Behind the name Molécule is Romain De La Haye-Serafini, a French composer, producer, DJ, author and sonic explorer. Born in Grenoble in 1979, over nearly two decades he has established himself as one of the most distinctive figures in contemporary creation, at the crossroads of electronic music, human adventure, immersive art and technological innovation. His work extends far beyond records and concerts: it encompasses concept albums, films, audiovisual performances, installations, books, virtual reality and dome experiences, and now a book-manifesto about listening. Across all these forms, Molécule pursues the same intuition: to make listening a complete experience—physical, sensory, almost philosophical—and to turn reality into creative material.

His path began as that of a self-taught artist. In more recent accounts of his life, Romain De La Haye-Serafini describes a childhood filled with sounds and records, a piano at home, a guitar inherited from his father, and very early memories of listening. Music entered his life early, not simply as a pastime but as a way of feeling the world. He often mentions Pink Floyd, Nirvana, Lee Scratch Perry, Debussy and Tricky, as well as the shock of discovering Daft Punk and the first possibilities of computer-based music production. He understood early on that a sound could hold much more than a melody: a space, a texture, an entire world. That intuition has never left him.

His path was hardly straightforward. Before becoming Molécule, he first dreamed of a career in sport, particularly basketball, until a back injury redirected his desire to push beyond his limits towards another field: music. After finishing school, he began studying sociology and psychology, then left university to devote himself entirely to making music. It was a risky, defining choice. He worked in a synthesizer shop in Pigalle, taught lessons, collected machines, learned in studios, produced, arranged and composed, gradually building his own language. This path of trial and error, odd jobs, encounters and persistence explains much about the artist he became: a musician drawn to research, resourceful experimentation and lived experience, always more interested in transforming sonic material than in belonging to any particular school.

His first records reflect this period of discovery and openness. In the mid-2000s, Molécule moved across a spectrum from trip-hop to dub, instrumental electronics to experimental song. Part Of You and In Dub V1.0 in 2006, followed by Climax in 2009 and Besides in 2011, along with several EPs and compilations released through PIAS, Underdog Records and his own Mille Feuilles label, trace the emergence of an artist already in motion, curious and attracted to collaboration and hybrid forms. At the same time, he developed a body of remix work for artists as varied as Serge Gainsbourg, Santigold, Oxmo Puccino, Manu Chao, Cassius and Bachar Mar-Khalifé, confirming his taste for moving between scenes, styles and imaginations. These early years were essential: they established an open, exacting producer already committed to sensation, texture and formal freedom.

The major turning point came in 2013. That year, Romain De La Haye-Serafini boarded a trawler departing from Saint-Malo for several weeks of fishing in the North Atlantic. On board, he rebuilt a studio in a small cabin and composed 60°43’ Nord at sea. This foundational project brought Molécule to an audience far beyond electronic music. His first major concept album emerged from total immersion: the engines, cables, waves, hull, roll of the boat, movements of the crew, fatigue, confinement and, at times, fear. Everything entered the music. With 60°43’ Nord, Molécule developed a method that would become his signature: going into the field, exposing himself to the elements, recording raw reality, then transforming it into a work in which the environment is not a backdrop but a true co-composer. The project later took the form of a book, a television documentary for Thalassa, images and an immersive 360-degree audiovisual live show, leaving a lasting mark on the French scene.

From then on, Molécule embarked on a cycle of artistic expeditions that would reshape his work. In 2017, he spent several weeks in Greenland to create –22.7°C, an album born in a hunter’s house in the depths of the Arctic winter. He thought he was looking for silence; instead, he found a multitude of vibrations, cracks, breaths and minute frequencies. The experience was crucial, both musically and personally. It deepened his field recording practice, led him towards binaural listening and helped him articulate his thinking more clearly: silence does not exist; listening is a physical, precise and radical experience. The expedition gave rise to an album, a more poetic book close to the haiku form, a documentary film, an immersive tour and, later, a VR experience directed with Jan Kounen, as well as a development for the dome format.

This period revealed one of Molécule’s defining qualities: his ability to bring nature, art and technology into dialogue. Although his projects are born from direct contact with the elements, they also rely on increasingly ambitious methods of recording and reproduction.

Binaural recordings, body-mounted microphones, spatialization, immersive sound, video, 360-degree formats, XR, domes and prototypes: over time, Molécule has developed a laboratory-like practice. He works closely with Hervé Déjardin, head of Radio France’s spatial sound unit, and has built relationships with Sennheiser, DPA Microphones and L-Acoustics, who have supported the development of his recording and immersive playback tools. For him, technology is never a surface effect. It serves one purpose: to heighten the sense of presence and convey as closely as possible the intensity of a place, a body, a natural phenomenon or an emotion.

The same approach continued with Nazaré, a project developed around Portugal’s giant waves. Once again, Molécule did more than observe: he immersed himself in an extreme environment, worked with surfers and experimented with recording systems mounted on boards, bodies, in ears and on drones. The sound of the wave became musical material, but also material for film and performance. Nazaré led to a concept album, a documentary and a live performance. It confirmed that Molécule had become much more than an expedition musician: a multidisciplinary artist able to bring music, cinema, storytelling, innovation and sensation together.

The following years expanded this territory further. In 2019, he presented the drawing exhibition Constellations Sonores in Tangier, a sign that his imagination had moved beyond music alone. In 2020, he initiated Music For Containment, an ambient curation project, then developed 29 173 NM, a film and music work about the Vendée Globe, close to sailor Thomas Ruyant. In 2021, he took on the Tévennec lighthouse, a legendary and hostile place off the coast of Brittany, for a new project bringing together isolation, the memory of places, the sea and perception. Each chapter confirms a constant: Molécule composes with the world, and each adventure takes several forms—album, film, book, installation, concert or visual archive—as though no single work could contain it entirely.

This immersive, exploratory work is accompanied by a substantial body of live performance. Molécule has presented his creations in many settings: 360-degree A/V concerts, club performances, shows in darkness with spatialized sound, commissions for institutions and festivals, performances in an igloo, at the Centre Pompidou, the Philharmonie de Paris, the BnF, the Rex Club, the Olympia, the Gaîté Lyrique and beneath Dubai’s vast Al Wasl dome in an exceptional spatialized configuration. These different contexts show the range of his practice: he can inhabit a club or a museum, a popular stage or an immersive space, while maintaining the same commitment to perception and to creating the conditions for listening.

In 2022, he took another step with BPM, a project built around what the press called “the instrument of the future.” With J.I.L., an instrument played with the eyes and modulated in real time by brain activity, Molécule pushed his exploration of the connections between body, machine, brain and sound further. The creation follows naturally from his earlier work: after bringing oceans, ice, waves and lighthouses into music, he turned to the interface between human beings and instruments. Here, too, innovation is not decorative. It seeks to open up new ways of sensing and performing.

His career then took two seemingly opposite but closely related directions. On one hand, RE-201, a Jamaican album released in 2024, brought him back to sunnier influences with a more direct connection to dub, house and the great Jamaican sound makers. He collaborated with Big Youth, Johnny Clarke and The Congos, as well as figures from the French scene including Étienne de Crécy, DJ Falcon, Boombass and Alex Gopher. On the other, he composed his first major orchestral work, Symphonie n°1 “Quantique”, performed by the Orchestre National de Lille and released in 2025. For this piece, Molécule spent two years recording the orchestra’s rehearsals, breaths, creaks, glissandi, harmonies and silences before transforming this material into a symphonic composition scored for 83 musicians. The work marked a major turning point: it extended his language to the orchestra without abandoning a method grounded in recording, editing, material and immersion.

After this symphonic detour, Molécule has returned to his first love: techno. With A:R, he makes a clear return to his electronic roots. Conceived as a direct, physical and radical release, the EP continues his sonic research while reconnecting with the immediacy of the club, the impact of rhythm, analog textures and hypnotic structures. This return to his roots is not a nostalgic retreat. Rather, it is a stripping back before a new cycle, already signaled in his recent writing and creative plans, turns towards the abyss, tornadoes and other places at the edge, where listening will once again have to reinvent itself.

If Molécule’s work has such force today, it is because it rests on a clear idea, one he expresses increasingly explicitly in his book-manifesto about listening. At its heart is a sentence: “I don’t set out to record nature; I set out so that nature can record me.” It contains everything. For him, listening is not about capturing, possessing or consuming.

To listen is to consent. To slow down. To be silent. To let the world act upon us. In an age of saturation, acceleration and noise, where attention is scattered and our connection to the living world is fraying, Molécule proposes another way: a culture of listening that is aesthetic, ecological, sensory and almost political. In essence, what we listen to, we respect; and what we respect, we protect.

Over the years, Romain De La Haye-Serafini has built much more than a discography. He has created an ecosystem in which albums, films, writing, photography, installations, immersive experiences, fashion collaborations, commissions, podcasts, performances, prototypes and sonic research meet. He has also made Mille Feuilles a vehicle for freedom and structure, for his own projects and those of other artists. Above all, he has given rare form to a difficult ambition: connecting sensation with meaning, technology with the living world, outward adventure with an inward journey.

Molécule occupies a place of his own today. His work is instantly recognizable but never repetitive. It speaks of the sea, ice, wind, machines, silence, raves, death, memory, perception and the future. It reaches a broad audience because it never separates artistic rigor from human experience. Behind each project is a man who chooses to follow listening to its limits, committing his body, time, vulnerability, curiosity and life to it. This deep coherence makes Romain De La Haye-Serafini / Molécule one of the most distinctive French artists of his generation.