Skip to content
Future Forum 2026 / Speaker 日本語
Keynote 2 / Day 2 11:40 / with interpretation

Christopher Currell

クリストファー・カレル

Founder & CEO / Chief Architect, Althea Project GK

The musician who played Synclavier and digital guitar on Michael Jackson's BAD, helped arrange the single alongside Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones, and performed on the BAD world tour. He gives a keynote in Tokyo on 17 September 2026.

Christopher Currell

Work with Michael Jackson

Currell contributed Synclavier, digital guitar and a great many special effects to Michael Jackson's album BAD. By his own account he also helped arrange the single "BAD" together with Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones.

On the BAD world tour that followed, he played Synclavier and digital guitar. He later contributed rhythm arrangements, Synclavier, guitars and percussion to HIStory. The official Synclavier site lists him in its Hall of Fame, noting that he "was the keyboard player and guitarist on many of Michael Jackson's albums" and "performed on Michael Jackson's two world tours".

What the Synclavier was

The Synclavier, which appeared at the end of the 1970s, was a digital synthesiser and sampling system that cost about as much as a house. Recording a sound, cutting it, placing it and playing it back — the work anyone now does on the machine in front of them — was first made practical on instruments like this one. How a pop record sounded in the 1980s depended in part on how many people could actually operate one. Currell was among the few who could.

What he works on now

From a long study of sound and consciousness Currell proposed the "Currell Effect", set out in his book Harmonic Resonance of the Quantum Potential. At Althea Project GK, founded in Japan in 2026, he is the originator of Absolute Reductionism (AR) and its operating architecture ARIS, and is developing ARIS-EC, a deterministic error-correction and verification architecture.

At esse-sense Future Forum 2026

17 Sep 11:40
Keynote 2 — "Beyond the existing framework: the search for cause, responsibility, and the creation of a new future"
Main Hall / with simultaneous interpretation
17 Sep 12:40
Panel — "Management leadership that carries the future into industry"
Main Hall

The keynote sets out three axes of observation — creativity, technology and spirituality (the domain of consciousness, self, purpose, meaning and responsibility, not religious doctrine or belief) — and then swaps the question itself, from "what is this" to "why is it this way".

Sources

This page draws on the public sources above and on the speaker biography he supplied on 10 August 2026. Statements about albums and tours are limited to what the public primary sources confirm.

Christopher Currell speaks at esse-sense Future Forum 2026, held on 16–17 September 2026 at Tokyo Midtown Yaesu — a multi-track conference where researchers from the natural sciences to the humanities meet companies and society.

See the 2026 edition