I am in a quite luxurious situation, due to my occupation as musician and software developer I get lots of diverse impressions. I travel, I meet people, and most of the time that input is inspiring. A little detail can impress me as much as something obviously big. Muscially I do not feel that listening to other music gives me the most significant impulses anymore. I had enough input and now I would prefer creating more output by myself.

I could be a great commedian, but musically I simply prefer this darker side of the world. For me there is more emotion in darkness. Happy music can get pretty anoying after a while. And rays of light look so much more impressive with a dark background. My darkness is full of desires, full of hope and from time to time quite comfortable.

When I was younger I felt like I need to learn an instrument but since my parents did not support it I gave up and instead try to create music from a more soundscape-oriented perspective. Obviously my deep love to sound is a compensation for being incapable of creating profound music with classical composer or instrumentalists skills. In retrospective I would say it was good for my music that I had to define my own way. There is still so much to discover in the field of electronic music that I do not feel the need to do something else. Why should I try to use classical instruments as long as I am still on the surface of what can be done with my computer?

At some point I want to make a recording as a documentation. Also I had in mind doing Atlantic Waves concerts with other artists. For me the project is still quite interesting, I just need some time to write a better software version of it and to do more shows..

A collaboration only makes sense if there is a good musical reason. I recently made a remix for Depeche Mode and I came to the conclusion that vocals and lyrics are an interesting topic. If I ever want to do a record with a singer, then I will try to find a singer, since I cannot do this by msyself. The last monolake album was done with a friend of mine, and the biggest benefit of this was the fact that another pair of ears were judging what I did and helping to follow the right path. Sometimes when working alone one can get pretty lost and blind. Collaborations are good to readjust your own ideas.

There is Studies for Thunder Live, an eight channel piece, which somehow creates an artificial and pretty impressive thunderstorm in a composed way. This piece does not work on a CD, it needs the appropriate space and PA setup in order to work. It premiered at MUTEK 2005 and I would love to do this piece again somewhere. I would also like to create more "sculptural" soundscape music for art galeries, but I do not have the time currently. I have no cracy ideas anymore. I like details and this seems to me a contradiction to craziness since details need planning and a clear mind...

Usually the record shops and lazy journalists want some text from the label which tells them what the record is about. Usually these texts are super boring, telling you that this record is another essential milestone of electronic music. And lots of reviews in magazins are nothing else but reprints of these texts.

I just have fun writing these texts. I might write lyrics at some point and these lyrics will become part of the music then. But every attempt to write a "song" at some point ended up with deleting that folder finally.

Live is developped by a lot of people. In contrary to urban legends I am not even a founder, I am just massively involved in the design and development of the product. Each idea is discussed by a bigger group. When making music you try to find something special, when making software you want a function to be as general as possible. A good filter is a good filter, and it does not matter if you process a synthesizer with it or a trombone. It`s like a pen. You do not need to know what people write with it, you just need to understand how they write technically.

Sound quality is more important for the producer then for the customer. People want good songs, they do not care about good sound. I am fine with this. The whole discussion about copyright comes down to some very basic questions about human interaction in general. If you consume something you should give something back to the creator of it. It is not important that you pay for each track, but if you are often taking something from someone you should also give. People who make their profit by selling music they don`t pay for and do not own are acting completely immoral. In case of some russian servers it gets really ugly: they look like fully legal portals, people pay for a download and have no idea that they do only pay these criminals, but none of the artists.

Guys who make mixes for their friends area completly different thing. But in order to find a solution which works for a larger group of people without discussing each single transaction again and again you need to find a set of laws. That is what copyright is for: Trying to find a fair balance between those who create and those who consume.