“Onwards” is a track that opens the album with a lot of forward momentum (for my music at least) and I feel it has a lot of hopeful energy. Complementing the lineup of piano and synths it features a nine piece string ensemble which I recorded all the way back in the spring of 2021 at "Immanuelskirche" in Wuppertal. "Onwards" was the first piece we recorded that day and I can still remember the feeling hearing the ensemble on the end of this track. Recording a live ensemble is always thrilling but when it's your own music and not for any other purpose than being beautiful music is truly one of the most special things in my life.

The video shows part of the process of creating “Onwards”: from the synths, tapes and the piano to impressions of the recording of the string ensemble

“Ride” is a track that like many of the pieces I release began it‘s life as a video on my YouTube channel. It truly came to be while I was playing it at that moment. It started with me, or my fingers rather, finding some chords, some sounds, that felt right and evolved as I went along riffing over a sliced piano loop. The first part is quite structured and I embellished the arrangement from the video with more synths and a small string section. The session was organised and engineered by Ben Winkler. The second part really flows freely and allows the music to ebb and flow at it‘s own pace.

Even before I had produced the track the trio “Diode Eins” from Neuss approached me with a remix they made. I actually had to make them wait quite a bit as the album got postponed multiple times due to scoring work I had but I think in the end the wait was worth it. I also decided to have a remix for almost every single which I think all complemented the releases nicely.

“To Complete” is a piece that starts out with an intricate polyrhythmic piano line that plays around a wistful harmony. I played around with different patterns leading into a cello solo played by Fransziska Burchhardt which evolves into a sweeping string melody. This was truly a special moment during the recording session. Next to the title track I think it’s probably my favorite piece on the album. For sure it’s the one that’s most fun to play live.

The video for the track was made using the free 3D software Blender. I scanned a bunch of places in my neighborhood and around the studio and represented those scans as point clouds in space which let me do all the fun things with them you see in the video.

Marton Harvest did a really unique rework of the track arranging it for a band featuring Saxophones, Guitars and Drums. It feels like a paralell universe version of the track.

"Wait" is a very spontaneous track. I liked the original improvisation so much that I took the recording that's also on YouTube and embellished it with some strings. This track has a very immediate quality to me and I really like what the strings did to this improvised track.

“Clouds” even moreso than the other pieces started out as a very free-form improvisation. After recording this improvisation for my channel I reworked it a few times. Adding and substracting things here and there making the form more and more coherent. I think it’s interesting to see how the piece evolved from a very “train of thought” one arpeggio to the next style improvisation to the finished piece.

“Periphery” is a track that I wrote while in lockdown (which dates this release instantly… hopefully). It’s the only track that I wrote at the computer without my piano. I think one can tell, I can tell at least but I don’t think it’s for the worse really. The synth and the strings are much more the focus here which is nice for a change of pace.

Where the other singles I released from this album were moving forward and very melodic this one is a bit more experimental. The piece, like the others started it's life as an improvisation on my YouTube channel. The original version mainly played around with a shifting synth line accompanied by monolithic piano chords. In the version for this release I added a bunch of alleatoric string patterns to the mix, which I feel complement the arrangement really well. This one was also a lot of fun to record but for different reasons than the other tracks. Here I could really let the wonderful musicians perform and interpret the lines as they felt.

The video was again made with Blender and 3D scans. This time I used a procedural texture to highlight the forms of the scanned objects.

My friend Julian Prießen did a fantastic remix of the piece deconstructing it in ways only he can.

“Versatz” is a quite meditative duett for piano and synthesizer.

Honestly I didn’t think I would release “Versatz” as a single. But my friend Ben Winkler wanted to do a rework of it after we improvised with the piece in a live-stream we did together. And re-work he did. So in addition to hopefully getting you all excited about the album it’s a good opportunity to spotlight Ben, his own work and the work he did for the album. In addition to giving me a lot of feedback and playing the Cello on a bunch of my past releases, Ben organised the String session for Lines of Flight which allowed me to really focus on the music on that day. So thanks Ben!

“Lines Of Flight” the title track and also the last track of the album is very much tied with “To Complete” for being my personal favorite. It’s going in a bit of a different direction than anything I’ve released so far but at the moment it’s a direction I want to explore much more.