Basile Huguenin-Virchaux

Basile Huguenin-Virchaux was born in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, and was in contact with music from a young age, as his family was involved in the local cultural life. Beginning to learn saxophone at the age of 14, he quickly had his first show experiences through his music school and his first musical projects. At first mainly focused on jazz, he started to develop an interest in a lot of other music genres like punk, metal, as well as traditional music from around the world like balkan music and sebene, and started to learn other instruments. He took part (and still takes part) in many different bands, jam sessions and shows.

In parallel to his passion for music, Basile Huguenin-Virchaux studied Languages of Antiquity, Economics and Ethnology at the university of Neuchâtel (UNINE). One of his teachers suggested he should write an article about musical practice in ancient Greece, and this is when he really discovered the concept of microtonality. Basile then explored on his own this new way of conceiving music, which was not straightforward at that time as there were almost no plugins allowing microtonal intervals. It is only a few years later, after his master in Statistics, that Basile developed a good knowledge in programming and was able to implement his own tools using the program Pure Data, allowing him to freely explore microtonality. He also started to learn the oud which opened the great world of maqam music to him.

Today, Basile Huguenin-Virchaux regularly composes microtonal music, explores and experiments with Pure Data, and recently developed a microtonal breakcore live performance using this same program. He is also actively learning to play maqam music (and broader microtonality) on the saxophone and other instruments, among other projects.