Biography 1971 - 2007
Born August 18th 1971 in Worms, a small town in the southwest of Germany.
It must have been around 1978 as I was watching a short excerpt of a KISS live show on TV by surprise. Immediately I was totally impressed by some maskeraded guy’s acting in a fireworks supported show with rocketshoting guitars ! As a seven year old child I used to use a carpetracket as “replacementguitar”, playing around. My Grandfather now and then , discovered me fooling around with some piece of wood or what ever could have been used as “guitar”.So he decided to buy me a real one and appointed me to some guitarschool. But actually I didn’t liked that guitar.It was a classical concert Guitar,but – excited by the upcoming ROCK MUSIC of these days- it was of course an electric guitar that I was looking for. Also I didn’t progress much in the guitarschool aswell.I never understood how to read notes. And after a while I decided to quit and the guitar disapered in a dark chamber. About a year later I rediscovered my “unliked friend” . I put on some steel strings and in a shop nearby I found a book about learning to play guitar by selfinstruction.It was published by PETER BURSCH and –the best about it- there was no need to know about notes! After three months I was able to play BLOWING IN THE WIND and stuff like that. Practising eight hours daily, I progressed pretty quick.
1980 I became a member of my schoolorchester. I was instructed to handle some Orff Instruments like glockenspiel and xylophones.
1984 a new style of music was rising more and more . It was called HEAVY METAL and I was infected by the very first time i‘ve heared JUDAS PRIEST and IRON MAIDEN. Now at last, it was clear that I must have an E- guitar, and finally my mum bought me my first ( very cheap) one. So I learned a lot of Heavy Metal riffs, chords, Blues and pentatonik scales. At the age of about twelve , I started to compose my very first Instrumentals. Also an Amp and Speakers were bought and I became in touch with other musicians. A Friend of my sisters boyfriend, ( Norbert Beyer) was a real good guitarplayer. He was looking for a Band and so these two always used to take me with ‘em , as they were visiting lot’s of rehearsals and concerts. My first E-guitar didn’t worked out too long and soon I had a better one. A Les Paul copy made by Hohner. I joined our Scoolband and besides Guitar playing I also had to act as lead singer , cause our frontman always became sick when ever we had to play live. A little bit later I played in a church community rockband ( coverversions from QUEEn to ZZ TOP). I ‘ve played a lot of sessions that time , but I couldn’t found a Band or a Projekt to hang on for longer. A lot of Inspiration was coming from my musicteacher in school ( Thomas Martin). He showed me stuff like LAURIE ANDERSON, KING CRIMSON and TUXEDOOMOON And it impressed me very much. I was fourteen years old , when a friend showed me a piece of music called Taurus 2 from MIKE OLDFIELD. And more and more I discovered my own ability to compose and create my own music.
I became in touch with a guy named Mathias Bachmann who owned a 4 Track taperecorder. So I convinced him to do some recordings with me. I had to begg a lot, but in 1987 I finally got my first demotape, titeled GUIDO MEYER. The tape had a very bad sound and the compositions were far away from perfect or fastidious. Of course I didn`t get too much attention at all. I started to be interested in other Instruments ,too. Like drumms and keyboards. And I must say that I was really into Synthesizers and the sounds you could create with them. Also I was fascinated by People wich used these “machines” like JEAN MICHEL JARRE and TANGERINE DREAM. I bougt my first own recordingunit. It was a Teac 144 4 Tracker and Gerhard Müller – a friend of mine who was collecting some Synth’s like a Korg MS 20 or Oberheims- lended me some of his Instruments. He also was the first one I knew who had a computer and knew what to do with it. For a short time we played together as the GUIDO MEYER COORPERATION but we already quit after about two gigs. Supported by the Müller, I produced my second demotape- GUIDO MEYER 2- in 1988. This time the compositions were at a higher quality level ( still I like them very much and for sure one day I’m gonna re- recorde them). But my very need of overdubbing the tracks several times couldn’t get handeled by my recorder too well. The sound used to get low and very noisey. Even 90% of the drumms were recorded without a correct timing. And once again the musicindustry didn’t show any interrest. I was running a “Folk Duo” with another friend ( Alexander Hammer ) .We tried to write some songs together , kind like SIMMON & GARFUNKEL (and we named our selfes MEYER & HAMMER !). But Alex recognitzed pretty fast that he can`t sing and I noticed that I’m not a songwriter but an instrumental music composer,and that was it. But Alex’s mum bouht her selfe a portable Yamaha Keyboard and this thing had some really good sounds . Because of she liked my music, it was no problem to talk to her and she lended me the Keyboard for a couple of weeks. That was neede because I was right at the beginning of a new recording. It tourned out to be a piece of music with a length of about fourty five minutes, devided into two parts. It became my third demotape in 1990 titeled ESCAPE FROM THE DARKLANDS. Once again I had some brilliant music but still I was unable to produce it the way it should be. Escape from the Darklands had to fight with the same problems like GM 2 and of course recordlabels weren’t interested once again. This is the end of the “Grey ol’ Years”.
From now on I was getting more interrested in musictheorethics and composing. So I bought some literature about it and studied a lot. At the age of sixteen I met a guy named Manuel Bumb. He was a computercrack and also liked Heavy Metal like I did. In no time we became friends (and still we are). He liked my musical acitivitys and bought him selfe a Bassguitar. With some help of mine he was getting really good in a very short time and we started playing together. He also showed me something that I was looking for so long and didn’t knew it was already existing.: Midi Sequencing or Computer supportet recording. Finaly I found something to develop my musical ideas and to keep them up with a correct timing.
My first coposition with a MIDI Setup was THE GLASSFOREST in 1992. An almost like Classics sounding one 45 Minute pice of music. A New Age symphonie. Manu and I tried to fit in a Band but wether was the Drummer rather spending time with his girlfriend or the singer was sick. Nothing really progressed and we decided to start our own projekt called THE FORGOTTEN. We did somekind of Instrumentalrock using an Atari as “backing Band” in loss of real musicians. We were very influenced by people like JOE SATRIANI and STU HAMM these days. We played a lot of live gig’s and this was a very good school for us ,too. We produced two demotapes ( The Forgotten ’92 and Network ’93) And were invited to a recordlabel in Collogne. But they wanted us to be some sort of “Pop Stars” and we didn’t sign a contract. When I wasn’t composing for the Forgotten (wich was to 90% pure E-guitar music), I did some synthysizermusic (EPISODES) in my constantly growing homestudio but because of my experiences with recordlabels so far I didn’t send some of the material in. More and more I had to put my attention on other things, problems and all the suprises Live has got for everybody. Soon I found my selfe in a situation wich left no space for music and composing. Manu and I had to quit The Forgotten and I started an development as a male nurse (The money had to come from somewhere , at last). Almost two years had past since I did some music and slowly I noticed there was something deep inside of me again waiting to brought out. I was out of money had and no studio or equipment (I had to sell most of my stuff ) to do some new recordings. Once again Gerhard Müller helped me out with some of his Synth’s and a Computer. In 1996 I had a bounch of shorter pieces named INSTALLATIONS. It was a big progress in my New Age compositions. But just like my other compositions before, they weren’t published ,yet. In the mid of the 90’s TECHNO,JUNGLE and DRUMM&BASS was really rising and became very popular. I considered what it might sound like if I would combine my New Age sound with some more elektrolike tunes. So two other guys ( Alexander Seewald and Peter Pogrezeba) and me sticked our heads together and founded a projekt called PARK DE LUX. So we lended so much equipment we could get and transformed my flat into a studio. After three months we had to give it all back and so we worked day and night with really less breakes…,just like mad. In 1998 we selected the very best of the material and published an Album on Minidisc titeled BREITGEFÄCHERT. It features a wider section of musical styles from Techno to Drumm&Bass. I did 90% of the music but the two always were around to stop me if I was about to put “too much” melodies in it. Also they were very important when it was about the arrangement of the tracks. Our biggest succes was some airplay all over Europe at the Dave Wakemann show on Evosonic Radio. And as nothing else happened ,our projekt fell appart. Peter went to New Zeland and Alex started with his own projekt , ANALOGWERK.
I fell into a creative hole, had no ideas and was totally uninspired. And for a longer time I almost did no music at all. Six years I’ve used to live alone and I decided to change something about that. I left my one room flat to join a living community with two old friends of mine. Now and then I composed a little bit,collected ideas and practised on the guitar as often as possible to keep my skills. I got in contact with an artist community ,met some musicians there (Tobias Krämer) and now and then we jammed a bit. Slowly I noticed that somehow nothing was going nowehre in my little hometown, things just stayed the same.
In 2003 I decided to move to Switzerland and build up a new studio there. So I could work without timelimits or other restrictions. Also I worked on older compositions and created some new ones. In the beginning of 2004 I decided to publish all my music done so far on CD-R. I remastered the first part of my ’94 music and EPISODES 1 was my first release on CD. But also I wanted to show my new tracks wich I composed between 2000 and 2004. And after five months of hard work I finished a new album: TOWARDS THE BLUE HORIZON. The album reached a very good response by the audience and earned some extremly good Critics. I finally had my first apearench in a magazine by adding a track (“Epedic” from Episodes 1) to the CD Sampler of the E-DITION MAGAZINE (Netherlands). Since then my albums are distrubed by the Dutch electronic music internet catalog GROOVE.NL. That helped very much. Radio stations like KKUP (USA) , RaBe (Switzerland), and CELTICA Radio (UK) gave me some airplay . A guy from California , JARED WHITE –who has it´s own little Radiostation on LIVE365.COM- was so impressed by my music that he added my tracks to his MELODIOUS SYNTH Radio programm and offered to create my website (because he´s a web designer).
In 2005 I recorded the album LIGHTYEARS. A musical story of how our world probably could end in 7 billion years.This time two of my old fellers (Alexander Seewald and Manuel Bumb) helped me out with some samples which had been used on the recording to connect the different tracks and make them flow into each other. But to be honest 80% of the samples were created by myself! It took me about six months to record this while the composing had already started in 1999. The title track made it again to the e-dition magazine CD sampler and alltogether my music was recived very well. Lightyears continious where I’ve stopped with Towards the blue horizon, containing my mixture of “Electronic meets Rock” style.
Then in 2006 it was time again to close another 10 year gap. I remastered my recordings from 1996. INSTALLATIONS was published for the very first time. My personal climax this year was probably my first live gig after 10 years (and the very first solo gig ever!) at the CUE RECORDS OPEN AIR (Eifel/ Germany). JOERG STRAWE worked really hard on me to come, because first I didn’t wanted to play live. I had no Band or other musicians to play with me on stage and first I couldn’t imagine me playing all alone in front of an audience. But then I decided to create 2 special live set’s, 30 minutes each on my Harddiskrecorder made the tracks melt into each other and played my Guitar as best as I can. And I’ve practiced a lot before this event was happening. Everything worked out fine and it was a very nice concert.
So I continued composing music the way I used to. I was right in the process of composing Tracks as I suddenly felt like I should change something. Somehow I was a little tired of composing in that structured way I always did, but still I did not know how and what to do different. And also I had a couple of very nice tracks in my Hands now that I wanted to produce and release anyway. So I decided to release not an Album but just a Single this time.
CYSCOOP was an EP containing 4 brand new Studio recordings and one Live Track from the Cue Open Air. It was the best sounding production I ever did so far and the idea behind it was actually to get more people in touch with my Music, because it was only an EP and just did not coast half as much as a complete Album. So I was convinced People would risk a little something and try and buy something from an more or less unknown Artist. But that just was not the case. Albums like Towards the blue Horizon or Lightyears sold several hundred Units, but it just seemed like nobody was interested in CYSCOOP. Anyway, tracks like ”Supervision” or ”Ys” belong to the best stuff I ever did.
In 2007 I developed the idea for a new album. I remembered the work on ”Lightyears” and how helpful it can be when you compose the Music around a Theme. And I remembered also my experiences as a young Boy, when my Family was invited to my aunt one day back in the 1980s. Her husband had died away and she was getting in touch with some experts of Paranormal activity. Well, I don’t want to talk to much about it, but she was one of those Persons who used an ordinary Tape recorder to talk to the Dead. Anyway we made some very strange experiences with her and I remember all this as a little wired and also scary. But I caught up on that idea and started to work on new Compositions. And this time everything became more a spontaneous work and not so structured like before.
I recorded while I was composing and I was composing while I was recording. I also didn’t restrict my self on only Synthesizers and Guitar but also got myself a Glockenspiel and real Windchimes. I also used some unconventional things like Glasses, Cups, Woodshakers, and stuff like that. I bought a microphone to record my own voice and a friend of mine, Stephanie Haller, lent me her voice for the track ”Meeting Amely”. I also went far beyond the boundaries of Electronic Music and put some ”Heavy Metal” in the Track ”On the other Side”. And as I expected it some of the ”Hardcore Electronic’s” just couldn’t handle it. But, sorry guys...I just don’t care to much what others think about my music.
So in October (after 8 Months of work), I released it under the Name: CONNECTED TO THE DEAD. I was very happy with the result and unlike many other ”Electronic Artists” I guess I showed that I just do not create the same Album a second time, but always try to surprise people anew.