Minimal Nightmare

I just released my album Minimal Nightmare - 9 tracks of dark ambient music and soundscpes inspired by dreams and recent experiences.
Merry Christmas!

New track: Minimal Nightmare

I am more and more attracted by minimalism and reductiveness - this track was created out of the blue today, the voices you here are white russian border guards who extracted us from a train on the border to the Ukraine because we didn't have transit visas...that was back in April during our film odyssey through Russia and other countries.

Album release: Non-Stop Ambient Flight Vol. 1

I just release a compilation of ambient electronic soundscapes and music, here is what I wrote in the release notes:

This album will take you on a fantastic journey into ambient electronic music and soundscapes. Originally produced as demos for Simons sounddesigning platform patchpool.de, carefully remastered and mixed, this first compilation of soundscapes is one of a kind triggering a wide range of emotions and states of mind. Just sit back in a comfortable chair, turn your stereo system up to a comfortable level or choose some high quality headphones and fly away. The album has no pauses, all tracks blend into each other in order not to disrupt the flow of your imagination.

And here is the widget:

what a ride....

So after travelling through Russia and Kasachstan with the Marinsky Orchestra by train and plane for over 2 weeks, visiting 13 cities we were taken from the train today at 6 am in the morning by white russian border guards on our way to Vilnius/Lithuania because we had no transit visa for White Russia.
So we missed the concert at Vilnius and experienced a little odyssey getting back to Moscow via Kiew.
Standing on the railway track with all our equipment in the middle of nowhere we felt kind of lost, we then took a train back to a small city on the Ukrainian border and then made it to Kiev in another 3-hour train ride where we eventually found a taxi to the airport. Cramped into tiny seats we finally reached Moscow at night.

What a strange and bewildering country this is, the old authoritative system on the one side represented by guards and police officers, the helpful and open hearted russian people on the other side.

Trip to Russia

For a documentary film directed by Alberto Venzago about the Mariinsky Theatre-orchestra and it's conductor Valery Gergiev I will create the Filmscore, the Sound Design and do the premix.
Alberto Venzago (director/camera), Markus Zucker (camera) and myself (sound) just travelled through 3 russian cities to collect images and sounds for the film. We visited Kaliningrad, Cheylabinsk and Ekaterinburg and - among other things - gained access to some incredibly huge factories producing metal products, cars, cement and other industrial goods.
We also collected fascinating impressions during the end of winter celebration in Cheylabinsk, a joyful gathering of thousands of people celebrating the beginning of spring.
The images and sounds we found during this first trip through Russia were simply overwhelming. Our next trip in April/May this year will lead us through many more russian cities during a tour of the Mariinsky Theatre.
Stay tuned...

Hot Summer

So this summer I will be focussing on developing new sounds and patches for Kontakt, Absynth and Alchemy. So many ideas and quite a few sample sets are already in the making. I found this big drop-off box for old clothes the other day in a street around the corner of my studio. It makes a huge percussive metal sound when moving the insertion-slot so I will multisample this on a quiet sunday and make a special percussion instrument out of it.

Steel String Monster

I dreamed about this giant String Instrument last night, it was as high as a pylon each string about a 100 meters long. So this morning I started to virtually build such an instrument, programming a plucked string sound with a VI called String Studio (by AAS) running it through various saturation devices, filters and tubes and then sampling those tones, 4 velocity layers per note, 4 notes an octaves, 4 octaves altogether. To achieve the plucking attack sound I heard in that dream I'm still experimenting, I guess I'll use a multisampled percussive synthetic attack run through a Combfilter with high resonance to achieve that sound.
This will be a truely giant Instrument for Kontakt 4.

Sounds for Kontakt on patchpool.de

Today I began uploading sounds for Kontakt to my website patchpool.de
Much more to come soon.

special offer: Soundpack Droneland and Bonus sounds

Until June 1st 2010 I'm offering some of my Sounddesign files on Audiosparx and KVR at a special price. So if you're interested check out this thread on KVR which has all the info.

Music for Haiti

Check out this CD which was released today. A charity project to help the victims of the Earthquake. I also donated a song of mine to be found on this CD: Timeless

get it here:
Music for Haiti