It was in my summer holiday of 2009 – I was still in school – when I found myself composing my first prog song. Dream Theater had just released their album ‘Black Clouds and Silver Linings’ which I absorbed those days. It had the last part of Mike Portnoy’s twelve-step suite on it that impressed me because of the bigger meaning behind a single song that refers to several songs of the past with recurring themes and lyrics. So I wanted to do something like this as well – much more than simple punk rock songs I used to write until then.

My first prog song ended up at 12 minutes length, which made me very proud because double digit song durations are very typical in prog music – a beloved cliché. From an neutral perspective, it wasn’t half as big as it felt but it was my first step. Due to the artistic aspiration, I liked to refer to this new type of music I was making as ‘the good stuff’ and filed it to a project folder called ‘Treasury of Merits’ – there was more to come! Between 2009 and 2011, I wrote a few more songs but never recorded anything. I couldn’t really play what my mind had created – except for the drum parts.

In late 2011, I started university. During my first term, I bought a lot of CDs and discovered so much new music – most of it was prog rock and especially the older bands that established the genre were in my focus now. One of the most important discoveries of mine back then was Tangerine Dream’s album ‘Ricochet’. I bought it from a record store, only because I had heard of this legendary band and how it was related to Krautrock (I’m from Germany, btw.). But I stopped playing it after a few minutes when I first spun the CD. Why? I strongly disliked purely electronic music by that time because it reminded me too much of pop music, which to me was the incarnation of musical evil as I considered it to be shallow-brained, uncreative un-music for the stupid masses. Little did I know…

Diving deeper into prog, I soon understood that electronic sounds were fundamental to big parts of the genre. I learned how synthesizers worked and gained an understanding of the craftsmanship behind especially the pioneer works with the old analog synths. After all, I fell in love with synth sounds and I changed my mind about Tangerine Dream as well. Nowadays, Ricochet is one of my favorite albums of all time. I even started to use synthesizers in my own songs – yet another big ingredient to the birth of Arctic Plant.

tbc