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, because if you count the miles, you risk seeing the void behind you, or worse, wondering if you walked in the right direction. Journey is the track of that backward look: not nostalgic, lucid, the one you compose when your head needs to stitch the fragments back together before continuing.

The trial: no longer knowing where you come from

There are moments when you no longer recognize your own story, because you've become something else — developer, CEO, Londoner — while 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 learned to speak at twenty, to the guy who didn't know how to code and learned alone because he had no choice. That dissonance wears you out: you talk to clients in English with a French accent, you code in JavaScript 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 the London studio, wondering if all this path had meaning, if thirty years of detours led somewhere or if I'd simply accumulated trades because I was running. The question isn't abstract: it tightens the chest, because if the path has no meaning, why keep walking?

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: doors knocked at shopkeepers 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 guy 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 not a CV: it's a body that fought everything, each step leaving a mark, a skill, a warrior's fatigue. 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.

There are also years we'll never write on a CV: failed services, shows where nobody called, lines of code deleted entirely because they served nothing, loves that gave way because you were always "building something." Journey isn't a triumphant retrospective: it's accepting the path includes stretches you'd rather erase, and they count anyway because they put you here, standing, with still something to say.

Why I had to release this track

Journey was born on a Sunday — I rarely took a Sunday — when 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 who didn't understand where I came from, and that inner voice murmuring I'd become a tech guy, that I'd forgotten the guy I was at seventeen behind the pass. It wasn't a fair accusation, it was a fear — that the path had taken me away from what mattered, that I'd betrayed thirty years of path to become another cliché.

I opened the studio, not to flee but to count, and the track came slow, like an inner map where every trade, every city, every sleepless night was part of one same line — not detours, steps. Composing was honoring what I'd traveled, not to congratulate myself but not to erase it; sharing was extending that map to those wondering if their winding path has meaning, because yes, maybe, meaning isn't at the end — it's in the walk.

Months later, replaying Journey after mixing it, I heard details I hadn't consciously chosen, silences that looked like pauses between two services, rises that recalled the plane to London. The track knew things my head still refused to formulate, and that's sometimes liberation: the body composes before the narrator is ready. I didn't write Journey to tell my biography — I wrote it because my head needed to see the thread, to no longer be scattered.

Free the mind

The Komby album is quasi-autobiographical, and Journey is the chapter where I count — three years of adolescent kitchen, audiovisual, radio, agency, exile, code — 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 don't build despite my past, I build with it. The memory of the guy in an apron at seventeen is still there when I design a screen, the radio host is there when I choose words, the London bootstrapper is there when I say no to what complicates. Komby — the project — is the consequence of this path, not the hero, the possible destination of a walk you don't always choose, you sometimes face, you finally own.

Journey. Fifth battle mark. The track you listen to when you need to remember where you come from — to know why you keep fighting.

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Alexandre Auger — CEO of Komby

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