Born 1961 in Braunschweig, Germany. The parents had a small shop in Beethoven Street. So, it might have been inevitable that the music of Beethoven, heard at the age of ten on the mother's vinyl records, provoked a kind of shock. A shock while being at home, being at home in being shocked. This was music, and this music came via technology and a medium. Visits to classical concerts, which also happened from time to time, did not at all have a similar fundamental effect. These concerts: a big hall with many people, its dresscode, and the music was far away. But here, alone with the speakers in the parents' living room, the musical experience was different, more profound and more close, ironically. Seen from today, there is a strange similarity between the child running through the room to the sound from the speakers, and the later work in electronic studios, again in front of speakers.

There was a piano at home, also because of the mother. Her father, the son of simple craftsmen, drew his teacher's attention by his talents and trained to become a village's teacher and organist. And so, the mother played some piano, and the children received lessons. The father's family had been farmers; a smallholding in a village in central Poland, as part of the German minority overall, yet of the German majority in the village of about a hundred farms.

So, piano lessons - but nothing much happening there. More actually with pop music, at the age of thirteen, fourteen. Beatles songs as inspiration to write similar texts, really. Protest, youth culture, asking why this, why that, the feeling of dissent. Different music later, Pink Floyd, different friends, a lot of reading, the whole time. At school at the age of seventeen, encouraged by the progressive music teacher, foundation of a Jazz-Rock-Band that rapidly evolved. Rehearsals every night, improvisation, a new world, crossing boundaries, Free Jazz, this was the gate to contemporary music. Composing began, too; composing for this band.

But the band broke up after two years the band, and composing wanted to be more than writing themes and structures for improvisations. To study music wasn't an option, music felt too important to be studied, but literature and art history, yes. Still in Braunschweig, from 1982, the minor became the major subject in many ways, because of Martin Gosebruch as professor in art history. What happens, when we look at images intensely and for a long time, and when we speak about what we perceive. This has remained.

But the home town had to be left behind, a friend was also studying literature, in Hamburg, and so the next important teacher was there, Klaus Briegleb. Reading texts with him and learning from him to read texts differently. Political discourse and art. Heine, Lessing, Peter Weiss, and Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva. A new awareness of the Shoah, the inconceivably usual mass murder in its dimensions. Writing emerged anew during this time, but also the realization that working as a literary scholar was not a vocation. Excited writing of the thesis on Lessing and the German Autumn. The degree's name, as by a whim of culture, was Magister Artium — Master of the Arts.

Shut the academy's door and earn money by teaching piano, in the small appartment, just enough, and otherwise reading and writing. Writing Gnosis, as literary writing of history about a late antique, an early christian ostracism. How the fathers of the church, in the name of love, persecute with merciless hate those who think differently, who fantasize differently. Having barely escaped persecution themselves, already in eradication mode. A study about history, in fragments, views, always related to the present, to perceptions, memories. No one had asked for this book, it was finished, but found no publisher. (Only five years later, when life had already moved on.)

It couldn't go on like this, and in the mean time the concern that formally studying music would obstruct an intrinsic gateway to music had gone, and it was clear that composing - which had never ceased - needed a proper frame. So entrance exams in 1995, and the first meeting with Younghi Pagh-Paan. Something was present in this meeting, something so attractive, exactly because it was not simple to understand, so Bremen was chosen rather than Hamburg. This Something held true: Learning with Younghi what composing can be, and what it means to teach. Learning modern composition techniques, also from Guenter Steinke, and from fellow students, and getting to know the music of Xenakis and Nono, Lachenmann and Klaus Huber. Learning how concerts can be organized, and taking responsibility.

Only now, in the mid of the 1990s, the computer enters, later than the lives of the friends but then fast and with a big impact. Programming, first PatchWork and Max, then Lisp and Csound. Fascination with virtual realities, with building event structures in programs. The first electronic pieces, Seduction and Ein Ort für Zufälle (A place for chances), deal with this.

Collaboration with video artists started already during the studies, and soon afterwards the friendship with Joerg Holkenbrink and his Center for Performance Studies at the University of Bremen. Experiences with performance and music, by acting and by composing for certain performances: Speisen mit dem Menschenfeind (Dining with the Misanthrope) after Molière 2008 and Am seidenen Faden (By a silk thread) 2015.

Teaching, first piano, then music theory, finally electronics and composition, was always more than a job. It was and is contact, transmission, and first of all to learn together. At first in Bremen, since 2004 also at Music University Hanover, since 2008 as head of the electronic department in the institute for contemporary music Incontri.

Having visited Tehran for the first time in 2002, the contact to the contemporary music scene there soon intensified, in particular to the Yarava Music Group. Workshops about electronics and composition since 2009, friendships grew and deepened. More constantly learning about traditional Asian music, not least because of wonderful musicians like Mehdi Jalali, Yasamin Shahhosseini, or Sori Choi. Pieces were written for them and with them, and in the frame of the Hannoversche Gesellschaft für Neue Musik (Hanover Society for Contemporary Music) festivals, concerts, workshops, and discussions were hosted, for the interface of contemporary music and Asian culture: Dastgah 2016, Traiect 2017, 2019, ...

Since 2014 again more writing: Texts in the constellation Laozi and Schwitters, transcriptions of the Chan (Zen) masters Huangbo and Linji. Foundation of the Schrenz self-publishing house. And, thanks to the software instrument Alma, newly back to improvisation, in touch with Free Music.

Commitment to the Open Source Movement since 2005, with various activities in particular for Csound, the oldest surviving audio programming language. With this back to political questions, from another perspective: How can we develop the tools for our own compositions collectively, grass-roots democratic, without depending on big or small money. How can it be a software for all, no matter how rich or poor, but depending on everyones contribution. How can we share and collaborate, not in theory, not in dreams and nice fantasies, but today, under these circumstances, as we are now.