Except for a few years, when I worked as an editor-in-chief/editor for KEYS and SoundCheck and head of a digital department for a major company, my work career has been as a self-employed entrepreneur. Personally, I like the freedom of pursuing any idea that I have without being restricted by somebody else's vision.  

Art & Design has played a major role in my life. I have studied design at Art School and was an early adopter of Desktop Publishing (designing on Atari computer with Calamus, in 1988). The music magazine KEYS and SoundCheck, that I worked for, was one of the first magazines in Germany that was done with DTP (in Ragtime, later than in QuarkXPress). I even designed the cover and illustrations for the first few editions of KEYS, which even created a little trend in that sector. Prior to that, there were only photos of products on the covers of the magazines. Since KEYS was focused on covering a special subject in each edition, it was difficult to capture this in a photo. How do you come up with a photo idea for a sequencer (which was the subject of the first edition of KEYS)?

After I quit as an editor, I simply went into DTP, because that was really an interesting field. I designed everything from logos, ads, magazines, and books to even clothes (for the fashion label MORE & MORE). Back then I combined my interest in writing and design by authoring my first books on Desktop Publishing and being a writer for PAGE, Germany's most well-known magazine for designers. 

Since I hadn't given up on my dream of becoming a songwriter/composer, I ended up moving to Boston, USA, to study music at Berklee, College of Music. While living in Boston, I worked as the US correspondent for PAGE and was fortunate enough to be at all the keynote speeches of Steve Jobs, after he returned to Apple. 

When the World Wide Web took off, it was clear that this was history in the making

Having started out as a freelance writer for SoundCheck, I was offered a job as an editor for a new magazine called KEYS. This keyboard and computer magazine was a high-end magazine, that had a topic in each issue. The first issue was on Sequencers and everybody thought that we could not come up with enough topics to keep this up. However, I was able to always find an interesting subject and it send a trend and other magazines copied us. MiB was my editorial signature for all the articles that I wrote and my colleagues even called me that as a nickname, so no, it is not a reference to Man in Black (Hollywood stole that from me ;). 

My first passion in life was music. A friend of mine had a KORG Polysix synthesizer and I remember to this day sitting at it and being fascinated by how you could create sounds with it. We both were really learning everything about music electronics, reading the Keyboard magazine and other special interest magazines. It resulted in lifelong friendship and collaboration. Unfortunately, much to my dismay, I was never able to build a career in music. Sometimes I wonder if this would have been different if I was born later. These days bands and musicians have way more possibilities to promote themselves. Back in my days, you had to get signed by a label and that simply wasn't that easy. I still write and record songs as a hobby: one of those projects was a music video that I created from Greta Thunberg's speech (check it out further down on this page).