Paul Mahoux

Paris born Frenchman Paul Mahoux is equally torn apart between his love of guitar and his love of audio manipulation. Coming from bands as varied as New Wave or African Highlife/Afrobeat as a guitarist/keyboardist, and endeing up studying jazz at the Paris American School of Modern Music. In the mid eighties, he started to jump on the digital audio wagon around 1986, when synthesizers and samplers became affordable and Atari computers were the widely used platform for sequencing. This gave him the opportunity to make music for TV and national radio. Stronlgy keeping big influences like Herbie Hancock, Jon Hassell or Steve Reich in mind, he discovered by chance the techno/house music scene in 1991, and released his first EDM track in 1994 on the Parisian label Virtual/Omnisonus under the moniker BùLù. Instead of becoming DJ, Paul made a specialty of playing guitar with delay loops on top of DJ's mixes or machine driven techno beats. Most memorable people he played sessions with were Derrick May, Alton Miller, Jerome Pacman, and percussionist Manu Lokole. But the efficient simplicity of this music sometimes left him frustrated and he never abandoned guitar and more elaborated harmonies. Using delays instead of loopers, which were anyway not really existing yet, Paul got more and more interested in jazz or groove flavored ambient improvisation and live looping on guitar. A collaboration with American singer Ekayani enabled him to live in New York for three years, where he used to participate in many free improvisation sessions in ambient/experimental circles. After meeting his Japanese wife there, Paul moved definitely to Okinawa in 2002, where he occasionally plays live, makes collaborations with local artists (remix, guitar), makes tracks at a relaxed pace, but his main job is teaching music.