I was born in 1992. After only a few years from there, I had a complete drum set made from anything I could get from the kitchen that looked like drums or cymbals. I also tried the piano at our house. My mother is a studied professional musician, so I was surrounded by and profoundly supported in anything related to music straight from the cradle.

My first drum lessons I took at the age of 6 and from there up until my 20s. It’s my main instrument and the one I definitely excel at the most. As a teenager, I started to learn how to play guitar but never took any lessons. My parents bought me an electric guitar after I proved my will to learn this instrument by learning the most important chords on my mother’s acoustic guitar.

Soon, I formed my first band with a friend of mine. We were into punk rock those days, it was the mid 2000s. Even there, we wanted to write our own songs – an intention and a measure I never changed. It’s needless to say, though, that these first songs were nothing more but first songs. It was the beginning of a learning curve.

Throughout my teenage years, I played in several bands both as a guitar player and a drummer. For guitar, it was always punk rock related. With drums, we did hard rock and metal. I was even better at drums than at guitar by that time, so I could play more complicated music only on drums. And I challanged myself, so through Iron Maiden and Lamb of God (I loved Chris Adler for his creative style!), I finally found an idol in Mike Portnoy from Dream Theater by around 2007. If you listen to my drum parts, even these days, you can hear his big influence on me. He’s still my hero.

And this is how progressive music and my own musical activities first crossed paths. My father used to listen to the old prog bands, like Genesis, Pink Floyd and many more. And now I found Portnoy, who wouldn’t only be a drummer but much more an ambassador of the genre. I loved (still do!), how much he is a fan of prog and talks about his influences a lot. So inspiring! My father’s record collection was found in his influences as well. A lot seemed to have come together for me by the late 2000s.

The last ingredient to the foundation of Arctic Plant is how at that very time, I started homerecording. With most of my bands, I tried to record our music and, if ever possible, produce our own albums. So I learned how to do that and formed a strong focus on albums instead of single songs or other lose material.

Musical abilities, learning how to produce, creating my own songs with a vision to make albums and a love for prog – it took almost 18 years to develop what turned out to be the starting point of Arctic Plant!

tbc