I was born into a very unmusical family (sry mum & dad). Nobody played an instrument nor could read notes. Only my mum had lived this hippie lifestyle for a few years and by that listened to Jimi Hendrix, David Bowie and Janis Joplin a lot. Funnily enough, my first favorite musicians were Eminem and Bon Jovi – kind of a wild mix, haha.

I still can remember my first experience on stage, it was a mini playback show on vacation in Spain, I was 6 years old and played the paper guitar like a real rockstar. I was obsessed with the stage afterwards and moderated the next show in my hometown school at 4th grade playing the role of Jon Bon Jovi. Actually I wanted to play a very nasty song of the german rapper Sido together with a friend who introduced me into this german Hip Hop shit, but our teacher somehow didn’t like the lyrics and so we had to switch our plans.

In 5th grade I started learning an instrument – the trombone – which later brought me into contact with Funk, Jazz and Blues after I denied the old fashioned classical music stuff which was taught by our school. From 8th grade on I played in our school’s Big Band and in 11th grade I finally got convinced to also play in the orchestra. By the way – we won the prize of Hesse’s best school orchestra by playing Dvorak and Liszt! My teacher for trombone was Andreas Jamin – the best and most experimental player I know – and he taught me everything all along the Real Book. He sharpened my feeling of music until today and I am very thankful for having had him as my teacher.

Besides the school – where I made my Abitur in 2013 with Music as my intensive course – I started producing Hip-Hop by the age of 14. Actually „producing Hip-Hop“ is a very adequate expression because I really started to „produce“ an alter ego of mine to explore the facets of my being. Not only because of an often missing father figure I chose Hip-Hop (as an archetypical masculine form of music) to be my cultural expression for a long time. I also started rapping and got to know to gangstas, self-delusionists and druggies – and decided this to be my lifestyle, too. But somehow I felt like I didn’t really fit into this world – nor into the „real world“ – and fear became a bigger and bigger player in my life. Actually my impression is that fear is a big player in Hip-Hop in general. Regarding Hip-Hop being the only genre in todays top 10 charts it’s quite a statement about our society. Anyway – through Hip-Hop I really got into this whole producing shit, from sampling to composing to recording to mixing to mastering to defining my style as an artist.

During the last year of school I decided to explore the sphere of Techno. After having danced as a gold-grade standard dancer I thought it would be nice to experience a more free way of dancing. I still can remember how a good old friend and me went to our first raves being high of cannabis and couldn’t understand how people could dance to these fast rhythms! We had the feeling of always dropping behind the beat. I talked to a rapping friend of mine and he asked me if I ever tried this drug called ecstasy or MDMA. We decided to take it on our next rave and what can I say – suddenly I really FELT the music, the atmosphere, the people around me! The DJane looked like a goddess and I danced the whole night without a pause. This experience made me curious about the whole techno music scene and my productions became more electronic. In that time I also met my life companion Sophie Sunshine aka Salty Tears aka Sistar ZuZu – at a rave, very romantic! – and until now we share our private, artistic and body oriented life together ❤

By the age of 20 we moved to techno capital Berlin (Neukölln) and got to know to the special club scene and the Berlin way of living. Sisyphos became our favorite club, but we also loved the atmosphere of Berghain, Kater Blau, Magdalena, Grießmühle and Kit Kat. Experimenting with psychedelics widened my view on the different spaces of music (one trippy night in Sisyphos I BECAME the music and had the feeling to be able to change it however I wanted it – in other words  instead of driving on the rollercoaster I became the rollercoaster – amazing and at the same time frightening experience – I wouldn’t miss it).

Regarding all the drugs I mentioned until now I want to add more information and do a shoutout to all of those who also are attracted to them: For some years I really became an addict – especially on cannabis, but also on many others – and besides all the fascinating aspects of the substances it’s always a good medium to escape the world you live in. Let me tell you that problems don’t get smaller when you try to escape them. Nor does your inner pain get healed. They will grow the more you ignore them and at some point you maybe can not come back to normal again. I had the opportunity to experience that by myself and needed more than a year to get back into life. How J.Cole let this beautiful female speaker tell on his album KOD: Life is full of pain. There are many ways to deal with this pain. Choose wisely!

How I see it is that escapism often leads to a form of consumerism which is a very common structure in our today’s world. And seeing that this consumerism goes along with the highly destructive hyper capitalism we live in today causing global warming, rivalistic competition and exploitation of humans and all other life forms escape for me becomes an impossible option. Action is desperately needed. One vital aspect of action for me is healing.
And the healing for me more and more got the movement itself. That’s why I started producing dance music and studied musicology and informatics at Humboldt-Universität in Berlin from 2014 til 2016. By that I learned how to program my own synthesizers, about transcultural concepts of music and the origin and importance of the bass element in music which always had a kind of rebellious character.

During my time in Berlin I started playing Djembe and evoked my fascination for all kinds of percussion. Until today I am learning and playing Djembe, Frame Drum, Tabla, Udu and Darbuka taught by percussionist Abdullah Kirli with whom I am conducting a project right now combining electronic downtempo music with Turkish folklore and mystic music. Further percussions I am playing and learning are Handpan, Tongue Drum, Sansula and all kinds of rattles. I love to combine all of those natural sounding rhythmic elements with deep and smooth electronic baselines and synthetic kick drums. For me this combination represents the harmonic combination of technics and nature – how they can boost each other instead of destroying each other and respect each other’s tradition in realizing that in modern times they depend on each other. Progression in honor of the past instead of regression in fear of the future.
All of those above mentioned instruments play major roles in music therapy and sound journeys. I had the possibility to experience that in my internship in music therapy in Berlin in spring 2019 under Andreas Fieguth – an inspiring therapist who taught me a lot about how to apply different forms of music to patients and to oneself. I think it is the natural intuition of those instruments that contain the strong impact they have on people.

My inner healing process reached a climax when I had my first breakout of a chronic gut disease in summer of 2016. At this point I lost lots of my weight and inner purification on a physical and psychic level was the result. I decided to move away from the concrete jungle of Berlin to the greener space of Marburg. I stopped taking drugs and was able to see my position in society more clearly. I started to act instead of escape. 

In 2017 I started studying Arts, Music & Media at Philipps-Universität in Marburg and reached my bachelor’s degree in spring 2021 with a thesis about the fusion of art music and popular music by taking the example of Kurt Weill’s music in the 1920s. During the time of studying I released four albums of experimental Hip-Hop / Rave Rap / Tribal music. „Wir Kinder vom Gleis 9 3/4“ in collaboration with beat maker Halfbakedone and the video of „Phoenix“ in 2017, „Neo-Indianer“ with the videos of the eponymous track and „Freak-Out“ in 2018, „Bass 4 Ya Soul“ with the video of „Don’t f*** wit’ ma Energy (feat. Sistar ZuZu)“ in the first half and „Tales From the Bassground“ in the second half of 2019. There were many shows I played with these text-heavy tunes – mainly at illegal raves and festivals like the New Healing Festival 2018 and 2019. After the last of those four albums I decided to get more into producing my own style of electroacoustic music combing the tempo and deepness of Hip-Hop with the drive of Techno, the natural sounding instruments of a sound journey and the bitter sweet melodies of my trombone. Live all this results in a dance journey with the wave form of an ecstatic dance, live spoken vocals, live played percussions (mainly on the Korg wave drum), live played trombone and different synthesizers with the message to let go the stress, to empower yourself to your fullest potential, to really move and by that move the people around you.
The two instrumental albums „Sonnentanz“ and „Mondtanz“ both released in early 2020 led to broader attention in the Downtempo music scene and granted me fantastic releases on labels like Monada from Berlin, Slow Bar. from Heidelberg/Mannheim, Talpa Rec. from Frankfurt/Leipzig, Kosa Records from India (#1 Beatport chart placement) and the beloved Random Collective from France/Canada/Costa Rica/NYC where my first label provided solo-album will be released in summer 2021. Live gigs on renowned events like Kabinett der Kuriositäten in Frankfurt joined this development.

Another development started with my participation in the Marburg based Exorbeatal collective: Organizing events. Actually it already started at school – I’ve been one of those responsible for organizing the so called „Abi-Parties“ to finance our graduation party. Anyway my tasks in the Exorbeatal collective were kind of different: I was the person responsible for creating a nice relaxing and healing area for those people who didn’t want to shake their asses off to the fast High-Tech-rhythms. This area soon evolved into a workshop space with yoga, lectures about projects for climate activists, cacao ceremonies and more. During indoor parties this space became a dance floor for the most expressionistic dancers, haha. 

When Sophie also moved from Berlin to Marburg we together with our good friend Phil – also known as the dirty Downtempo DJ Woanders – launched our own collective in 2020: the Leaves & Feathers-Collective. Our intention was to create event spaces without consumerism but with a lot of love. The results were Ecstatic-Dances, Morning Dances, Yoga-lessons from Sophie, community-building events with focus on authentic meeting, Element-Dances and drug-free (but still illegal) outdoor raves. All that (with few exceptions) soon had to pause with the outbreak of Covid-19, but we still organized online events and experimented within our growing collective community, so there will be even more output in summer 2021 and further.

So here I am now, fully equipped for further progress and besides the album on Random Collective preparing and conducting further projects like composing music for the fire performer duo Gretor, researching for a new dance format called Improvisational Dancing Theatre, producing a new solo-EP for climate change activism with artwork by the graphic artist El Tripador and planning my 2021 festival live performance.

So yeah, basically that’s me, c y’all on the dancefloor ❤

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