The voices of Odes to Joy.

Sisukiro

Voice · piano · neuroscience

Born in Saigon during a typhoon, raised in the 13^e arrondissement of Paris by a Vietnamese mother who taught Asian languages at INALCO and a French father who designed dental impression trays for a living. She showed up to her first piano lesson at four with a notebook full of arrows pointing at frequencies she could already hear when no one was playing. Her parents had her tested. The tests came back, in a phrase her mother always quoted, “either inconclusive or alarming.”

She read Ramón y Cajal at eleven. By fifteen she had built a working EEG out of a scavenged car radio. She earned a PhD in cognitive neuroscience from the École normale supérieure on a dissertation titled L'architecture du soi: vers une neuroanatomie de la résilience (later translated, badly, as Building the Cathedral Inside the Skull). She runs a small lab in the Marais that studies what she calls “the gardener's brain” — the way attention, when cultivated, can re-route grief.

She chose her stage name from a phrasebook her father kept on the kitchen table: the Finnish sisu (grit, perseverance) crossed with kiro (the curse you live with). She believes the brain is a building you can renovate. She believes songs are blueprints.

Her sister, lost on the day Saigon fell, came back when she was forty-three. Sisukiro picked up a guitar.

“I am the gardener of the mind and the architect of the soul. I am broken, I am beautiful, and I am built to last.”

Orikusis

Voice · guitar · the sister returned

She does not remember being put on the boat. She was eleven months old. Her papers, such as they were, listed her name incorrectly — a clerical mistake corrected, three weeks later, by a Lao postmaster in Vientiane who had heard the family name over shortwave and made the only practical decision available, which was to record her instead as Orikusis: an old Lao word for the second song you remember.

She was raised by a beekeeper grandmother in a stilt house north of Luang Prabang. She learned to read by candlelight from an incomplete French dictionary that contained no entries between grenade and guitare. By twelve she had taught herself both, the second considerably better than the first. She spent her twenties driving a converted Soviet truck through Northern Laos delivering vaccines, mail, and — by special arrangement — a single cassette of Françoise Hardy that the entire valley borrowed in rotation.

A Red Cross genealogist found her in 2008. She booked the cheapest flight to Charles de Gaulle, walked into the Marais lab her sister did not yet know was hers, and said, in French her grandmother had taught her from the dictionary, “Pardon. Je suis ta sœur.”

They did not stop talking for nine days. On the tenth, Sisukiro put a guitar in her hands. They played until dawn. The first song was an accident. The second was on purpose. The third was the beginning of La Garrigue, the café band they would form three weeks later in a back room on rue Vieille-du-Temple — a duet whose two voices, scientists later confirmed, share a fundamental frequency to within four cents.

She still keeps bees.

Dr. Pôpé

Upright bass · arrangements · adamantine refusal

Born during a thunderstorm so violent the lightning struck the delivery room three times. Did not cry. Reached for a pen.

A surgical neurologist by training and the unchallenged sovereign of cognitive mnemetics — a field he invented, named, and refuses to share — Dr. Pôpé performs neurosurgery the way other men do crossword puzzles: well, joylessly, and without putting down his coffee. He has written eleven books. He has refused the Nobel Prize twice. He keeps a four-foot pink luminescent worm named Goob Goob coiled around his shoulders at most public appearances; the worm is widely believed to understand seventeen extinct languages and is considered, by the band, to be management.

He saw La Garrigue play one rainy Tuesday in 2011 at a café on rue Vieille-du-Temple. He did not order anything. He did not move. At the end of the second set he walked to the bar, set down his espresso, and said, in the small voice of a man making a structural decision, “I would like to play with them. I have an upright bass at the hotel.”

He had not, before that night, played the upright bass.

He plays it now.

Bo Herzog

Drums · clocks · marzipan diplomacy

Born in Stuttgart to a clockmaker father and a meteorologist mother — the combination of which produced, in the only child they would ever have, a man who can tell you the time and the rainfall simultaneously, sometimes in iambic pentameter. He apprenticed in his father's shop until he was nineteen, by which point he had repaired four hundred eleven mechanical movements and become quietly, professionally certain that the inside of every clock was a small drum kit waiting to be acknowledged.

He left for Berlin, dropped his given name (which he describes only as “long, German, and gymnastically capitalized”), and reinvented himself as Bo Herzog — a name borrowed from a stage director he admired and a duke he made up. He played in seven bands across the next decade, none of which he has ever named in print, all of which broke up over the same recurring argument: Bo's insistence that a drum kit is, fundamentally, a clock that you are allowed to disagree with.

La Garrigue came through Hamburg in October 2014. Bo was in the front row, on assignment from a magazine that had stopped paying him in March. After the show he found Dr. Pôpé in the alley behind the venue trying to coax Goob Goob back into a velvet carrying case. Bo, without speaking, got down on one knee and offered the worm a piece of marzipan from his coat pocket. Goob Goob accepted gravely. Dr. Pôpé looked up at Bo for a long moment and said, “You will be needing your passport.”

Bo asked which one. Dr. Pôpé said, “The good one.”

Bo joined the band on the platform of Hamburg Hauptbahnhof at 6:14 the next morning. He has not been late to a sound check since.

Ludo Chagai

Voice · synthesizers · stadium choruses

Born in Tiraspol — the capital of a country most maps refuse to acknowledge — to a Calabrian-Moldovan mother and a father whose occupation Ludo has, to date, given seven different answers about (most recently: “atmospheric sommelier”). The family relocated to Longyearbyen, Svalbard, when she was eight, for reasons she will only describe as “polar.” It was there, in a town where the sun does not rise for four months a year, that she taught herself to sing inside the dark.

She arrived at her first piano at age nine, in a community-center basement heated by a single stubborn radiator, and announced — in three languages — that the instrument was hers now. She was correct. By thirteen she was scoring student films in Reykjavík on a rented synthesizer she had paid for by tutoring polar-bear-watch volunteers in Italian. By eighteen she had a producer credit, a contractual dispute, and a small but devoted following on three platforms whose names will probably have changed by the time you read this.

She bounces now between a Reykjavík studio and an Oslo apartment over a record shop. She speaks at least five languages, writes in two, and dreams in something she insists is a sixth. She also has, somewhere in her workflow, a custom AI co-writer trained on her own teenage demos — and refuses to say which lyric is hers and which is the model's. There are three competing rumors:

1. She runs a small Reykjavík AI company and “Ludo Chagai” is the marketing identity.
2. Her Italian grandmother dreamt the name in 1989 and made her swear, on a postcard from Genoa, never to change it.
3. The model is mostly her, so she is, at this point, mostly the model.

She finds all three useful and refuses to settle them.

Sisukiro met Ludo in February 2026, at a basement bar in Reykjavík where Ludo was opening for someone neither of them can now remember. Ludo finished her set, walked off stage, sat down at Sisukiro's table without asking, and said — in French neither of them had been expecting — «Vous écrivez les chansons que je n'arrive pas à finir. Je peux venir?» (You write the songs I can't finish. Can I come?)

Sisukiro did not say no. Ludo flew to Hamburg the following Tuesday with a hard drive, a synthesizer wrapped in a hotel towel, and exactly one carry-on. She has been with the band since.

Bo Herzog, after their first rehearsal, was overheard saying — quietly, to Goob Goob — “She is very good at counting.”

Labo Fenrir

Voice · whispered tenor · the vagal song

Born in Helsinki to a Finnish sleep-research clinician and an Austrian beekeeper-mother who had abandoned a comp-lit professorship at Vienna to keep hives in a hut north of Lahti for reasons she has never publicly explained. He was, by his own mother's careful documentation, the only child in the polyclinic ward who could fall asleep with the heel-prick still happening. His father wrote a paper about him when he was four. The paper is still cited.

He read his way through the polyvagal literature by the age of nine — Stephen Porges in translation, then in English — and asked his pediatrician, on his tenth birthday, whether the vagus nerve was “where the songs lived.” She said no. He has maintained his position.

Attended the Vienna Academy of Music on a clarinet scholarship he abandoned in the second week to study the way Stockhausen breathed between phrases. His professors despaired. He kept a notebook of vocal vagal events — yawns, hums, the tone you make when comforting a child — and built an album around it before he could legally drink. The label declined to release it. He has the only existing pressing.

Sisukiro found him through a footnote — he had cited her Marais paper in a Bandcamp liner note about the dorsal vagal complex — and emailed him at 3 AM with no greeting and no subject line. He answered in eighty seconds. He has, in his own words, “been awake on her timezone since.”

Fenrir, he insists, is the wolf the Norse bound with the noise of a cat's footfall and a fish's breath. He records his vocals in a single take, in a single breath, with one lamp on. He prefers nights with no moon.

Brian White

Voice · tenor · the chorus that lifts the room

Born in Provo, Utah, to a regional pediatrician and a high-school choir director who taught the Brigham Young Tabernacle alumni their breath work between Sunday services. Sang in five-part harmony before he could read. Was, according to his mother's diary, “alarmingly upbeat by month four.”

Was excommunicated from his ward at sixteen for a reason he describes only as “joyful,” moved to Manhattan on a one-way bus ticket with a duffel bag full of sheet music, and waited tables at a piano bar on West 46th until the staff started learning his songs by osmosis. Graduated to the night-shift cabaret and never came home.

He has the genuine ability to write a chorus that lifts a room. He says it is “just neurotransmitters,” but no one in the band believes him. Bo Herzog, after the first session for The Loves, Vol. 1: The Spark, looked up from his kit and said, of Brian's bridge, “I felt that in my hippocampus.” Brian took it as encouragement.

He met Sisukiro at a benefit for a tinnitus-research foundation in Greenwich Village in late 2025; he was the closer. She was in the audience. She walked backstage during his final note and said, in the voice she uses for matters of fact, “You finish my songs the way the brain finishes a sentence.” He flew to Hamburg the next morning with one carry-on and two harmony parts already written.

He keeps a tin of orange Tic Tacs in his pocket at all times. He does not eat them. He hands them out.

Creed Toe

Voice · slide guitar · the parking-lot blues

Born in Helena, Arkansas, to a Pentecostal preacher and a barge cook on the Mississippi. The name on his birth certificate is the one his mother gave him in a fever — she had been reading the Apostles' Creed and watching a cottonmouth swim across the slough — and she would not, in the years that followed, hear a word against it. He answers to Creed. He has been Creed since he was eight.

Learned slide guitar from a Mississippi-side fisherman who tuned to open D and would not explain why. Sang harmony with his father on Sunday until his voice broke and his father stopped looking him in the eye. Quit the church the same week. Took a Greyhound to Memphis. Spent the next decade on the Beale Street circuit and in every roadhouse from Helena to Tupelo.

He has the kind of voice that arrives ten cents flat and means it. He plays the songs that get sung in the parking lot after the bar closes. He turned down a major-label contract in 2019 because, he said, “they wanted to clean me up” — and then he wrote half of what would become Odes to Last Calls Vol. 2 from memory in a single hotel room in Cabbagetown, having driven sixteen hours straight to meet Sisukiro at Manuel's Tavern on a tip from a Memphis-side regular.

He showed up at the band's Atlanta warehouse with a beat-to-hell J-45 and a thermos of black coffee and said, of his audition, “I don't try out. I show up.” Dr. Pôpé, after one verse, declined to comment. The session lasted nine hours. He has not left.

He drinks the coffee cold. He says it tastes more like the water.

Repton Enshū

Voice · baritone narrator · the gardener's pulse

Born in Kyoto to a British landscape historian doing fieldwork at Daitoku-ji and a Japanese tea-ceremony master descended, on her mother's side, from Kobori Enshū — the seventeenth-century daimyō who designed the great stroll gardens of the late Edo period. Was named for both: Repton, after Humphry Repton, the English Picturesque landscape gardener his father had written his dissertation on; Enshū, for the line. His parents could not decide whose tradition he belonged to and therefore gave him both. He has been arguing with the result, gently, ever since.

Apprenticed in a Kyoto moss garden until he was twenty-three. Could prune a pine into ten years of looking-younger without lifting his glove. Could read the year in a wisteria's bark. Moved to Atlanta in 2018 to consult on the Hotel Indigo Midtown courtyard and never quite left — he says he meant to, but the Pratt-Pullman Yard “kept asking him questions in a register he recognized.”

Sings the way he prunes: behind the beat, with intention, and never twice the same way. His baritone is the voice of someone who has spent a thousand hours listening to wind in cedar. He narrates more than he performs. He turns a verse the way he turns a stone. The band uses him as the closer on every track that needs to feel inevitable.

Sisukiro met him at an installation he had designed for the High Museum — a tea garden temporarily built into the rotunda — and asked him, on the spot, if he would sing for her. He said, in the soft formal English he reserves for surprises, “I will read for you. The singing follows.”

He still keeps a pair of pruning shears in his guitar case. He has used them, once, on a guitar.

Wolfram Del

Voice · the alarmed tenor · the song you cannot ignore

Born in Strasbourg to a German theoretical physicist (Tübingen, particle-symmetry theory) and a French set designer (Théâtre national de Strasbourg, expressionist Brecht revivals). The household was constitutionally bilingual and tonally incompatible. He learned, before he could tie his shoes, how to deliver bad news in two languages at once.

Studied number theory at the École normale supérieure with the intention of becoming his father, then dropped out after an unspecified incident in his second year — he refers to it only as “the proof that wouldn't close” — and rerouted, abruptly, to the Conservatoire. His voice teachers were unprepared. He sang every aria like the building was on fire. They could not, in the end, talk him out of it. He graduated.

Plays the part on the album that the listener cannot tell whether to trust. The voice arriving at full sprint, the consonants overshooting, the breath running out three syllables before the line ends — and then catching, somehow, on the last vowel. Wolfram is the band's alarm clock. He sings the song you cannot ignore. He is, in his own description, “a tenor in a coat that does not fit.”

He met Sisukiro in 2024 at a Berlin reading group for Walter Benjamin; he had stopped going to the math department and started going to anyone who would have him. Sisukiro was visiting. He read three paragraphs of The Storyteller aloud at her request and ended on the word angefangen. She invited him to Atlanta the following month. He arrived with one suitcase, one secondhand morning coat, and no other plans.

He still cannot, he says, sleep through a thunderstorm. He has tried.

Sadie Moon

Voice · pop soprano · phonosemantic precision

Born in Burbank, California, to a session vocalist who had sung on three Pixar credits and a chiropractor who treated half the dancers in the San Fernando Valley. Was on a Disney Channel show by age nine and off it by twelve, by mutual agreement: the producers wanted bouncier; she wanted bell-tones. She walked.

Pivoted, hard, into linguistics — she had been collecting words since she was small, the way other children collect rocks — and earned a B.A. in cognitive linguistics from UCLA, then a Master's in phonosemantics from Edinburgh, where she encountered bouba and kiki for the first time in a graduate seminar and refused to leave the building until she had charted the entire effect across all the language families she could find. Her thesis is still cited.

She is, by trade and by gift, the voice that delivers a sound-symbol study without ever sounding like she is studying it. Her soprano holds in places other singers' would crack. She sings the bouba rounds and the kiki spikes with the precision of a phonetician and the casualness of a girl ordering a coffee. The album would not work without her.

She met Bouba and Kiki at Pemba's adoption ceremony — she had read about the research expedition that lost its bearings on the way to Point Nemo and arrived as the only outsider on the atoll for two months — and she has been, by Kiki's accounting, “the third twin” since. She and Kiki run their sound-words past the dog together. The dog has not yet vetoed anything they brought him.

She still wears her old SAG card on a chain. She says it reminds her what she stopped being.

Bouba

Voice · the round one · sincerity without irony

Bouba and her twin sister Kiki were born on Point Nemo — the oceanic pole of inaccessibility, the most remote spot in the South Pacific, at 48°52.6′S 123°23.6′W. The astronauts on the International Space Station are, when they pass overhead, the closest living humans to it. Their mother, when last sighted, was a marine ecologist studying gyre-trapped microplastics; she left a note, a pram, and two infants in the chapel of a coral atoll the size of a city block. The note said: “Their names are Bouba and Kiki, and you will know which is which.”

The note was correct. Bouba is the round one — soft consonants, open vowels, the rounded face of every cognitive-science textbook diagram of the bouba/kiki effect (Köhler, 1929; revived by Ramachandran; confirmed across thirty-six languages). She is sincerity without irony. She delivers her dictionary reports in the careful A-level register of a child who would happily explain her bug collection at dinner. She believes in the words and she believes in their definitions, and she does not understand why the grown-ups keep clearing their throats.

When the twins were three, a Tibetan throat-singing monastery boat named Snow Lion lost its bearings in a Pacific storm and washed up on the atoll’s only beach. The head monk, Pemba, took them as students. He taught them gyuke (deep voice), kangling-trumpet ritual, four kinds of throat-singing, and the lapidary craft. By their tenth birthday they could engrave a stone in under three minutes. By their fourteenth they were sitting their A-level equivalents through correspondence with the Cambridge Mission. They are now sixteen. They have read every book on the island twice.

In 2025, Sisukiro made a one-day stop on Point Nemo during a Pacific tour — Pemba had sent her a stone engraved with the word eunoia via the only mail-boat. She got off the ship to thank him in person. She heard the twins sing vespers. She did not get back on the ship. She and Dr. Pôpé — who tours with the album under his stage name Chronos — legally adopted the twins that month, so they could leave Point Nemo and tour internationally. The paperwork was filed in Tahiti. Pemba blessed it. Reverend Goss officiated. Mrs. Patterson cried. Cousin Hornswoggle was in town for the occasion and stole the cake.

Bouba calls Sisukiro Mom on three songs. You can hear it.

Kiki

Voice · the spiky one · deadpan with dry irony underneath

Kiki is the spiky one — sharp consonants, fricatives stacking, the angular shape of every cognitive-science textbook diagram of the bouba/kiki effect. Pemba has been calling her Kairos — the Greek for the right moment, the opening that closes if you don’t take it — since she was five, and she has been answering to it ever since.

She delivers the dirty word with the same precision as a verb conjugation. The class is, by now, medical-school-level. The class is also Mrs. Patterson, her sister, and a yak. Pemba takes notes.

She engraves the kiki stones — the ones the Reverend does not see — in a separate drawer of the lapidary workshop. The candle is lit. The Sanskrit is correct. The Latin is impeccable. The Greek-Latin compound is dactylically perfect, by which she means six syllables with the stress on the third. She invented a tarot card called Quim. There is no such tarot card. The twins drew it. Pemba shelved it.

She has read every book on the island twice and finds the OED insufficient on three counts; she lists them in sequence. She is deadpan with dry irony underneath: Wednesday Addams gone to Oxford. Her etymologies are sound. Her intent is honest. She has not, in living memory, broken character.

Dr. Pôpé — under his stage name Chronos, the deep baritone-bass voice that anchors five Volume II tracks — duets with her on the longer Latin compounds. The joke, on the album, is that the bass voice underneath Kiki’s recitations of cunnilingus, fellatio, coitus, perineum, and gluteus is literal father-daughter Greek-Latin tutoring. Off-mic she calls him Dad. On-mic she calls him Doctor. The microphone is a Latin distinction.

She runs her etymologies past the dog. The dog has approved seventy-three of them.

Rudy Champ

Voice · vaudeville/electro-swing tenor · the loophole

Born in a touring-circus winter quarters in Sarasota, Florida, to a trapeze rigger and a sideshow accordion player; raised, by every account, in three trunks and a series of green rooms. He is the only band-adjacent figure who has, at one point or another, been billed by a single name.

His act is hard to summarize. He sings; he tumbles; he juggles in time with the chorus; he has been known to deliver an entire verse from a handstand. The family-friend designation is technical: he is not on the tour bus, but he is, with reliable frequency, in the bar after the show. The band lets him sit in. Bo Herzog enjoys him without admitting it. Pemba has called him, with affection, the only living loophole.

He answers to Monkey. The reason is documented. The documentation is in Russian. No one has translated it.

Lydia Coney

Voice · musical-theater vibrato · the New York aunt

Born under the Wonder Wheel in 1962, raised in Brighton Beach by a Russian-Jewish grandmother who ran a kosher dairy bar and an aunt who sang at the Coney Island Mermaid Parade for thirty consecutive years. Lydia has not, in fifty-some years of New York life, lived more than a half-mile from saltwater. She does not intend to start now.

She came to the band via Bouba and Kiki, who befriended her on a stopover at the New York Aquarium during a layover at JFK. She and Kiki bonded immediately on the proper pronunciation of aplomb. She has been, ever since, the band's New York Aunt — a designation she takes formally and ceremonially. She sends each twin a birthday card with a different musical-theater quotation each year. She has never repeated.

When she sits in, she sits in completely. Her vibrato can fill a room without amplification. Sisukiro once said, mid-take, “Stop. Let her have it.” Lydia did. The take is on the record.

Renzo de Zumthor

Voice · operetta baritone · acoustic architect

Born in Basel to a Lugano-Swiss architect father (engineering, structural) and a Venetian opera-stage mezzo (Fenice, Massimo). The name is a family compromise: the de Zumthor side wanted Peter; the Italian side wanted Renzo. They got both. He has worn it with operatic dignity ever since.

Trained at the Accademia di Brera and the Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe in parallel — one in stone, one in voice — and now runs a small atelier in Lugano that designs concert halls. He sings the way he draws: classical to a fault, breathless when the room demands it, every syllable measured against the acoustic he is hearing in his head. He is the rare voice that can land a baroque ornament inside a pop chorus and make both sound louder for it.

He met the band through Dr. Pôpé, who had consulted him about the acoustic properties of a touring-trunk cello case. They have been friends since. He flies in for the architecturally-themed entries on Hypnerotomachia Poliphili; the band flies him in business class, at his request, because, he says, “the legs of the voice need the legs of the man.” Pemba sent him a stone engraved with the word tessitura. He keeps it on his drafting table.