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Born and bred in a small town near Hannover/Germany, my musical career started at the age of 6, when my mother sent me to a public music school for recorder lessons (which is still a typical first instrument in Germany). My parents were very serious about us children to learn an instrument, which I am nowadays extremely thankful for.

However after some weeks I still didn´t know how to hold it correctly in my hands, so it was clear that recorder won´t be "my" instrument.

As we had a piano in the house, my parents then asked me "Would you like to learn piano playing?" and I, not having the faintest idea about how it might be, answered "Yes, ok", just out of the curiosity of a child.

This huge instrument proved to be much more adequate to me, at least I went to the lessons every week, practiced every day (although more and more often my mother had to push me) and for a couple of years I did it, not out of enthusiasm, but because it had simply become part of my life.

However after some years a got a teacher, who taught me not only playing after sheet music. She showed me how to play a boogie-woogie bass line with the left and improvise above that with the right. She explained to me what a blues sceme is. As my father had always been a jazz and rock´n roll fan, I had a fairly good idea about this music from sunday morning jazz radio listening with him. Now this was the first time I did not only play what others had invented, but I invented something by my own!

After having taken this first step into creativity I somehow trained myself in pop music by playing current popular songs on the piano. I recorded the songs from the radio on tape and then played them bit by bit to find out how they work, how they are constructed and how I can play that with only two hands on a piano.

Still there was a big issue for me: it was the time when music video clips became popular to be shown on TV. And I saw that the keyboarders of modern pop bands did not play piano on stage, of course. Instead they had those slim and supercool keyboards, or "synthesizers". This techy and somewhat science-fiction appearance looked gorgeous to me.

Then came the first big impact, when music really hit me: I listened to a tape copy of "The Art Of Noise" first album "Who is afraid of...". I well remember sitting in my room in the evening, the lights turned off and just listened to this strange mixture of sampled noises and synth sounds. It blew me away! Afterwards my wish to be able to make such music by myself grew stronger and stronger. However I needed money to buy such expensive gear, so I worked during school holidays and finally could buy my first equipment. It started with a second-hand digital piano, the Yamaha PF80, which I got from a local music shop. Then I saw another second-hand unit, a Roland D-20 in the shop window, a fully-blown workstation with tone generator, sequencer and effects. Again I put together all my money and finally could take it home. On this machine I took my first steps into sound programming as well as song production. Over the years a pile of other gear followed (Klanglabor, The KlangCollage)

Soon I got my first job in a band, when I joined "Balance On Property", a synth pop group of 3 friends of mine. It was basically synthesizers and vocals, the keyboards doing all the music, partly programmed, partly played live. After one of the guys left the band, the 3 remaining of us renamed the project "Cryptix" and we changed the style a bit towards a mixture of Dark Wave and EBM. We played a number of concerts and joined or even organized some small local festivals. After about 3 years I moved to a distant place due to a new job, so I had to leave the band.

During the next years I found myself sitting in front of my gear, producing songs by myself by playing around with a variety of styles. Also I did some smaller projects with friends, only one of those leading to a live concert (GeoRa, live at the Jump, Götingen). Furthermore I did several dedicated projects, such as music for a jazzdance group, some recordings for friends and I joined a couple of rock bands. Another thing was working for different non-profit student theatre groups, who sometimes just needed a piano accompaniment, but much more exciting were those occasions, where a real sound design was required for background noises, music, or speech recordings. I even did some live sound. One of those was a theatre version of Edgar Alan Po´s "House Usher", a production of the ThOP, Göttingen. Another one was for the group "Die uralten und erleuchteten Brüder von Iieh", who made adaptions of Terry Pratchet´s "Disk World" novels. Bringin a dragon to the stage only as sound, or managing MORT´s voice on the mixing desk was a completely new, exciting experience for me.

The only time when I left the keyboard aside was when I joined "Roll´s Voice", a pure vocal group, which we started on the occasion of the wedding of a friend. We sang "Caravan of love" in the style of the Housemartins and it was so much fun that we decided to continue, and we did for a while.

The last rock band I played with I had to leave again because of a new job and thus moving to another place. Bad luck indeed, as this band is in fact still existing and actively playing.

In the next years I again concentrated on programming sounds and enjoing life, until an old friend of mine called and asked me, if I would like to support her in a new project. My job was to improve some part of the music and do some recordings. So I worked on a couple of pieces of Camena Dream (see "Links" section).

Now as I enjoy family live and business live, both of them a lot, there is limited time for making music. But still inspiration strikes from time to time, so over the last year I made some completely new version of some of our old "Cryptix" songs, which led to the "Cryptix [Reworked]" project (Recent Projects).

More to come...

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