Here you can find music projects that I have made over the years. I started playing the drums when I was 6 years old and making music has played a big role for me ever since. I started taking piano lessons at about 16 and started playing tenor saxophone at around 20.
I was lucky to have friends with a similar passion for music that led to many projects throughout my teens and twenties.
Since leaving my hometown of Berlin in 2022 my focus has somewhat shifted to work. But I've recently started to teach myself guitar to have an instrument that is more suitable for a lifestyle of frequent moving.
One-man-band project in 2018/2019
After finishing my BSc in engineering in January 2018, I decided to take a break for a year and focus on music. I rented a studio and spent 2 days a week working and 3 days a week in the studio practicing instruments, music theory and recording songs. I wrote, recorded and produced 1 song / month for a full year, resulting 12 songs. This is the final song of the year, august: future plans
AUGUST: future plans
The last song was definitely the most extensive, in instrumentation, production and also video editing.
This is one of the earlier songs, about 6 months into the project. I tried to vary tempo, effects that I used and just overall feel.
february: fearful solitude
When doing everything along there is such an urge to add more and more, so this was a deliberate attempt to reduce the number of instruments.
april: shift and overlap
While studying music theory and practicing playing in different time signatures I tried experimenting with that in my song writing. I was also learning a lot about best micing techniques for different instruments and different music production techniques to get the best sound out of each instruments. This song felt like a big improvement compared to the previous ones in that regard.
Vincent Sirius Trio: Queens Gambit
Another song that explores different time signatures, this one was inspired by J. Bernhardt - On Fire, which alternates between 6/16 and 7/16. So I wanted to experiment with this and wrote Queens Gambit which is 3 bars of 7/16 and then 5/16. Which in summary feels like a straight groove again.
june: control and lack thereof
In June I was listening to a lot of big band music by Charles Mingus and Duke Ellington and so wanted to write something with a more aggressive melody line played by multiple horns at once.
Vincent Sirius Trio: Particle or Wave
One of the last songs of the year is another rhythmic exploration. I really love the electric bass sound coming out of my Kawai ES7 piano and so this song has very little editing and effects on the instruments and was more a focus on the bass and drum groove. And playing around some more with the video editing.
In summary
I'm extremely grateful that I took this year to focus so much on making music. I just really enjoyed focusing on my hobby and having so much time dedicated to something that maybe isn't measurable in success in the same way that work is. I certainly learned a lot about music and improved on the instruments but I also started to listen to music slightly differently. Paying more attention to subtleties both from players but also in the production of music.
For just audio the music is also available on soundcloud
Contribution to the Polar sounds project
Acoustic Encounters Of A Fin Whale
I was able to contribute a song to the Polar Sounds project.
This piece features a Fin whale's journey through the polar soundscape. Due to its enormous size, the Fin whale (the second longest whale on the planet) produces a very low frequency (20 Hz) pulse, reaching the lower end of the human hearing range. Based on the recording of a Fin whale, a tune was composed, revolving around the reoccurring low frequency pulses.
The inspiration for this piece of music was taken from the long distances traveled by Fin whales in combination with the huge diversity in marine species in polar regions. The repeating low frequency pulses reveal the Fin whales point of view whilst encountering a diverse acoustic environment. Recordings from polar regions comprising sounds of various cetacean species like Killer whales, Ross seals, Bowhead whales, Sperm whales, Leopard seals and high frequency sound produced by sea ice, present the listener with an idea of the acoustic diversity in the Arctic and the Antarctic. A synthesizer playing chords based on the sounds produced by the sea ice is the only purely artificial sound in the piece - all other sounds are taken as recorded and only slightly altered.
The piece is a celebration of nature's diversity and beauty in yet another realm.