✧ Piccaya: The Alchemist of Sight and Sound ✧ ♪
Piccaya, born Michel Uyttebroeck, is a Belgian multidisciplinary artist working at the intersection of structure and intuition, technology and nature. For more than three decades, his trajectory has moved fluidly between creative direction, large-scale visual storytelling, and immersive electronic music. His work is unified by a single intention: building meaningful bridges between the digital and the organic.
The Foundation: Design and Architecture
Born in Brussels and trained in Design and Architecture at Saint-Luc Art School, Michel developed an early sensitivity to proportion, spatial intelligence, and narrative composition. This structural mindset shaped a 20-year career as Creative Director and Graphic Designer. Through his agency Metapixels, he led brand strategy and visual identity projects for international companies including Coca-Cola, British Petroleum and Citroën. Beyond aesthetics, his role focused on aligning visual language with strategic positioning, ensuring that design functioned as a coherent storytelling system rather than decoration. This period refined his understanding of how concept, emotion, and execution must operate as one ecosystem.
The Visionary: WatchTheWorld
Guided by a persistent drive toward exploration, Michel gradually shifted his practice toward travel and wildlife photography. Under the long-term project WatchTheWorld, he has documented more than 75 countries across multiple continents. His photographic work centers on authenticity and context. Rather than staging reality, he observes it. His images capture the quiet dignity of local communities, the raw presence of wildlife, and the tension between ancestral traditions and accelerating modernity.
From the altitude of La Paz to the vast silence of the African savanna, his approach remains documentary in spirit, attentive to light, texture, and human nuance. Photography for him is not tourism. It is immersion, patience, and long-form observation.
The Sound: Musical Journeys
Under the name Piccaya, Michel translates landscapes into sound. His productions and DJ sets inhabit the territories of Organic House, Spiritual Downtempo, and Melodic Progressive. The aesthetic is both earthy and precise, combining electronic architecture with tribal percussion, ethnic instrumentation, and subtle psychedelic atmospheres. He approaches performance as narrative construction rather than track sequencing. Each set is conceived as a gradual arc, designed to guide listeners through emotional and rhythmic states. As co-founder of the Kosmozoo Project, he has become an active presence within the international Burner community, performing at Burning Man in the United States, AfrikaBurn in South Africa, and Nowhere in Spain. His music often integrates field recordings and sonic textures gathered during his travels, reinforcing the continuity between what he sees and what he composes.
The Philosophy
Today, Michel operates as a nomadic creator. Whether developing a complex digital platform, tracking wildlife through a lens, or producing melodic soundscapes from a mobile studio, his core intention remains consistent: to reveal beauty, connection, and coherence in a fragmented world. Across disciplines, his work reflects the same principle. Structure serves emotion. Technology serves presence. Travel serves understanding. Piccaya’s practice is ultimately about continuity. Seeing the world deeply. Listening carefully. And translating experience into form.
SUPPORT ME ON
Download every playlist + Set HD wav file.