I had a revelation at the age of 6: I understood that I knew how to draw. Drawing has always accompanied me since, whereas most people stop around 9 or 10 years old. But the discovery of the Beatles around the age of 15 swept everything away. From then on, I absolutely wanted to make music. Despite the courses at the conservatory, I was not particularly good musician, but I had in me this ability to compose melodies.
After high school and studying architecture in Nancy, I spent two years in Great Britain. In truth, my main objective there was to approach English musicians. So I used Erasmus somewhat shamefully for musical purposes. The first year took place in Newcastle, a rather quiet city in terms of the pop scene. A small Liverpool label, Sugarfrost, noticed my demos anyway and had me record two tracks in the studio, released on vinyl. under the alias Fugu. This marked the start of my musical career.
Then back to Nancy, where I still “took advantage” of my studies to go to London. It was there that I met musicians such as Sean O’Hagan, from the High Llamas, and Lætitia Sadier, from Stereolab, with whom I recorded a few singles. It was in 1995, the year of my architecture degree. I quickly realized that working for an agency did not suit me: my former comrades worked all the time, even on Sundays. It was inconsistent with my idea of properly thinking about a song longer than two minutes.
Learning to look
There was then a break, I left to do my military service in Bucharest, where I partly composed my first album. After two 45-laps recorded during my permissions, I started to have press, the label Ici d’Ailleurs spotted me and signed me. My first album, Fugu 1, was published in 2000. In truth, I have never worked as an architect, only as a teacher, giving classes in schools. I started teaching in 2005 when I released my second album, As Foundthen I became a lecturer in architectural design.
When I started in architecture, we still drew a lot. It’s something that has since disappeared, and I learned a rare skill today. I find myself teaching something that has been somewhat forgotten. In music, for example, I like to work on vocal harmonies, whereas it had become old-fashioned in the 1990s. With drawing, it is more difficult to convey today, because it is very much linked to our relationship to computers, time constraints. Because of software, students have a very distorted vision of architecture: drawing has only become compulsory in the first year. You have to convince them that this material is necessary. Drawing by hand is also an apprenticeship in the gaze and another way of looking at architecture.
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