Phobias is a conceptual project built around fear. Not the kind you find in horror films, with jump scares and shrieking strings, but what happens just before: the tension, the body tightening, the breath growing shorter. You can know there’s no danger, repeat it to yourself, understand it completely. It changes nothing. The body decides first. Fear is probably the most universal emotion there is, and yet no one lives it quite the same way. Phobias started with a simple question: what would it sound like? Each piece takes on one phobia and turns it into a physical experience, built on deep drones, metallic resonances, sounds processed until they become unrecognisable, and above all on silence and space. It isn’t a clinical project, and it doesn’t come from personal experience. It’s an attempt to understand a fear from the outside, and to make you feel it from the inside.
Vertigo is the first piece of Phobias. It stands at the edge, high above the void, where the ground feels far away and something keeps pulling you down. Sliding, off-balance sounds and a heartbeat that won’t slow down build the pressure until control slips away. For a moment, flutes and harp offer a breath, a fragile attempt at calm. Then the fear comes back stronger, with small detuned sounds falling somewhere below. It ends on a dark, shivering note. What happens next is up to you.
Locked Up is the second piece of Phobias. It doesn’t strike all at once. It settles in. The doors close, and for a few seconds everything is fine. Then something shifts. Rigid, squared-off synths close in like walls, leaving no room for anything organic. The piece moves between attempts to breathe and regain control, and waves of panic that return a little stronger each time. Nervous strings hold the tension, the percussion lands like a fist to the stomach, and the silences only make it worse. There is never a way out.
Abyss is the third piece of Phobias. Where the others rise, this one sinks. It begins just below the surface, after a fall from a boat, and keeps going down. The light fades, landmarks disappear, and instruments drop away one by one until you’re alone in something immense. Faint movements, distant glimmers, the sense of what might be out there. A single brushed string keeps returning, like a last point of reference. Then the surface is out of reach, and so is the air. How it ends, the music doesn’t say.