Arctic Plant is my biggest hobby. Over the years it has become very time consuming with every step further I took it. In my everyday life, I’m an engineer, so my days are busy already. So even though after ‘The Black Riders’, there was extra motivation and there were ideas to build Arctic Plant even further, it was clear that I was going to face a problem considering the amount of time I can spend on AP.

With the global pandemic, we were sent to home office – which wasn’t possible before in my company. Plus: we had to do short time work, which means that we had a day or sometimes two days off every week, because of the economic weakness at the time without it being an official holiday. The home office spared me the time spent on commutes but those extra days off really bought me a lot of time. I was living in my own single apartment by that time and we weren’t allowed to leave our homes. Luckily, I wasn’t mentally affected by these circumstances – I rather enjoyed being able to spend time alone solely for the purpose of writing new music and working on ideas. For me personally, it was perfect.

I wrote all the music for my third album ‘A Wandering Mind’ in one go during spring and early summer of 2020, just when the lockdown had started and all the world was both in shock about what happened and fearful about the future. But I also expanded my thoughts from only pushing AP through new and refined musical ideas to raising attention with marketing initiatives. I ordered a book about online marketing with Instagram and I started my own channel. I quickly understood hat I was not going to be as active and subversive as you should be if you want to make it on IG. I’d rather go for a thoughtful deep dive about things than for the superficiality IG represented by the time (‘back then’ we didn’t know about things like TikTok yet). The fact that I’m enjoying to write a blog about Arctic Plant supports this brilliantly while the most important thing to me will always remain to gain attention for my music rather than for myself, which makes IG a tool but not a self-purpose for me.

It’s wonderful, though, how much you can dive down the prog rabbit hole in social media. All the bands are there, reviewers and promoters are there and most importantly: the fans are there as well! So I found one or two channels who would talk about my music and present it to their audiences which boosted the attention I got on the streaming platforms. I started to get an idea about how I could make this wheel spin even more. Of course there’s also a learning curve with online marketing and five years later, I’m still an amateur but I understood a few things that work for me and that I feel comfortable with.

Now I needed to record and produce the new album that should fit the picture of the bigger and better Arctic Plant I had envisioned…

tbc