What makes sound move people?

Learning the room before learning the studio.

I started DJing as a teenager in southern Germany. Fascinated by the artform of leading the crowd through the night with just two turntables, a mixer and a well curated collection of vinysl, Techno & Jungle became my first real education in music, sound and co-creation.

Different rooms, crowds and systems taught me how radically context can change the same record - and how repetition, anticipation and volume can turn individual listening into a collective meditation.

Hamburg: music business, underground resistance and opening up to pop culture.

Moving to Hamburg put me inside several different parts of music culture at once. By day I worked in A&R and label environments; at night I was DJing and surrounded by Golden Pudel folks, the Parfüm collective and a network of musicians, designers and artists who rarely separated music from everything around it.

At Elektromotor / Motor Music / Polygram I became the driving force behind Barcode, the first German drum & bass compilation. Running our own small label Parfüm at the same time taught me the opposite end of the scale: how records come into existence when there is no large organisation behind them. Those two perspectives — institution and independence — have stayed with me ever since.

The studio becomes another instrument.

Working with Andreas Dorau gradually moved me deeper into production, engineering and mixing. The sessions were rarely about technical perfection for its own sake. They were about finding the one sound, edit, arrangement decision or accident that made a song unmistakably itself.

Over the following years I worked across numerous recordings and remixes with Andreas and other artists. It was where I learned one of the principles that still guides my production work: the producer does not need to dominate the music. Sometimes the most important contribution is recognising what is already interesting and creating the conditions for it to become clearer.

Barcelona changed the scale of my world.

A residency at Nitsa brought me to Barcelona, but the city quickly became much more than a place to DJ. I stayed for three years and became part of an international community of musicians, artists and club people at a moment when Barcelona felt unusually open and culturally fluid.

With Max Turner I started Meteorites almost accidentally. We had borrowed instruments, very little equipment and no real plan. Within a year the project had taken us to Sónar, John Peel and The End in London, opening for Peaches. More important than the speed of it was the lesson: a strong musical identity did not have to begin with virtuosity, genre purity or expensive tools. Curiosity and chemistry could be enough.

Latin America enters the picture.

My collaboration with Matias Aguayo began in the studio and expanded far beyond it. I co-produced, engineered and mixed his debut album Are You Really Lost for Kompakt, and we continued making music together as BROKE while touring internationally over the following years.

Through Matias and those travels I became increasingly connected to Latin America - its rhythms, languages, people and ways of thinking about music socially. That influence has never really disappeared. It later informed KEOPE, my work with artists across the region and, much later, GOD ON TRIP. It also reinforced something I had already begun to understand in Barcelona: some of the most interesting music appears between cultures rather than inside a single one.

Entering music technology from the musician’s side.

I originally joined Native Instruments as a side job while continuing to produce and mix records. Instead, it became a fifteen-year immersion in how musical tools are imagined, built, positioned and used.

I arrived with the perspective of a working musician rather than a technology specialist. That became useful. As MASCHINE developed, I could move between artists, engineers, product teams and audiences and often translate what one group meant to another. Leading the MASCHINE brand was therefore never only marketing to me; it was a way of helping define what the instrument was, who it was for and the culture it belonged to.

The commercial growth was substantial, but what stayed with me was the much harder question underneath it: why does one tool become part of somebody’s musical language while another remains just a piece of technology?

Listening to how musicians work around the world.

Native Instruments gave me access to an extraordinary range of musical worlds. I spent years developing collaborations and producing artist and product films with musicians, producers and beatmakers in Los Angeles, Atlanta, Bogotá, London, Lisbon, Amsterdam, Tokyo and elsewhere.

The interesting part was rarely celebrity. It was observing process: how a hip-hop producer in Atlanta, an electronic musician in Lisbon or an experimental artist in London might understand rhythm, instruments and technology completely differently. My job was to listen closely enough to represent those differences without flattening them into advertising.

That period also changed how I think about communication. The strongest story usually already exists inside the work. Creative direction is often the process of finding it rather than inventing one from outside.

KEOPE — returning to the stage with fewer boundaries.

After years spent largely behind artists, products and cameras, KEOPE brought me back into making and performing music as a central practice. The collaboration grew from improvisation rather than a fixed stylistic idea: modular synthesis, drum machines and Toni Bruna’s electric guitar meeting somewhere between electronic dance music, song and repetition.

Releasing through Frank Wiedemann’s Bigamo imprint and performing in Europe, Morocco and Mexico put me back into the direct feedback loop of making music for a crowd. KEOPE also became a counterweight to increasingly structured professional work — a place where not knowing what would happen next was part of the method.

From explaining instruments to helping design them.

After more than a decade around MASCHINE from the brand and artist side, I became increasingly interested in the decisions made before a product reaches the public. I moved into Native Instruments’ Products department, working first in market and user research and later in product and UX design.

It meant learning a different language: research methods, interaction design, prototypes, requirements and the compromises involved in turning an idea into something thousands of musicians can actually use. At the same time, I could bring decades of practical music-making into rooms that were often dominated by technical or business perspectives.

The shift completed a circle for me. I had gone from using instruments, to communicating them, to participating in their design.

Independent again — but not starting over.

Leaving Native Instruments was less a reinvention than a chance to bring parts of my life back together that had gradually become separated by job titles. Music production, technology, sound, storytelling, spaces and collaboration now sit next to each other again.

Today that means producing and releasing music through Groove Script, developing GOD ON TRIP and KEOPE, working with artists such as Laura Largillier, experimenting with loudspeaker and sound-system design, and helping shape The Lovers & Leaders Space in Berlin-Mitte.

I’m also returning to an older idea with Rossknecht’s Bodega: creating situations where artists, music, technology and audiences can meet directly. After more than thirty years, the thread feels surprisingly consistent. I’m still interested in what happens when sound moves from an idea, through a tool and a room, into other people.