In a recent interview, the former Accept singer Udo Dirkschneider claimed that younger metal bands need a concept to stand out. While I fully agree on that (the question is always there, how one can differentiate him/herself from others in a world where approximately 100.000 songs are uploaded on Spotify on a daily basis…), it was not the main reason, why I finally – after much hesitation – wrote this post.
It’s actually quite hard to answer such questions in a few concise sentences. Why do I still bother to formulate such a “mission statement” to my music? The reason is simple: I want you guys to fully understand, what are my main motivations when composing and playing songs (apart from the pure love for music, of course). While I already wrote quite a lot about my personal motivations earlier, I never defined the exact conceptual framework that glues the small fragments together. Per definitionem, I would say that my aims are the followings:
- My most obvious aim is to explore all those territories that lay between “modern” and “classical”. I firmly believe that all sorts of music belong to a continuum, and although I’m first and foremost a metal musician, I’m also free to implement elements from the vast legacy of past and present musical styles in order to express my feelings and thoughts in the most appropriate way.
- However, if we believe that “The purpose of art is to make the unconscious conscious” (Richard Wagner: Opera and Drama (1851)), then even a musician has to be always accountable for his/her ultimate motivation for creating anything at all. In this regard, my answer is quite simple: music is the ultimate manifestation of my profound quest for meaning of all things. In other words, my music can be considered as some kind of a very personal soundtrack to my inner struggles, while I’m still wandering inside the vast labyrinth of the human existence. Well… in the “dark night of the soul“, as St. John of the Cross would have said somewhere in the sixteenth century Spain.
You might have already realized my interest for all things beyond the veil of visible reality in the denomination of my songs and albums. The track titles of “Hexapla” and “Missa Innominata” are clear references to the rich transcendental heritage of the Western civilization, while “Thanatology” refers to a scientific discipline that explores the physical termination of the human existence. To be absolutely honest, I have always been searching for the answer to the excellent question posed by G. W. Leibniz in 1714: Why is there something rather than nothing? (“Warum ist überhaupt etwas und nicht vielmehr nichts?” In: Die Vernunftprinzipien der Natur und der Gnade) – and I think that our personal answers that we give to this fundamental question of metaphysics have a decisive role on our whole human existence.
Will you join me in this quest? Will you listen to this soundtrack to my trip in my own dark night of the soul?
Atmospheric. Progressive. Metal. 