I
Today I celebrate the birthday of Stellar Supreme, my first solo album released exactly 25 years ago on November 1, 1992.
When I close my eyes, I see a happily packed young man in Wonderland. The Wonderland was a small but bright one-room apartment with stove heating in Berlin-Kreuzberg, Wiener Straße / backyard; a bed, a bookshelf, a desk and my favorites, with whom I was closely connected in a living community:
a 101, a 303, a 606, a 909, a Juno 106, a JX1 and a JD 800 (all from Roland). Also an EMU – Emax, a Yamaha CS40M and an Akai S1000.
This is where the compositions for “Stellar Supreme” came into being, which in sum could express musically all the emotional facets of my existence at that time: what I was agreed with what I wanted to be; it was a WITHOUT-IF-AND-BUT-BEING-IN-LOVE in the time. An outstanding stroke of luck that can only be experienced in this completeness in the most rare moments of a lifetime.
II
No artist, no work comes out of nowhere. As surprising as an audience finds a work, as fast as the media with keywords such as “shooting star”, “brilliant album debut” or “benchmark” are at hand: there is always a (long) story behind it. In my case 29 years, of which at least about 25 have taken place in connection with making music. A so-called “master piece” is composed of many individual elements that then react in an ideal constellation and perform a complex chain reaction. Suddenly, a situation arises in which personal sensitivities and abilities, conceptual ideas, technical opportunities in production, emotional and social circumstances meet in an unexpectedly happy way. In the summer of 1992, everything was there that I needed.
I moved to Jens Woynars’s studio in Berlin Tempelhof and left it in the coming weeks usually only when I had concerts on the weekends. The performances, in turn, were incredibly important for the studio work on the pieces, as I could then directly incorporate what I had tried and experienced live into composition and mix and vice versa. On “Stellar” manifests the spectrum of my then musically expressive possibilities.
III
Never would “Stellar Supreme” have become like this without: KAA – because of her love and inspiration -, JENS WOYNAR – because of his fantastic studio work – and WOLFGANG RAGWITZ – because of his gifted skills as a sound engineer and mastering engineer.
IV
So today I pause and am grateful that I was allowed to experience this time and all my times the way I experienced them. 25 YEARS ARE NOT A DAY, so it seems to me. And at the same time many a day seems to endures longer than twenty-five years.
Who I am today, I was already then and at the same time I am today quite another. Some things you can do and experience just because you still know very little about life; other things, on the other hand, need the immense experiences, trials, confusions, (self-) disappointments and discoveries as preconditions to even perceive, think, and then do.
Cosmic played Juno & his 909, Harald plays on the grand piano … in both of them the motif: the joy of speaking in tones.