DR·GAAR

I wrote my first pieces at fourteen, on an old western guitar, and played one of them at a school concert in 1976. A few years later the radio put on Crystal Lake by Klaus Schulze, and that settled it. From that evening on I wanted synthesizers.

It took a long time before I owned one. The first was a Yamaha DX11, the smaller sibling of the DX7, and I disappeared into FM synthesis for years. Even then I refused to use presets — every sound was built from scratch, which is a habit I never lost. Everything went onto an eight-track recorder.

When the first software synthesizers arrived, editing suddenly became incomparably easier, and the hardware went to one side. Native Instruments FM7 first, then Absynth, later Omnisphere. These days most of the work happens on a Waldorf Iridium.

In 2007 I met Mathias Erhard through the Reaktor forum I was running at the time. We got together, started making music, and it turned into Zero Degree. He had an outstanding feel for rhythm; underneath my surfaces it produced something neither of us would have arrived at alone. Three albums and several years of playing live later, we ended the project in 2013, as friends.

What I am after is a long, wide surface with a fragile sequence laid over it. The best place to make that is outdoors, under an open sky, where I can see the stars. The night sky is my single biggest source of ideas, and it is exactly the thing I am trying to build: surface and sequence.