Photos: Jack McKain
Story: Luna Bacce
For French multi-instrumentalist and producer FKJ, creativity has never been about following a straight line. It moves, branches, doubles back, and sometimes disappears for years before resurfacing at exactly the right moment. His latest album, Tyber, is a reflection of that instinctive process—a meeting between past and present selves, built from new ideas, old recordings, and whatever happens when he stops trying to force the outcome.
“Music is like my vitamins. It’s like my therapy,” he says.
Since emerging from the Parisian club scene, FKJ has developed an unmistakable identity by blending electronic production with live instrumentation. His work has always carried the energy of someone who would rather discover something than manufacture it. Over time, that curiosity has expanded beyond music into video, photography, visual concepts, and the creation of physical spaces, each medium opening another door into the same creative universe.
That evolution is especially apparent on Tyber, an album FKJ says he didn’t even realize he was making until the music began to reveal itself.
“This record kind of revealed itself over recording things, and then it became a record,” he explains.
One of the clearest examples is “I Want U,” a collaboration with Eryn Allen Kane that began as an improvised recording in 2019 and eventually became part of Tyber years later. FKJ rediscovered the unfinished track while going through an old hard drive, a habit he says often leads him back to forgotten ideas and nearly finished recordings. When he heard the song again, something immediately clicked. He sent it to Kane, who had also forgotten that they had made it.
Much of the original recording remained untouched. The drums, bass, rhythm guitar, hooks, and choruses all came from that first session. The pair later added verses, horns, guitar, and other production elements, allowing a song from another era of FKJ’s life to find its place in the present.
“I think all the extra production bits are something that I wouldn’t have done before,” he says. “So that is what bridges it to this world.”
For FKJ, that kind of creative evolution doesn’t mean abandoning the past. If anything, his older work remains a source of inspiration. He describes his growth as something that branches rather than simply moves forward, with music eventually opening into other mediums such as video, photography, and writing.
That same philosophy informs the way he works with other artists. In the studio, FKJ wants to create an environment where people can let go of self-consciousness and allow instinct to take over. He prefers to spend time getting to know collaborators before making music together, then prepares a setup that allows them to immediately start experimenting.
“I try to let loose and aim to have the person I’m working with let loose too,” he says.
Improvisation becomes a way of entering that space. Rather than beginning with a rigid plan, FKJ likes to make something new and see what happens. Sometimes the magic arrives immediately. Sometimes it doesn’t. But when it does, he knows it.
“When you start improvising, you get into a comfortable zone of playfulness, and usually that’s where some magic happens.”
The visual world surrounding Tyber follows that same instinctive logic. FKJ co-directed the video for “I Want U,” filming the entire piece from the perspective of a door’s peephole. The idea had actually existed in his collection of visual notes long before the album, alongside graphic, photographic, and musical concepts. Once the song found its way onto Tyber, the connection suddenly made sense.
The peephole creates a distorted, multidimensional perspective that gives the video a vortex-like quality. For FKJ, it also connected naturally to the lyrics, which describe wanting someone on the other side of a door. Even though “I Want U” was an older recording and one of the last tracks to arrive on the album, the right connections allowed it to become part of the larger world.
That ability to let disparate ideas find each other is central to FKJ’s process. He doesn’t seem particularly interested in deciding what something has to become before it exists. Instead, he lets the work reveal its own logic.
That approach extends to his live performances as well. FKJ began in Parisian clubs, sometimes bringing a full setup of synths and guitar and sometimes arriving with nothing more than a USB. Even now, he thinks about his shows less as reproductions of his records and more as journeys. Songs from Tyber sit alongside older material, but each one is reconsidered, remixed, and reshaped for the experience of a live audience.
“When I build a live show like this, I also think of it as a set, as a musical, almost like a DJ set, where you bring people on a journey,” he says.
After spending much of the past few years creating and communicating through the virtual world, FKJ is also ready to reconnect with something more immediate. He hasn’t toured the world since 2023, and returning to the stage feels like a return to real human connection.
“When you’re making music, most of your interactions with listeners happen through the internet and this virtual world,” he says. “You don’t really know what the real world looks like anymore.”
Now, he wants to see people’s faces, feel the energy of a room, and hear their stories.
There is a similar sense of reflection when FKJ listens back to the music on Tyber. Because some of the songs were written during different periods of his life, they preserve earlier versions of himself. He doesn’t necessarily listen back looking for definitive answers. Instead, the songs become reminders of particular moments—some difficult, some joyful—and the lessons that came with them.
Ultimately, he hopes listeners leave Tyber feeling something he himself experiences through the act of making music: optimism.
“I hope they feel hope at the end of listening to Tyber,” he says. “I like people to feel uplifted when they listen to my music.”
That optimism doesn’t mean everything has to be bright. FKJ acknowledges that some of his music is melancholic, but for him, creating it can still be an uplifting experience. Music becomes a way of moving through whatever life happens to bring rather than pretending those difficult moments don’t exist.
And there is plenty still unfolding outside the music. FKJ has moved back to Paris while continuing to spend time in Southeast Asia, where he is building a creative space and working on a school. Family, travel, visual projects, and new music all occupy different branches of the same constantly expanding world.
Musically, he’s already working on what’s next.
For FKJ, the past doesn’t stay fixed. An unfinished song can wait years for the right moment. An old recording can suddenly sound new. A musical idea can become a visual idea, which can become a physical space, which can lead somewhere else entirely.
Maybe that’s the real thread running through Tyber: not knowing exactly where you’re going, but trusting the instinct that gets you there.
The next chapter doesn’t need to be mapped out yet.
It just needs room to unfold.
