Moving quietly through the sky, varying all the time, forming, shrinking. Come from and go to invisibility.

This is the piano solo version of a song I've released one and a half years ago, it's further down on my page. 

Thanks to Dallas Reedy for the original photo on unsplash.com:
https://unsplash.com/photos/HbZ2vXaHtas

Cumulus Clouds – Piano Solo

Kumuluswolken (Cumulus Clouds) – Piano Solo

Descending into the unknown, thousands of years old. What will you find? How will it feel?
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I've realised the descent by the continuous downwards motion of the bass in the first part. The delay on the kick drum mirros the echos in a cave, first being on it's own, later being joind by more echos to form a pulsating groove.

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Thanks to Erica Li for the original picture on unsplash.com!
https://unsplash.com/photos/co6ACvcrGCU

Höhle (Cave)

How does a whale sleep? It can't hide somewhere underwater because it obviously has to breath every now and then. While the different sleeping methods dolphins, humpback whales or sperm whales have developed are interesting in itself, I wondered if something goes through their minds while they are sleeping. Do they dream? Do they relive their experiences of their journeys through the oceans? 

The song has an A-B-A form: falling asleep, a deep state of sleeping with episodic dreams, lighter sleep and waking up. The solo violin marks the transition into deep sleep and out of it, the first three tones of the 'out' are the last three tones of the 'in', but reversed. During the episodic dreams one synth imitates the click sounds of sperm whales. The polyphonic string quartet part in the end expresses the waking up - and also just how nice it is to (still) have creatures like whales in this world. 

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Thanks a lot to Marcus Dall Col for the original photo on unsplash.com: 
https://unsplash.com/photos/HYJVNzJp_qk
On the picture is the tail of a humpback whale. They sleep upside down. Sperm whales sleep the other way round. If you haven't seen that, check it out on Youtube, it looks incredible:

Sleeping sperm whales:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nVmojBaRLk

Sleeping humpback whale:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOamfKwr6aU

Sleeping Whale

Schlafender Wal (Sleeping Whale)

Windblown

Windgetragen (Windblown)

Lebenszyklus

Lebenszyklus (Life Cycle)

Warmer Regen

Warmer Regen (Warm Rain)

Bergwetter

Bergwetter (Mountain Weather)

Leafcutter ants, endlessly working, carrying the leaves to their nest, building, cleaning, growing their food and nursing their children. Always busy. A different species, yet so similar.

Ameisenstraße (Ant Trail)

Sensibilität

Sensibilität (Sensibility)

Ich beginne zu akzeptieren

Ich beginne zu akzeptieren (I'm beginning to accept)

Opening the door on the first day of spring and perceiving the synesthetic experience of flower scent, birds singing and the sun shining onto your skin.

Spring

♥ on 𝗦𝗽𝗼𝘁𝗶𝗳𝘆

You can dive into anything. When you do, new things will surround you instantly, but you will not change so quickly. 
The song floats chromatically around its center, which is the beginning and end in C major. Though there seems to be a big difference between the parts, the melodic notes and harmonies fluently move from one to another without a cut, what balances out the contrasting instrumentations.

Dive

Slipping through your fingers like a soap. 
To create this feeling, the synths constantly move in the stereo field regularly. But because the bars differ in length (5 beats, 4 beats, 3 beats), the sounds appear always in a new position in an otherwise repeating part. The wahwah-like sounds add to the impression of a soap slipping through your fingers. The changing bar lengths challenge the sense of meter again and again, it can’t be grasped so easily.

Donna Elec

Freeing the senses of trying to make sense of what we perceive, that is aesthetic contemplation. It leads to a feeling of presence, during which the future and the past don’t matter. 
I think a lot of composers/producers try to achieve this with their music nowadays, be it through simplicity and/or cosiness (chill/lofi pieces) or overload (like some elektro or techno). The latter often seems to me like a wild and unstructured musical stream of consciousness, perceived in a similar way as a waterfall or a fire. I've choosen this path here, stringing together parts that strongly differ in expression, vividness and sound. I wanted to check out how far I can go in terms of contrast. Though beneath the surface, the harmonies flow without a cut, going through some smooth modulations here and there. And of course, the string quartet makes its appearance again. I have a fondness for it. 
About the intro: Everyone knows the stereotypical build-up when the rhythm of the snare gets faster and faster. I wanted to do something different here, so I did the opposite, starting with 128th and getting slower. It works, too.

Contemplation

The song depicts the last 3 milliseconds before I die. Time goes extremely slow in my mind then. Pleasant memories mix with the last rebellion of some parts of me that don't want to go. Yet above all shimmers a serene feeling. In the last third, I enter a new state. Acceptance prevails. Then my body dies. My mind leaves my body and hangs in an empty, dark space. An awfully strong, relentless force takes hold of the weightless vapour that is my mind and tears it apart. I'm silently screaming while my mind dissolves into an infinite number of little pieces that drift in all directions and dimensions towards an endless journey. I'll always be there, in pieces, in peace.

Trees, water, mountains, air, snow sunshine, gras, plants, the sky, lakes, the ocean, animals ... our world is beautiful. Why would you like to leave it? What could you possibly exchange it for?

Back to life

Back to Life

Find it within you

Find It Within You

Midnight Memories

This song is about human sympathy. 
A thought experiment: You go to a restaurant with your family. Everybody is very hungry and orders food, but for some reason, only you get your food. Can you enjoy eating it while your loved ones are staying hungry? Your happiness is in this moment linked to theirs. When they are feeling bad because they are hungry, you cannot enjoy your meal properly. So you share what you have, because you feel sympathy. 
Where does this sympathy for others end? Where should it not end? Is the mere anonymity of the countless people who are starving, homeless, sick or working under terrible conditions a valid reason to not feel sympathy? 
In a globalized world, the unhappiness of some will lead to the unhappiness of those who exploit them and try to ignore it or not to think about it. By caring, everyone will benefit. 
In my song, I illustrate this mechanism of “your happiness is my happiness” in a very simple way. The piano melody is repeated unaltered four times. In the last repeat, the surrounding harmonies change. The feeling of the piano melody changes accordingly. For being part of an arrangement, a world full of other sounds, its feeling is determined by its surroundings. This is true for music as it is for life.

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Thanks to Jude Beck for the original photo on unsplash.com:
https://unsplash.com/photos/1UTjTz4w4xQ

Your Happiness Is My Happiness

I Woke Up

Moving quietly through the sky, varying all the time, forming, shrinking. Come from and go to invisibility.

Thanks to Dallas Reedy for the original photo on unsplash.com:
https://unsplash.com/photos/HbZ2vXaHtas

Cumulus Clouds

Kumuluswolken (Cumulus Clouds)

This song is quite simple yet extraordinary for me. It's simple because it’s based on only two chords and a looped drum and bass rhythm. The chords set the deeply positive and calming feeling I had when I played at that moment. 
What makes it an extraordinary song is the melody and the structure. All the melodic material stems from an improvisation around midnight a few weeks ago. This melody alone shapes the whole emotional dramaturgy of the song, supported only by a few other sound layers that reappear at specific times. A short motive extracted from the melody acts as a hook. All this gives the song its structure, whereas the timing was crucial for it to be convincing, i.e. the length and the succession of the parts and therefore also of surprising and familiar elements. It’s all intertwined. This succession is a rhythm itself, getting it right is most satisfying.

Positivity

Flow

The creative spirit is a passerby. Emotion is a passerby. I'm a passerby.

Passerby

Floral

Floral (Floral)

Taking a walk on mild summer evenings my eyes always get caught by the treetop silhouettes. I think it's the contrast to the slightly illuminated sky that's pleasing for the eye. Also, their gentle movements in the wind and the white noise are soothing. Because the treetops are completely dark, they have a mysterious aura. I wanted to capture this.
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Thanks to Glenn Carstens-Peters for the original photo on unsplash.com:
https://unsplash.com/photos/dMX-4Lv0k7I

Treetop Silhouettes

Baumkronensilhouetten (Treetop Silhouettes)

Cranes look sublime and graceful to me, like for people in many cultures. Often – like in my home country, Germany – they are seen as heralds of good luck, because their return early in the year marks the beginning of spring. During their journeys they fly in great heights. They are also know for their joyful dancing. And since Sadako Sasaki they are not least a symbol for peace in the form of fragile origami cranes. All of this I tried to capture – the sublime appearance, the solitude while flying high in the air, the elegant dancing – and embed it into a peaceful atmosphere. 

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This track is more a composition than a song. It may seem a bit complex at first, but it's in fact quite simple if the form is understood, so I want to tell you a little bit about it here. But probably listen first and then read on if you want. 
So it begins with the strings playing an intro, joined by the piano. After that you hear a piano melody in the left hand. This goes on for quite some time, joined by a melody in the right hand, that is of a pentatonic nature (although it actually has only four different tones). This pentatonic style gives it a somewhat asian touch, which I like very much. The bass part in the left hand consists only of offbeats, while the pentatonic melody is always on the beat, creating a moderate rhythmic drive. All this resolves in a varied reprise of the intro (where you hear the pizzicati), followed by a more calm reprise of the intro. The reprise of the intro serves as a transition to the string quartet part that follows. This string quartet part sounds completely new, but it in fact is build around the bass melody in the left hand of the piano from earlier in the track. This melody goes from the viola through the second violin (transposed a fifth up) into the first violin. In the first violin, the former bass melody is varied to become a whole-tone-melody, which leads to a completely pentatonic part. The composition technique changes here: during the first part of the string quartet it resembles polyphonic music (though, of course, being harmonic), then it becomes homophonic and is more focused on the sound that all strings form as a whole. This sound is then just moved up and down, no matter the key or tonal function. During this part, the piano melody from the right hand is heard, now appearing in a completely new light. It resolves into tonality again, and the string quartet becomes more polyphonic. Then, another reprise of the intro – again serving as a transition but also as a stabilising reappearing element – leads to a piano solo part, that is basically the piano version of the first polyphonic string quartet part. It ends with exactly the chords that appeared in the intro. 
So overall, the composition consists of three parts – one predominantly rhythmic part, string quartet, piano solo – that build upon and refer to each other, connected by a reocurring transition and framed by an intro/outro. 
I hope this makes sense to you. Because to me, it is very important that the form of a composition makes it feel like it is a complete whole. If this is not the case, the composition often runs into danger of feeling random, and so there can be no emotion that emerges from the reappearance of an earlier part. The form is contributing considerably to the feeling of tension and release, and therefore is also a great carrier of emotion. At least this is how I see it. Feel free to let me know in the comments or via a message how you see it, it's very interesting for me to talk about that.
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Thanks to Alfred Leung for the original photo on unsplash.com:
https://unsplash.com/photos/FmnZFoRdDYw

Cranes

Kraniche (Cranes)

I'm always fascinated by the glowing creatures in the deep sea when I see them in documentaries. I once was able to do a night dive and experienced some bioluminescence of small krill-like animals myself. This piece captures the atmosphere and the display of bioluminescence.
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Thanks to Michael Jasmund for the original photo on unsplash.com:
https://unsplash.com/photos/__Xl0GEeEXc

Bioluminescence

Biolumineszenz (Bioluminescence)

Electronic music with a classical touch. 

“Cospote” is an abbreviation for “cosmopolite”, a citizen of the world, representing the deep conviction that no national borders and no physical characteristics of any kind should divide people, and that we all as citizens have to care for the natural world we have been born into.

Cospote

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