO61 hypercardioid microphone, a Behringer XENYX Q802USB mixer, a pair of Presonus Eris E4.5 monitors. It is enough to produce little pieces, like the OST of my son's first short for the Nikon Film Festival: "Le Temps s'en Souviendra".

Inspirations

When I was a kid, there was always music on at home. My parents were very eclectic and made sure I listened to almost everything: jazz; blues; rock'n'roll; pop; and of course, a lot of classical music. On my own, I developped into a metalhead, and was listening to the likes of AC/DC, Iron Maiden, Whitesnake, Steve Vai, and many others.

But throughout my life, some artists have really been influential when it came to build my own style. Since my early years, I had a fascination for the works of Jean-Michel Jarre (and especially his early research at GRM), Vangelis, Kitarō, Andreas Vollenweider or Yanni. Film score composers James Horner, Jerry Goldsmith, Hans Zimmer, Giorgio Moroder, and Jan Hammer also played a crucial role in my musical development.