Part 2

From very deep/high/loud/quiet sounds to very long/short/simple/complex compositions - are there extremes in music you feel drawn to and what response do they elicit?

I guess I'm past the extremes. But you can never be so sure.

But no, extremes don't appeal to me at all at the moment. My reactions to extremes in music currently vary between pain and being bored.

Could you describe your creative process on the basis of one of your pieces, live performances or albums that's particularly dear to you, please?

For my new album Frozen Music I had only one poem by Robert Louis Stevenson as a template, "Evensong". I must have been walking around with it for a year, it was with me everywhere. I memorized it and starting from the verses, I developed my sound ideas for each track from the colors and the moods of the words and named my tracks after key words from the verses. That's roughly how I had my whole album in my mind.

Pretty quickly I had the title of the album, Frozen Music. This was also inspired by a verse by Stevenson, and it seemed fitting here because this time, different than usual, except for one track, I didn't have any harmonic ideas. Inside of me it felt like the music was "frozen". I also wanted the intro track to be a moody ambient track as a transition from my dark ambient album She's Leaving to Frozen Music.

For this I borrowed chord progressions from Claude Debussy's "Pour Le Piano".



Debussy was a contemporary of Stevenson's and although this has not been handed down, I think they may have met on one of their travels. In addition to this there were the influences of my listening and reading: I discovered Drum & Bass: T.Power, Sunchase, Krust, just to name a few.



From these three influences the album was born. First I built my drum loops and got really into it. From there I developed the individual tracks.

For a predecessor album Andersworld, I selected several poems by the aforementioned Stevenson and learned them by heart while walking, during which the first musical ideas came.



Then I set them to music and composed scores for piano and voice. Down to the detail of the piano accompaniment, a lot of time changes, different tempos processed in one track, and so on. I took these scores as a template for producing, but quickly realized that especially my synthesizer sounds needed other dimensions in time to unfold their sounds than the piano.

At the time, I was listening to an extremely large amount of electronic music that was new to me, and as a result, completely different influences came into the album than I had thought when I was writing the scores. I also took some liberties not to sing vocal passages as I had initially intended, but to experiment a lot with the voice according to Sevdaliza or James Blake.

Whereas I am by far not as good a singer as these two and have always considered my vocals as a kind of instrument next to others.



More and more the production process became a kind of remixing process of the scores.

Do you conduct “experiments” or make use of scientific insights when you're making music?

No, I wouldn't say that. However, when I produce an album, I like to make a careful search for information into side projects and topics that are directly related to my production: for example, with Frozen Music - parallel to the production process - I delved a lot into the history of Drum & Bass, as well as into the life of R. L. Stevenson on Samoa and the topic of colonialism.

For the latter I am writing an independent text and hope to publish it close to the release of Frozen Music.

In the past, when I was studying composition, it was customary to make an experimental arrangement for each new score, which virtually genrated the music. There is a little anecdote about this: I had written (or "generated") a piece for the instrumentation of a piano trio, and it was all very complicated, atonal, and ran according to a certain scheme. In the course I had inserted, purely by chance, "windows" in it: chords, like C7, Am etc ... In other words, harmonies that were to shine like foreign bodies in the rest of the piece.

The piece was called "Gelb" ("Yellow") and one day I took it to some composition professors in Basel. Afterwards I was sitting with the composer Detlev Müller-Siemens in the pub and he pointed to these chord windows and said to me: "There you are!"

How does the way you make music reflect the way you live your life? Can we learn lessons about life by understanding music on a deeper level?

First and foremost, classical music comes to mind, especially that for piano, which I play myself almost daily and also teach. Here, every note has a meaning. Nothing is blown up to seem bigger. That fascinates me.

The precision with which it was composed, I would say, reflects my attitude to life: to remain precise, attentive, always pursuing different levels at the same time and remaining aware of them.

In my experience, there is something deeply invigorating in the qualitiy of our attention to the tasks that confront us, whether in music production or in everyday life.

Do you feel as though writing or performing a piece of music is inherently different from something like making a great cup of coffee? What do you express through music that you couldn't or wouldn't in more 'mundane' tasks?

Freedom. While producing, I experience a kind of freedom that I rarely experience otherwise.

Bringing beauty, power and freedom together is something I manage to do a little better with music than with making coffee. But a good coffee also wants to be made with care ;)

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. Do you, too, have a song or piece of music that affects you in a way that you can't explain?

Minimal Music I personally find difficult to listen to. It feels like something gets stuck inside me. Can become unpleasant.

Honestly, I find enumerations very appealing. For example, in a track from my new album, "So Far", a techno track (btw. which nods towards drum & bass with its snare rhythm), there are always numbers mentioned.



I find that exciting because it's so absurd. You can interpret everything possible into it. Clever minds ask for a pattern. And it's so incredibly meditative.

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

Unfortunately, I immediately think of what I don't want to hear: AI-generated music - but unfortunately this will probably not be stopped.

But if it has to be, then I would like to see a reflective and critical approach of composers and producers to AI. Especially with the question, what touches me in music, who do I want to hear? A human being and his way of seeing, hearing, representing, inventing the world? Or a perhaps impressive result of a machine, which then just sounds.

In this point, and perhaps in others, I am very old-fashioned.