It was during school that I encountered computers for the first time - remember that those were the pre-PC-days... So I learned Basic (and later Pascal) on an Apple IIe. I got bored with programming very soon, but from that moment on I *was* hooked on computers anyway... After all this was something really new in those days... If you’re from a ‘younger’ generation you probably won’t realise that, up to the middle of the 80’s noone even *knew* about computers except from sci-fi movies! ;-) Ok, except some government experts perhaps - you know, what I mean!
Of course I had to have one on my own and of course it became a Commodore C64... And of course I very soon got to know the works of such famous game-soundtrack-composers like Rob Hubbard, Ben Daglish, David Whittacker, Chris Huelsbeck or Martin Gallway.
At the same time I became more and more aware of the music of a certain Group from Düsseldorf - Kraftwerk - and the new sounds they had created.
I assume that those really were my earliest influences, because their work inspired me to try it on my own as well. First I programmed some tracks in C64-Basic (quite an inefficient way to do such a thing, believe me!) and then came the real Genesis: Some German magazine printed the programm-code for Chris Huelsbeck’s SOUND MONITOR, one of the earliest tracker-like programmes freely available...
With this nice piece of software I did my first real steps - not fantastic or ingenious, granted, but my first own compositions... Sadly most of the music from these days is lost, the tapes destroyed and the disks long reformatted.
I then moved on to the Commodore Amiga - unbelievable! This machine worked with samples and actually was able to produce four channels in stereo - a novelty, for sure! It was also then, when I had my first contact to midi and *real* synthesisers, in this case a Roland MT-32. From that point on, things grew bigger and bigger - I soon moved to real sequencer-software, got another synth and another one, got a mixer and when it became too small I got a bigger one, then an Atari ST and Cubase and so on...
Today I’m the proud owner of my own small homestudio and I can look back to some nice productions.
At the beginning of my “career†as an artist, I produced a lot of tracks for tape compilations. In the late 80s/early 90s, before anyone was seriously talking about the Internet as a mean of distribution for music (to be more precise - noone talked about the internet at all...), there was a nice, world-wide net of 'tape artists' which I happily joined. It was ... well, somehow it was “underground†since there you had the chance to meet artists without any major or even a minor contract, it was there where you sent a tape to some guy, preparing a tape-compilation in France to later get Fan mail from Brazil from some other guy who now owned a really noisy copy of a copy of a copy... ;) And it wasn’t about money. Maybe that’s been one of the most important things - you just wanted to have fun, distributing your music through those channels. Of course everyone was dreaming about being discovered, some even did. Some of the bands that I know from the tape days are Sabotage (qu est ce que c’est), Endraum (then “Schaum der Tageâ€) or Dauerfisch.
After the release of “Brot für die Jugend†(Kobayashi Maru), I left the tape-scene. Not because I disliked it, but simply, because always was a bit lazy and it was too much trouble to copy tapes and send them around the globe...
It was in early ‘93, that I started to work with Stephan Riess, at first I simply let him use my equipment to produce his own music, but we very soon started to work together. First we called our new project “Wolf 359â€, but later we changed it to W359 , perhaps because the too obvious Star Trek reference didn’t really work out as a concept...
It was 1998 when I first heard about mp3.com and the possibility to publish my own music via the Internet. This was really cool - actually I felt the spirit of the old tape-days at once. For me, the concept to put my own music into the Internet, available for free downloads, is the logical continuation - money ain’t the most important thing, it’s the distribution of my work, the fact that I don’t just make the stuff for myself and a small group of friends but for *everyone* around the *world* who happens to like it. And this time I didn't even have to copy tapes... ;)
Even though a lot of the changes they had were rather bad choices imho I stood with mp3.com until the "end" when they closed down after a sale. Until then I found a lot of great new music and some good online-friends who as well are really creative artists there. After mp3.com I first thought of joining one of the other available online-music platforms, but then decided against it, since I found this webspace that isn't really more expensive than joining one of the services. And the *big* advantage: On my own page, I can decide how *everything* looks and don't have to live with advertising I don't like (on mp3.com they once were running popups for the US army... No comment there).
