Miguel Hiroshi Is Listening for the Sound the Universe Makes When No One Is Watching
Born in Japan, raised in the south of Spain, and currently in perpetual motion between Spain and Mexico — Miguel Hiroshi has never belonged to one place, one genre, or one sound.
A musician schooled in Flamenco, Jazz, and World music who now moves freely between acoustic tradition and the multiverse of electronic composition, Hiroshi works in three directions at once: creation, performance, education. He sat with us to talk about nature as a frequency, the moment the invisible becomes visible, and why your neighbour might be the most important icon of our time.
There is a particular kind of musician who treats genre as geography — a set of borders drawn by other people, useful for navigation but not for living. Miguel Hiroshi is that kind. Flamenco, Jazz, World music: he moved through each not as destinations but as languages, accumulating nuance and expression the way a traveller accumulates accents, until the combination became something entirely his own. Now, with electronics woven through everything, the map has expanded again. He is not sure where the edge is. He seems to prefer it that way.
His biography alone resists easy categorisation. Japan, southern Spain, Mexico. Three cultures with entirely distinct relationships to music, to rhythm, to the body in performance. Most artists from such a background spend their careers explaining it. Hiroshi simply makes music that sounds like all three places at once, and moves on.
Ask him about inspiration and he goes, without hesitation, to nature. Not as metaphor — as source.
"I feel that there are so many different emotional states you can access once you are in nature. The visual part is so vast, so rich. I get many ideas from connecting with it."
But then he says something that recalibrates the whole conversation: "I believe that music is the universe manifesting itself through us — the musicians and the artists — just as nature is."
It is a large claim, and he makes it quietly, without performance. In the context of a practice that spans Flamenco's deep emotional rigour, Jazz's improvisational intelligence, and electronic music's capacity for pure sonic architecture, it doesn't sound like mysticism. It sounds like a working method.
The emotional and the visual, he says, are his two parameters. Inspiration arrives through both channels simultaneously — a feeling and an image at once, a dream, a visualization. And what drives him is the moment that follows: when the invisible becomes visible. When the smell of an idea becomes a sound you can play back.
"That part is exciting. It is very interesting to see the results and compare them with your original idea."
The gap between vision and manifestation — between what you heard in your head and what actually came out — is, for most artists, a source of anxiety. Hiroshi describes it as the most interesting part. That distinction matters.
The pandemic, when he addresses it, reveals a particular cast of mind. He is not naive about the difficulty — a tough road, very hard for many people — but he refuses to stop there. Difficult situations lead to transformation. The world needs changes. He experienced the last two years as genuinely uplifting, even through the disruption, and attributes some of that to a deliberate act of attention: looking inward rather than at the noise outside.
"I try not to pay much attention to the outside and more to my intentions."
In an era of relentless external pressure on artists — algorithms, visibility, the economics of streaming — this reads as both a creative philosophy and a quiet form of resistance.
On the subject of icons, Hiroshi gives perhaps the most interesting answer in the conversation, and the most Antakly one.
"Anybody that follows their intuition, their inner voice and fights for their dreams against the big theatre that the world imposes on us today is an icon of our time for me. Could be a famous character, you, or my neighbour."
The deliberate levelling of that — a famous character, you, or my neighbour — is worth pausing on. It is the answer of someone who has genuinely thought about where artistic courage actually lives, and concluded that proximity to power has nothing to do with it.
Wellbeing, he says, is different for every human being, and the key is learning to listen to yourself. His own version: music, art, nature, caring for the body, resting well, being as free as possible in the mind, eating well, good moments with people he loves. The practice is the balance. The balance is a daily challenge. He offers this not as wisdom but as honesty — the simple description of a life organised around the things that actually matter.
Miguel Hiroshi is still moving. Between Spain and Mexico, between acoustic and electronic, between the tradition he inherited and the sounds he hasn't found yet. The invisible, for him, is always in the process of becoming visible.
"The possibilities are endless. It is the best game in life for me."
Miguel Hiroshi is a musician, composer and music educator working across Spain and Mexico. His work is available on all major streaming platforms. Discover more artists chosen for their ideas, not their visibility, at Antakly Projects.
