When I started to write my first prog songs around 2010, I filed them under ‘Treasury of Merits’. To me, unlike the rather simple music I wrote before, these new prog songs had to have a special project name to them that underlined my musical aspiration. But this first project name didn’t really feel like ‘the real thing’ – a little too naive.

In late 2012, I was reading Frank Zappas biography which was very inspiring to me. His philosophy and how his career was entirely self-made with a strong will to follow his artistic vision had a strong resonance with my own new ideas. I was impressed how he was a musically versatile, lyrically trenchant artist with a mind blowing oeuvre and a very critic, almost cynic underlining in his lyrics – one of the greatest for sure, going far beyond the ‘boundaries’ of progressive rock. Another idol! Somewhere in that book, I found out that he had derived his logo from the shape of his beard. So I decided to create a logo derived from my own beard for fun, yet not exactly because I didn’t want to straight-copy him (how could I!). What I ended up with looked rather like a plant that started to grow from a seed and for some reason, I gave it a light blue color.

But this is where the interesting part of the story ends. I didn’t derive the name from a cold colored, plant-like logo but some time after this experiment, ‘Arctic Plant’ popped up in my mind as an idea for a name. I liked it from the start, it sounded good to me – still does. So I kept it and that’s the end of the story. Everything else is a myth 🙂