So this is the standalone, final (kind of) version of my tune "The Third Secret". Full of changes, quiet moods alternating with more intense, dramatic moments, a little world to discover, "The Third Secret" is nothing else than the third song that I wrote in less than one month, between November and December 2022. That's the secret. However, I will spin a story to be sung in the future lyrics to the song, which will in some way with the theme of a third secret (and maybe also the other two, at that point).

I am very much honored to have gotten permission for the use of one of the fantastic paintings of my friend Sonja Streck, a German-Swiss lady who emigrated to Sicily and who is among the most "ardent" fans of my music. In harmony with the theme of the song, it is a triptych that shows mysterious features, resembling landscapes and/or plants or persons --- three secrets, indeed!

Year Of Fire

The Third Secret

Here is the entire "Dance Of The Volcanoes Suite", all three parts in one, which makes this a different listen. 

And I am very honored to have received another piece of artwork from a friend as title image: the Sicilian volcanoes Etna, Vulcano and Stromboli dancing together, with dormant Vesuvio sleeping in the foreground. The artist is my friend Grazia Musumeci (aka Grazia Emme). Grazia is known in the Etna area for her "Vulcomics", little comic strips depicting the "human side" of the Sicilian (and Italian) volcanoes, which have become rather popular over the years.

Grazia produced this image while listening to the music of "Dance Of The Volcanoes", which my family and I chose from no less than four images of dancing volcanoes made by Grazia!

Don't miss visiting her "Vulcomics" blog: https://vulcomics.blogspot.com/

Dance Of The Volcanoes

The original version of "Fires At Nightfall" consisted of two parts, a quiet, mystical one, followed by a more intense bit with rock music. This version remains quiet and atmospheric, ending with a prelude to "White Easter".

Composed, performed and edited in 2023.

Fires At Nightfall (alternative version)

When I was sixteen, after years of being an unhappy adolescent that received little (and mostly negative) attention from the young ladies, I finally started building self-assurance and feeling that girls were no longer in an unreachable corner of the universe. One particular occasion was my first holidays without my parents, to southern Switzerland, where I was away from my common environment where everybody knew me (or at least believed to do so), in the summer of 1978. Here I finally had my first - rather timid and extremely brief - romantic moments, and with the newly gained confidence I embarked on my first real romantic relationship a few weeks later, when back home in Germany.

This tune came to me in that period, and it eventually became part of my hypothetical "Your Body" Album, a collection of songs that in my imagination should describe those experiences, from the summer of '78 through that relationship, which lasted only 40 days, and its aftermath of despair, rage, and renewed optimism and new romantic encounters. I have published a few of the "Your Body" tunes here, such as the title track and "Empty House". There is also "Lightness", which is a first effort in putting a closing section to this tune, but which I was never fully convinced of; here the song comes with its true meaning.

It was that feeling of freedom from what I had been before, and from the notions people had of me. I was immersed in the grandiose scenery of the Swiss Alps in the region of St. Moritz, there were glaciers, mountain brooks, grassy plains, and lakes. And amidst this magnificent landscape, a tiny village named Maloja, where there was a gigantic building once constructed as a hotel (the Palace), but which at the time was used as a vacation center for teenage girls from Belgium. It took me a moment to digest this, but no less than 800 (eight hundred !!!) girls were packed into the building each week, and these girls were eager to get in contact with some male creature, and I was one of the few that were available on site (I did stay in another holiday center, named Salecina, a bit away from the village). A few of the girls did actually fall in love with me, and I a bit with them, but I was confused after those long years of feeling unloved, I was terribly timid and embarrassed and did not know how to move forward. How did you get from A to B? How did you take a girl's hand, and - unimaginable - kiss her? It was all very exciting and mysterious, like the mountains around us, it wasn't all that easy to get there.

The photo is of me right there, in the Salecina holiday center, suntanned and quite self-confident, one day in July 1978.

The Palace vacation center was more recently re-transformed into a high-class hotel named "Maloja Palace Hotel" https://www.malojapalace.com/it/home

Also the Salecina vacation center - which is of a rather alternative style - is still operating:  https://salecina.ch/en/

Far Away From Here

In the spring of 2002, my first marriage fell apart after only five years, and my illusion of the perfect relationship with the girl of my dreams was blown to smithereens. One of the reasons for the failure of the marriage was my sort of stubbornness in pursuing my stuttering career as a volcanologist. This brought considerable financial hardship and insecurity, and so I accepted to accompany groups of hikers, mainly from France, on one-week-long cruises in the Aeolian Islands, north of Sicily. Many of the hiking tours went from island to island on a magnificent sailship, the "Sigismondo", under the command of Capitan Felice.

If I remember correctly, only one of the about 10 tours I did on the "Sigismondo" in that period, was not haunted by at least one day of stormy, rainy weather. There were thus many moments of melancholy under a gloomy, gray sky, where my mind went into collision course with itself, between immense frustration and sadness, and a spirit of curiosity, waiting to explore the unknown, virgin new period of my life that had opened with the demise of my first marriage.

I've already told the story of how that young lady Catherine suddenly burst into my life during one of the later tours with the "Sigismondo", in early September 2002, and things changed in a way I had not been able to anticipate the least. The season had started with despair and the implosion of what had seemed a dream of a marriage; it ended with a new love that would turn out the most important of my life, and with a dramatic, destructive and disruptive eruption of Etna, which brought a lot of nuisance, anger and renewed frustration and nearly drove me away from my acquired home, Sicily.

This is the geographic and emotional setting in which "Tears In Paradise" was born. After carrying the melody in my head for 18 years, I finally recorded the tune in August-September 2020 and published it here on Soundcloud, but was not really satisfied with that version. It took me another four-and-a-half years to create a considerably improved version of the music, especially for the sax sound at the end. So here it is, complete with a nylon guitar track mimicking the melody that, hopefully, one day will be sung by a singer with a good voice. 

If you like to listen to a "karaoke" version of this song, here's the link:
https://soundcloud.com/boris-behncke/tears-in-paradise

The title photo was taken during one of the tours on the "Sigismondo" in the summer of 2002, while sailing toward the island of Stromboli, seen in the background.

Tears In Paradise (2025 version)

This song is about me falling in love with girls because I was attracted by their beauty, and trying to be handsome so that I could please them. I took lots of selfies with my old Canon reflex camera, displaying this craving, soulful look as in the title picture. Had there been social media at that time, I would probably have posted some of these, and maybe some young lady would even have liked them.

It was summer 1988, and I had come out of a long and very difficult relationship rich with conflicts and scenes of jealousy (from her part). I enjoyed my newly gained freedom having fun with the girls, and always wanting more and more, but beyond the brief affairs I was longing for a new, stable relationship (it came two years later, and turned out much worse than the earlier one, in terms of arguments and jealousy, once more the woman being the pathologically jealous partner).

It was a time when I had gained a certain self-confidence, still ridden with a lot of doubts and lack of assurance. Certainly things had much improved since my adolescent years, when I was considered by most a rather unattractive young guy, and girls were not at all interested in having to do with me. But there was a constant urge to prove to myself that I was attractive, and therefore valid, and this could only be obtained by being appreciated and wanted by the ladies.

This burning desire for appreciation only slowly calmed down over the years, and now I wonder how this could be such an immense issue for me, given that I was indeed a good-looking guy, but my insecurities prevented me from feeling at fully ease with myself and the surrounding world. In the end, this nonwithstanding, I did have quite a lot of fun in that period, and I guess I couldn't have had much more anyway.

During the summer of 1988, a melody came into my mind, which I gradually developed mentally over the next couple of months, and my idea was to call this song "U R So Qt", in a fashion that had come in those years with artists like Prince, of using only a couple of letters for whole words. It took me a long time to decide that this piece deserved becoming an audible reality ... and finally, 37 years later, here it is. I have played it thus as to make you get an idea of what should be the vocal melody. There is still hope that one day there will be a singer to give real life to my music!

U R So Qt

Originally thought as a part of my 2021 tune "Restless", in 2024 I decided to make this a stand-alone song and gave it a proper intro. This is about challenging time and age and doing your best kicking as for as long as possible.

The photo was taken on 6 March 2025, when together with my friend and colleague Salvo Giammanco we were with a crew of the Italian RAI television filming on Etna.

Still Restless

I wrote and performed this song in July 2024, while preparing for a week-long mission to the area near Napoli and Vesuvio, which I had not visited since 2014. It was a period of anticipation, and at the same time filled with excitation, as my "home volcano" Etna was going through a phase of powerful summit eruptions. And here, finally, my view of Vesuvio from Napoli, on 2 August 2024. Finally I saw those places again ... places always under the threat from the nearby volcanoes (on the other side of Napoli is the restless Campi Flegrei caldera, which for the past few years has been the cause of massive concern).

This tune is a bit different from my "usual" style, if there is any, and listening to it you will travel with me through those weeks before that voyage, which was mainly for institutional reasons, and finally go through the culminating moments, when I saw them again: that incredible, impossible, impressive and implausicle city of Napoli; the slumbering and potentially violent, deadly volcano Vesuvio; the elusive but hauntingly dangerous caldera of the Campi Flegrei.

When I See You Again

Trekking on Etna can bring you through a stunning variety of landscapes and scenery, and give you a broad range of emotions and sensations. This tune, which I developed between December 2024 and May 2025, reflects the three main areas that you can discover in escursion - the areas immediately adjacent to the uppermost mountain villages, the forests on the middle slopes of Etna, and the upper portion of the mountain up to the summit craters, where eruptions are rather frequent.

Passeggiando in montagna

This song came into my mind during the cold, cold German winter of 1984-1985, at a time when the relationship that I was in was about to break up, for which I was largely to blame. There was a feeling of profound sadness, of guilt, and self-hatred, and I wished that I was able to encourage that girl I was with, to tell her that after the pain there would be a new, joyful phase of life, that the sun would eventually shine again, one day.

During the following decades, I have relived similar situations and emotions, sometimes it was my fault, at other times it was my partner's. Each time I tried to remember that after the cold and the dark times, there would be sunshine, and indeed there always was, and always will be.

For a long time I hesitated working on this tune and finally make it an audible reality, because it reflects so much pain and sadness. Yet I always liked the music, and in the end I decided to record and publish it. The final section, which I composed while working on the song in June 2025, reflects the change from the dark, depressed mood to a lighter tone, ending with a powerfully positive finale.

Photo taken in August 2020 of a sunrise on the island of Stromboli and my daughter Ida

And The Sun Will Shine Again

Sicily is a land of fire - the fires of its volcanoes, Stromboli and Etna, but also frequent wildfires, which especially during the summer ravage the dry vegetation and are in most cases human-made fires. After the particularly bad summer of 2017 - in terms of wildfires - I had the idea of "Summer On Fire", which I started creating and editing using the Hydrogen software. However, I soon got stuck without knowing where to go with the tune, and it took several years until I had a reasonably complete version in early 2020. This version is a completely re-recorded and re-edited version created with Studio One in early summer 2025.

During the particularly hot summer of 2023, hundreds of wildfires burned their paths through large areas of Sicily, including several of the scoria cones formed by eruptions on the slopes of Etna. The large cone of Monti Rossi near Nicolosi on the south flank of the volcano was severely hit, with a major portion of its pine forest devastated by the flames, as seen in the title photograph taken on 25 July 2023, when scorching heat and strong wind fanned the flames at record speed across the land. Fires broke out in numerous locations simultaneously, clearly indicating that the cause was arson.

As of early July 2025, Sicily has so far been spared from major wildfires, but the season is just starting as I am posting this tune, and there are concerns that like in many previous years, fires will take their toll in the vulnerable vegetation weakened by long drought. 

Summer On Fire

Composed and performed in a handful of days in the hot days of the Sicilian July of 2025, with Etna puffing and rumbling in the backyard. As simple as it is, I think this is one of my finest compositions so far. Image courtesy of Adobe Firefly AI, reflecting exactly what I imagined to go with this song. Try doing the slow dance to this music, I am sure it will work!

A Slow Dance

After the romantic and rather linear "A Slow Dance", here comes a new prog gem from my personal music factory.

This is a tune that I started composing nearly 30 years ago and finished right now, on 31 August 2025. The first idea came when I hiked the beautiful island of Salina, in the Aeolian Islands, in September 1996, marveling at spectacular, colorful rock of past volcanic cataclysms in roadcuts, and the breathtaking panoramic views from its two major mountains. I finally decided to complete the idea that I had in mind, and here is the result.

The photo shows the view from the higher of the two volcanoes on Salina, Monte Fossa delle Felci (the mountain of the crater of ferns, 962 m) toward the slightly lower Monte dei Porri (mountain of leeks, 860 m), with the village of Leni at left, and the islands of Filicudi and Alicudi in the distance. It was taken on 2 October 2005 during a field trip with international students.

Salina

After nearly two years of Civil Service, I was ready for college, and the plan was to pursue my childhood dream of becoming a volcanologist. There were very few university professors specialized in volcanology in Germany, and one of them - the most famous at the time, Hans-Ulrich Schmincke - taught at the Ruhr-Universität in the city of Bochum, deep in the west (tief im Westen!) of Germany. For this I moved from my previous home in Cologne to Bochum and stayed there for six years, having a rather good time and slowly proceeding with my studies.

Then professor Schmincke moved to the University of Kiel and the associated GEOMAR research center, and like many of my budding volcanologist companions I moved to the city on the Baltic Sea in the far north of Germany. I did not return to Bochum until almost thirty years later, in December 2019 with my family, to show them the place where I had lived, and obviously the Geosciences building of the University (which since has been broken down and is currently being reconstructed according to modern building codes).

From the center of the town there is a long, long, long road leading to the University area, the Universitätsstraße, and when driving up that road in 2019, I was impressed by HOW long it was, and an idea for a music crept into my mind. I constructed a brief intro piece of this music after returning home from the Germany visit, in early January 2020, and then moved over to other projects, and then Covid came, and the little intro dropped into oblivion. Only in mid-2025 I rediscovered it and decided to bring it to completion. 

In a certain sense, this tune is not only about that physical road in Bochum, but also reflects the long way I have come in the 40 years since moving to that town, which I initially didn't like, but which eventually grew on me. From those days of dreaming of becoming a volcanologist to being a volcanologist on one of the most active and intriguing volcanoes on Earth, the road has indeed been a long and winding one.

And here it is.

The image is from Google Earth and shows the long, long, long and winding Universitätsstraße running across the scene to the University complex (at the bottom of the image).

The Never Ending Road

In the summer of 2020 I started using Studio One for the recording and editing of my music, and one of the first tunes that I developed with that software was "That's What Life Is All About". In those days we had a tiny kitten that unfortunately was rather ill and died after a short time; shortly thereafter also our black tomcat Dino also died. I felt like I had to really concentrate on the positive things in life, and that was what inspired the title of the song. However, I was not very satisfied with the sound and parts of the melody, and finally, five years later, decided to create a new and revised version of it, with a completely new intro, central part, and outro. That's what you are listening to now.

Cats have continued to be a significant element in my life, and currently I live with five cats in the garden, two parents and three young cats that are rapidly growing. The cover photo shows dad cat, whom we simply call "gatto", in our garden in spring 2025, where he often passes half days sleeping in the grass.

That's What Life Is All About

Gemona is a small town lying in the region of Friuli, in northeastern Italy. On 6 May 1976, a magnitude 6.5 earthquake devastated a vast area in the region, causing the death of nearly 1000 people. Gemona was hardest hit among the stricken towns and villages, with about 400 people killed. While the inhabitants struggled through the months after the disaster, several strong earthquakes between 11 and 15 September 1976 - including one of magnitude 6.0 - caused further destruction and left the population in despair. However, decided action by the extraordinary commissioner Giuseppe Zamberletti led to a well coordinated evacuation and subsequent reconstruction effort. This included rules that required that the damaged towns be reconstructed exactly as they had been before the earthquakes.

I visited Gemona in the summer of 1987 with my then girlfriend. 11 years after the disaster, reconstruction was rather advanced, especially when considering that reconstruction in other Italian areas hit by previous earthquakes had proceeded with extreme delays and large proportions of reconstruction funds vanished in obscure channels. In Gemona, very few buildings were still in ruins, whereas much of the rest of the town had been pretty much reset to its pre-earthquake shape. 

During that trip in 1987 I had brought my acoustic guitar with me, and while waiting at the train station for the train to bring us to our next destination, I played a little melody that I had in my head since some time. This tune brings that melody to new life, with some sections of music added in its intro and central portion. I decided to give it the name of the town where I played it on my guitar decades ago, a town which I visited once more in November 2021, to see that there was still one would left from the earthquake - the castle on a hill in the center of town. At the time, many businesses were closed, giving grim testimony to another disaster - Covid, which had claimed a heavy toll in northeastern Italy.

I took the photo during my 2021 visit to Gemona, looking toward the Cathedral (entirely rebuilt after the 1976 earthquakes) with Monte Glemine (or Glemina) looming above it.

Gemona

"Vita incognita" is Latin for "unknown life," combining vita (life) and incognita (unknown), similar to the famous "terra incognita" (unknown land) and meaning an unexplored aspect of existence, a mysterious journey, or a new chapter of life full of discovery and potential challenges. This is pretty much how my life in the year 2025 can be described.

Photo shows trees burned during a 2023 wildfire on the Monti Rossi, a large crater formed during an eruption in 1669 on the south flank of Mount Etna (seen in the distance), and new vegetation sprouting and blossoming in the foreground. The photo was taken on 17 April 2025.

Vita Incognita

A brand-new and relativel short song written and recorded in less than a week, just before the end of the year 2025, which is why I gave it that moderately inspired title. Things got tense while completing the tune, because Etna surprisingly became active and erupted spectacularly the day after the song was finished. Exactly in those same days I was the on-duty volcanologist at the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia in Catania, which means that I had to continuously follow the events and the data, and manage the communication of our Operations Room with Civil Defense, the authorities and air traffic control ... a pretty wild but also exhausting experience.

The title photo was taken just two weeks before Etna acted up and shows the volcano as seen from Taormina on 12 December 2025, emitting gas and ash clouds.

At The End Of A Year

Since my childhood, I always played my own melodies in my head, and some of them evolved into more or less complete tunes. They were pretty much all about girls and my feelings toward them, would-be love stories and failures. At fourteen, I started having some more consistent ideas, and my first "complete" song idea was called "You Will Never Die", another one "I Can't Tell You", and they were strongly influenced by The Beatles, my favorite band then (and still one of my favorites today). I had had my first encounters with progressive rock and liked it, but it did not yet reflect on my musical ideas.

During a family holiday in southwestern Germany in the (very rainy) summer of 1977, while walking around in the countryside near the town of Bad Dürkheim, I dreamed of having a nice girl walking with me, and a new musical idea came into my head, which I then evolved into a tune called "Take A Walk With Me". More than 48 years later, I decided to bring this very old song idea to life, and here it is. Much of it is the original melody, with a couple of sections added in late-December 2025. The vocal melody is represented by piano and acoustic guitar. I guess I should write some lyrics, but the original lyrics are too embarassing to be used here, they are of a 15-years old, testosterone-afflicted, love-hungry boy frantically wishing to find his first girlfriend.

It would take more than a year until I finally had my first real, though rather short-lived, romantic relationship, which resulted in three songs that you can listen to here in my Soundcloud collection:

Far Away From Here https://soundcloud.com/boris-behncke/far-away-from-here
Your Body https://soundcloud.com/boris-behncke/your-body-1
Empty House https://soundcloud.com/boris-behncke/empty-house

The photo is of myself in April 1977, a few months before I wrote this song, playing on an organ at a friend's house.

Take A Walk With Me

This melody came into my mind during my first voyage on an Italian hydrofoil, going from the volcanic island of Stromboli to the nearby island of Lipari (also volcanic but less active) in September 1989. "Aliscafo x Lipari" actually means "Hydrofoil to Lipari". Since then, each time I travel on hydrofoil to revisit the charming Aeolian Islands, this music is with me.

This is the completely re-recorded and re-edited version of the tune, which I uploaded on 20 November 2021, and some further editing - equilibrating the volume of the drums trace, improving the final drum cascade - was done on 14-15 November 2025.

Photo was taken during a trip by hydrofoil from Stromboli (seen in the distance at left) to Lipari, in late March 1990, during my second visit to the Italian volcanic areas.

Hazards

Aliscafo x Lipari

Here's a tune with a story that brings us back to my early days of studying geology - with the aim of later specializing in volcanology, the science of volcanoes. Geologists study rocks, and for this they often have to break them with a geologist's hammer, to get to the better preserved, non-weathered portions of a rock. In 1987, I had this melody in my head, with the rhythm dominated by the sound of the geologist's hammer on hard (volcanic) rock. I had bought the hammer just a few months earlier. 

So that's the story behind this tune, at least the main part of it, where you can hear the sound of my very personal geologist's hammer (seen in the photo at left while hammering some old lava from Mount Etna, which is steaming in the background) on a piece of Etnean lava that is part of the collection of volcanic rocks on our balcony. And yes, that is still the same hammer that I acquired back in 1987!

All of this tune - except for the calm bit between 05:55 and 07:55, which is brand-new - was written between 1987 and 1989.

Originally constructed in 2020 with the Hydrogen software, I completely re-recorded and re-edited the tune with Studio One in early 2022, and now it sounds quite like I imagined it decades ago. In the 2020 version the fadeout slowly passed into another song, "Pompeii", which I have yet to re-edit with Studio One.

Hammer On Rock

For years I have been waiting for that magical idea for a tune describing the many years of discovering my home volcano, Mount Etna. This is as close as I have come thus far: an instrumental voyage lasting more than 8 minutes, and going across a vast variety of musical styles, sounds, moods, and tempos. In February 2024 I re-edited the tune, which now has a much clearer and dynamic sound, and the guitar in the second part is a completely different story ...

The photo shows one of the most significant moments in this voyage of discovery: the first hike with my then fiancée Catherine, now my wife since almost 10 years, in the most beautiful area of Etna, the western flank, in mid-October 2002. I had been hiking many areas of the volcano over the previous years, sometimes with friends, more often alone, hoping one day to share these experiences with a woman I loved. Catherine was the one person to come into this private dimension of exploring Etna, and she still is there with me. We are both delighted to see that our daughter Ida is following us into these secret worlds almost unknown to the masses of tourists commonly visiting Etna.

If someone knows Steve Hackett's hauntingly beautiful tune "Spectral Mornings", they will note that it did inspire to some degree the slow last part of this tune.

Boris Behncke

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