Komby in 14 Steps: Step 5: Journey, looking at the path when you’ve forgotten where you started

When you've been moving for thirty years, you sometimes forget to look back, not out of modesty, but out of combat necessity. If you count the miles, you risk seeing the void behind you, or worse, wondering if you walked in the right direction. Journey is that backward look: not nostalgic, lucid, the one you compose when your head needs to stitch the fragments back together before carrying on.

The trial: no longer knowing where you come from

There are moments when you no longer recognise your own story, because you've become something else: developer, CEO, Londoner. Yet part of you stays hooked to the distant memory of the kitchen at five in the morning, when you were sixteen or seventeen, to the radio booth where you learnt to speak from the age of twenty, to the bloke who didn't know how to code and taught himself because he had no choice. That dissonance demands clarity: you talk to clients in English with a French accent, you code thinking in French, you mix a track listening to a voice singing in English, and the question returns: who are you?

I had that crisis, not once but several times, often at night, sitting in my London studio in Waterloo, stitching the fragments back together to see where thirty years of detours were leading. The question isn't abstract: every trade left behind was also a skill gained, and the path held up.

What thirty years really look like

The kitchen first, from sixteen to nineteen, then finished: hands in cold water, back breaking, rush and grease, but also pride in a successful service and rage at a sent-back plate taken as a lost round, never as lost identity. Three years of adolescent field, today a distant past. Then came audiovisual and media: at twenty, radio and music production, every penny saved for school, Studio École de France, the booth, the mic, learning to speak alone into the void, and Electromix Records, because nobody was releasing the music I loved. Creating without permission.

Restovisio next, then Digital CHR: knocking on shopkeepers' doors and service-sector players (restaurants, offices, nightclubs, and beyond the businesses that didn't want digital), nights publishing for a hundred clients, and the idea that a bloke already through radio and CHR sales, who still remembers the kitchen field of his youth, could look at POS software and think we can do better. London finally, in 2019: credit score at zero, studio, Brexit, COVID, a British company first then a France SAS one month later, and French Digital CHR clients kept from London. Starting over as if I were twenty when I'd already lived several lives.

It's a path where I fought everything, each step leaving a mark, a skill. I told part of the radio story in Comment je suis devenu animateur radio, and what I keep for Journey is that radio gave me confidence to speak alone, create alone, publish without waiting for permission: the same stubbornness that made me code, that made me leave.

Why this title

Journey was born on a Sunday. I rarely took one. I needed to stitch the pieces back together, after a week spent on tasks that looked nothing like my adolescent kitchen: APIs, integrations, calls with prospects. I'd become a tech guy, and I loved even more what I was doing.

I opened my laptop to compose Journey, inspired by my travels around the world, the ones I document on the blog. The bloke who was travelling in 2016, before TikTok launched in 2017, and who, without knowing it, had invented a format everyone would take up: "Leave France, travel."

Letting it land

The Komby album is quasi-autobiographical, and Journey is the chapter where I count my travels, my experiences, without reducing all that to a label. On France Je Te Quitte, other fragments of this path are documented; here, the track is the musical synthesis, thirty years held in a melody.

In the background, this trial nourished a maturity: I build with my past. The memory of the lad in an apron at seventeen, of the radio host at twenty-one, of the London bootstrapper is there. Komby is the consequence of this path.

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Alexandre Auger, CEO of Komby

*Step 5/14. Previous: Higher (04). Next: London Lights (06)*