I was absolutely stoked when I finally got to release my first album at the end of 2017. I didn’t make it a big deal in terms of publicity, though. The only official thing I did was to put it up on bandcamp (a great platform for independent artists from all over the world – if you want to discover great music far off the tracks of the big labels, you should check it out!). Inofficially, I self-made a few CDs for my family and friends. A few people took a listen on bandcamp and people whom I gave a CD were impressed with what I had created. Nothing else happened on ‘the outside’.

Inside of me, it was only the start. I had already written a big part of what was to become my second album by that time, next to all the recording work on my first album. I preferred to have a chronological order in my works, though, so I didn’t mix any of the new material into the recording sessions of ‘The Lake of Time’. It was in spring of 2018 when I started to record guitars for my second album. I was literally in a big musical flow. Everything seemed to fall into place automatically.

Meanwhile, I was starting to gain a bigger interest in classical music, especially from the romantic era. I had lived in Bayreuth for seven years already, so Richard Wagner was a part of my daily life – yet, I had never really listened to any of his music before. When I did, I immediately fell in love with the melodies and the complexity in his overtures. The big ideas and concepts behind his operas were so impressing to me, I – once again – felt like ‘I want to do something like this!’. So I interrupted the recordings to learn how to basically arrange music for an orchestra, simply by trying to recreate classical pieces (Wagner, Tchaikovsky) and also some film music (Goodwin, Morricone) I liked with my DAW and the new orchestral VST library I had bought (‘The Orchestra’ by Sonuscore). From there, I started to carefully recreate the puzzle for the new album, which took the rest of the year. So I only continued the original recording process in early 2019.

In spring of that year, I moved from Bayreuth city to a bigger apartment in the north of Bayreuth. This increased my productivity a lot, as I had to compromise a lot in the single room apartment I lived in before. Now, finally, there was enough space to set up a proper mixing place, an own desk for my synths, a microphone, my guitars and so on. A new level of level of possibilities was unlocked…

tbc