Part 2

Sound, song, and rhythm are all around us, from animal noises to the waves of the ocean. What, if any, are some of the most moving experiences you've had with these non-human-made sounds? In how far would you describe them as “musical”?

Nothing compares to the sound of the waves spilling to the shore. The sound of wind moving through the leaves of a tree opens my heart in ways that human-made music hardly can. Sounds of Nature are probably the actual origin of music.

We are part of nature. We are nothing but a tiny bit in time and space of this universe. I think, most of the music we make is either an attempt to reconnect to our ancient experiences of singing together in caves (Why else would we go to stadium shows?) or to re-connect to the vibrations that the universe and much later we were born from.

This summer, I re-enacted some experiments done hundreds of times before: I recorded creeks, streams and rivers to find their harmonies. And they’re all more or less the same: C major with an F in bass (when the flow grows stronger) when your A is at 432 Hertz. One begins to wonder if it could be any sort of coincidence that loads of musical systems are based on the C major scale. Rather a coincidence than a co-incidence, if you asked me.

My truest feeling about this is, that deep inside, music is our way of re-connecting to this vibration that we once originated from. Non-human-made sounds always make me feel like shifting back into the right dimension. We’ve only been here roughly 300.000 years, on a planet that’s been here roughly 4,5 billions of years.

Maybe non-human-made sounds are the music that we try to reconnect to ever since we grew conscious and started losing that connection.

There seems to be an increasing trend to capture music in numbers, from waveforms via recommendation algorithms up to deciphering the code of hit songs. What aspects of music do you feel can be captured through numbers, and which can not?

I think it is really helpful to capture the business side of music in numbers to a certain extent. It’s helpful if you try giving your creative endeavours an at least partially life sustaining twist. But even with that, I try to be careful.

For my last album, ATOLLS, for instance, I did all the promo myself and had maybe 8 things directly returning from over 250 pitching emails that I wrote. One could say, that’s no good at all. But amongst the 8 were two absolutely amazed people who I was really connecting to personally as record collectors, they pushed my album to their communities and now I am shipping the Vinyl worldwide and sold more than a third of the first edition in two months!

How do you capture connection and excitement in numbers? Mathematics, statistics etc. are methods of trying to understand or depict reality. They’re only means of understanding, but never a self-fulfilling entity, if you asked me. Today’s time is so obsessed with numbers, but I don’t really get it. It’s like obsessing yourself with the fact that there’s 233 letters E in Whitman’s Who Learns My Lesson Complete? rather with its stunning poetic beauty.

I think art is always about the personal connections with people and in best case, numbers won’t be doing that experience any harm.

We can surround us with sound every second of the day. The great pianist Glenn Gould even considered this the ultimate delight. How do you see that yourself and what importance does silence hold from your point of view? What role do headphones play for you in this regard?

I have ambiguous feelings on this omnipresence of music. First of all, I feel it is embedded in this general idea of a world that has everything at the tip of their finger all the time. That bores and overwhelms me at the same time. I simply find more joy in discovering a random record in a store that I become close friends with later, rather than having the same music being pitched to me by the YouTube algorithm.

For me most of today’s world (or the part of the world that I live in) is just way too fast. I think, by this omnipresence of music, we take music way too much for granted. Music is a living entity, no doubt about that. I really feel that my connection to music is a relationship to a breathing entity. But most of the time, all we do is take, take, take from music. Making us feel good through coffee house mood playlists in the morning and so on. If I imagine treating my close friends like that, I wouldn’t have any left today. And so, it is with music.

I think it is as important to take from music as it is to give something back. Maybe through active listening, maybe through slow discovery, maybe through playing a tune in the garden with some friends, just for the fun of it. I think, recorded music being so present all the time, discourages a lot of people to pick up an instrument for self- or home entertainment. The quality bar is raised so damn high through all the music that you can listen to 24/7 – and social media trains our brains to compare with others all the time ... It’s a toxic mixture to be honest.

In the same spot, I don’t think all internet-based music services are rubbish. My main musical outlet is through Bandcamp and I support their philosophy 100%. Or TIDAL: The platform makes high quality audio streaming accessible and it doesn’t give you headaches when listening through headphones. But I have no use for services like Spotify that you give horribly sounding mp3s in bad quality, not paying small indie artists at all.

Every time I listen to "Albedo 0.39" by Vangelis, I choke up. But the lyrics are made up of nothing but numbers and values which don't appear to have any emotional connotation. Do you, too, have a song or piece of music that affects you in a seemingly counterintuitive way – and what, do you think, is happening here?

Haha, I can absolutely relate to that! For me it’s a similar but slightly different thing most of the Heavy Metal music that I love. I grew up on Metallica, started digging myself into all the 80s and 90s stuff in my teens. The other week I re-discovered a Pantera CD that I hadn’t touched in 15 years. It still sparked me instantaneously. The energies are so direct and honest. I love it.



But today, my English is quite solid. I understand the lyrics – and what should I say? Phil Anselmo ain’t no Shakespeare – haha! But oddly the music still works for me: It’s plain, bit dull lyrics to energetic instrumentation that absolutely take off. And it still sparks me.

Maybe it is because this music made me feel like belonging to something greater in my teens. But also it is just because the energies expressed are so direct and honestly angry, that I still connect even if aspects in it feel counterintuitively plain.

I’m thinking about this a lot as I still love my Metallica and Motörhead records despite for their sometimes, let’s say, straight-forward lyricism.

If you could make a wish for the future – what are developments in music you would like to see and hear?

I’d love to see people, including myself, pickup music at home and amongst their friends and families more often, just for the fun of self-entertainment. Music as a profession and a way of life is the most fulfilling journey I can imagine for me personally, but it’s only for the few.

Thinking of a musician only as “the professional” is a very, very exclusive perspective. music is for everyone! I think, everyone that sparks an excitement for music already is a musician, ready to embark on their personal journey. I’d really wish for a change of encouragement of actively playing music rather than only music’s consumption.

The unbiased listening and vibing together to make everyone sound as good as possible, which comes with playing a song with your friends is what our society really needs these days. I’d wish for that in music more than anything!