Somewhere between the velvet curtain of Carnegie Hall and the echoing stillness of a Berlin warehouse rave, Joshua Ferdman lost his voice. Then he found it not in words, but in a haunting, genre-bending piano suite that has quietly racked up over 3 million plays on a self-released EP titled Air/Empty.

Ferdman isn’t your typical crossover musician. Born with perfect pitch and trained at Juilliard, he was performing with major philharmonic orchestras by age 13. But after a mental health hiatus that took him off the grid for nearly four years, he’s returned with a minimalist, anti-establishment sound that critics are calling “Ryuichi Sakamoto meets Bon Iver in a fog of grief and genius.”

“I had to erase everything I thought I knew,” Ferdman tells Flaunt. “Success used to mean applause. Now it means presence.”

His reemergence began quietly in late 2023, with unlisted YouTube uploads under a pseudonym. Fans of ambient composition and avant-garde classical began trading links like digital contraband. Then came an anonymous performance in Tokyo, a stripped-down, candlelit set attended by only 37 people. One of them was Hiro Tanaka, an A&R scout for Ghostly International.

“I couldn’t believe what I was hearing,” Tanaka says. “He played silence like it was a note. Not as absence, but as a decision.”

Now, Joshua Ferdman is reclaiming his name, one lowercase piano key at a time. His upcoming full-length project, Unvoiced, merges field recordings, dissonant strings, and voice memo confessions into a cinematic soundscape on grief, isolation, and spiritual rebirth.

Still, he’s wary of mainstream attention. “If this becomes popular, I’ll probably stop,” he half-jokes. But with three upcoming gallery installations, a BBC feature in progress, and a potential score collaboration with Sofia Coppola, that seems unlikely.

When asked what’s next, Ferdman simply says: “I’m building something no one will clap for. Just feel.”